Bengt Berger: Percussion | Communion

However it is with his groups Beches Brew (BIG and small) and with Beches Indian Brew that Mr Berger returns to his favourite hunting ground – the purest language of music or that which has enabled him to commune with the spirits of his many ancestors. It is here that the “next great thing” is sure to come from. For here seems to be the fountainhead of Mr Berger’s music, seemingly aligned with the continuity-based models that pure linguistics experts.

“One is never afraid of the unknown, one is afraid of the known
coming to an end”
J. Krishnamurti

For like these experts such as the eminent British archeologist Steven Mithen who seem to see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin, Mr Berger seems to see music likewise.

Mr Berger’s music continues to spring from – as suggested by the Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan – a pure and formless form that may have been adorned by the mathematics of Bach, but only after the hum of its lyricism grew out of the continuous line in the oldest civilisation in the soil of Nubian Africa and in the later civilisations such as India where the sages who first deciphered the first language of art out of seemingly incoherent sounds, the sounds that became music and later poetry, will forever fuel ideas not only about the mysticism of sound and music, but of the very sound and music that we hear in the Bitter Funeral Beer Suite and the Dhrupads and raags that have been captured forever on record in performances presided over by the ineffable genius of Bengt Berger.

Interested in more about Bengt Berger? Find it here.

Bitter Funeral Beer Band with Don Cherry – Deutsches Jazz Festival – 1982

Chapter Seven – 4 Don’s Kora

Strike – 2000