Scotty Hard Steven Bernstein ResoNation Trio / Ultra Resonance

Few artists exult in the joyous exhilaration and intrepid spirit of communal music-making with the fervor and vitality of visionary bandleader, trumpeter, composer and arranger Steven Bernstein. With a breathtaking pair of intimately interrelated new albums, he applies that bold passion to an uncharacteristically pared-down setting, then transforms those stunning sounds via a startling process of sonic reinvention.
'ResoNation Trio' convenes a new chordless trio with master improvisers Scott Colley on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. The album’s contemplative explorations feel like a departure from the raucous spirit that characterizes so much of the trumpeter’s work, yet the trio discovers such an audacious beauty and celebratory gusto in these sparse environments that the music feels uniquely Bernstein’s. It is also a rarity in his oeuvre for featuring Bernstein - whose mastery of the little-used slide trumpet has become so central to his sonic identity - exclusively playing valve trumpet and flugelhorn.
In parallel with this captivating trio excursion, Bernstein handed the recordings over to his longtime collaborator, the pioneering producer Scotty Hard, to reimagine the album through his own iconoclastic lens. The result is the uncategorizable 'Ultra Resonance,' which finds Hard breaking down the 'ResoNation Trio' session into its constituent parts and redeploying them as the elements of a wholly original, mutant creation.

The spacious, skeletal pieces that Bernstein penned for 'ResoNation Trio' open new and expansive pathways for the veteran trumpeter while harkening back to his early experiences on the experimental 1980s Downtown scene and the influence of pioneers like Don Cherry, Lester Bowie, Baikida Carroll, Wadada Leo Smith and Butch Morris.

'Ultra Resonance' is an album that Bernstein has wanted to make for more than 30 years, though even he could never have foreseen the shape that it ultimately assumed. The spark for the project was lit when he heard Garvey’s 'Ghost,' the dub version of reggae band Burning Spear’s 1975 album 'Marcus Garvey.'

In the end Hard tackled the project as a composer more than a producer, conjuring new improvised performances utilizing the trio’s music as his instruments. Almost nothing is presented on the record as it was originally played; every single sound has been altered, reconfigured, chopped up, played backwards, played in a different key, transformed via any number of inventive methods.

Bernstein delights in the ways that the two albums so diametrically opposed spring from the same well. He likens the all-acoustic 'ResoNation Trio' to folk music, albeit with Harmolodic abstraction, and ''Ultra Resonance to a science fiction vision of a far-future musical genre. The companion albums equate to two distinct environments. One – a trumpet, acoustic bass and drum set in a room – is as traditional as humans sitting on the back porch telling stories. The second places that traditional format into a completely unfamiliar, invented environment. The results are drastically different yet equally compelling and celebratory.