E-Mail This Article to a Friend Happy accidents Tim Berne’s long, sweet ride, plus wordplay from Paul Auster and Don Byron BY JON GARELICK

Alto-saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Tim Berne has been forging his own musical path for more than 30 years now. The story goes that in 1974, the 20-year-old R&B-loving alto-saxophonist — a Syracuse native who had been studying at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon — heard Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A.D. album, caught the jazz bug, and headed for New York. Hemphill, a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet, fashioned angular, long-lined melodies over chugging, funk-inflected rhythms, all of it dipped in deep blues. In New York, Berne moved into the loft-jazz scene, studied with Hemphill, and began to front a series of line-ups that were models of small-group composition and collective improvisation.

There were his early bands with trumpeter Herb Robertson, with the cellist Hank Roberts, and his two ’90s bands Caos Totale and Bloodcount, the latter with saxophonist Chris Speed, bassist Michael Fromanek, and drummer Jim Black. You can still hear plenty of the loft scene in Berne’s open, extended forms, with long passages of collective improv, and in his keening, adamant tone. He’s unfashionable in that he still likes long tracks — sometimes as long as 20 or 30 minutes — released on live-concert discs. And there’s still plenty of Hemphill in his taste for strong rhythmic schemes, in his abstract approach to funk, and in those keening melodies. The forms might be open, or long, but there’s always a form: Berne thinks compositionally, and he likes to surround himself with like-minded collaborators. Whatever the length or the freedom of his pieces, there’s always a narrative trajectory.

Aside from a brief late-’80s fling with Columbia, Berne has recorded on small independent labels — at first, his own Empire imprint, then Soul Note, JMT, Winter & Winter, and, lately, Thirsty Ear and his second label, Screwgun. Since the turn of the decade, his albums have often featured variations on a quartet with Craig Taborn playing Fender Rhodes electric piano as well as various electronics, guitarist Marc Ducret, and drummer Tom Rainey.

Berne, who comes to the ICA on March 6, has a hedgehog stick-to-itiveness with his bands — he stays with an outfit until it’s played its course, writing for individuals rather than instrumental formats — but now he’s taken another turn. The line-up coming to the ICA is called Acoustic Hard Cell. Ducret — a Frenchman whose dirty, aggressive playing is almost otherwise unheard these days in jazz — is gone. Taborn, meanwhile, has dropped the Fender Rhodes he’s become famous for (at least in jazz terms) and is playing acoustic grand piano only. Rainey remains.

"We accidentally did this acoustic gig in England," Berne recalls when I reach him by phone in New York, the day he’s set to fly to Europe with Acoustic Hard Cell to begin the new tour. It turned out that a Rhodes wasn’t available, so acoustic it was. "The tunes sounded amazing with the grand piano, which I kind of knew they would. But the other thing was, I was just trying to do something else. We’ve done a lot of electric tours, but we always had problems getting the right gear, and when the gear’s not right, it’s a drag, especially for Craig."

Taborn doesn’t simply transfer acoustic piano ideas to the Rhodes — he thinks orchestrally, in terms of timbres, and makes effective use of the instrument’s special sound, especially its "sub-bass" effects. "If you have a good Rhodes," Berne says, "it’s great, but if you don’t, there’s a huge difference. It’s also become kind of trendy, and I tend to shy away from anything remotely successful." He laughs. "You know, all of a sudden, seemingly because of Craig, everyone is playing the Rhodes. But it’s not so much the Rhodes — I think people kind of miss the point. It’s really that it’s Craig. It doesn’t really matter what he plays. I think he’s one of the most incredible musicians alive."

Berne was going to write a solo piano album for Taborn, but then he turned to the idea of a trio. He also says he changes his bands to recharge his creative juices. I mention his work with Bloodcount. "We had five or six really great years, and then invariably I run into a wall where I just can’t think of anything new for the band and it just becomes sort of a caricature of itself. Which isn’t a bad thing, but I find that usually means I have to find something different, just to get myself to think differently."

That may come as a disappointment to fans who were knocked out by the electric band — either the bracing space funk of 2003’s double CD The Sublime And, with Ducret, or last year’s trio CD, The Shell Game, with its spacier ruminations (both are on Thirsty Ear) — and didn’t get a chance to hear them live. Berne calls The Sublime And the "peak" of his electric band. "The difference is, when you have a trio, the lines of communication are much more direct, so when we make shifts dynamically and rhythmically, all the shifts are much more concise — just three people making decisions instead of four." He also calls the band’s sound more "transparent" with acoustic piano. "Texturally, it’s a whole different sound."