2012.05.09 Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso on Creative Music Studio

Rebroadcast September 28, 2020.

Ornette Coleman was renowned for dispensing with the rules of Jazz improvisation.  So can Ornette’s concept be taught? Even institutionalized? That was the question before Ornette and fellow musicians Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso in the early Seventies.  The answer? Oh yes, it can. You bet it can!  Institutionalized with all of its infinite horizons still in view.  

The Creative Music Studio, in Woodstock, NY, became a learning center, a nexus point for emerging improvisers, a concert producer… As founding advisory board member Buckminster Fuller might have said, a verb rather than a noun.  For a dozen years, CMS pointed the way to undiscovered lands and provided the means and directions for getting there.  Its impact decades later is undiminished and certainly not forgotten by the many who passed through it.  You will find quite a number of these folks named in any evaluation of today’s most imaginative improvisers. 

Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso joined me in a Deep Focus on the history of CMS in 2012, complete with ear-opening, never-before-heard live recordings. 

#WKCR #DeepFocus #CreativeMusicStudio #KarlBerger #IngridSertso #MitchGoldman

Photo credit: Mitch Goldman – copyright 1982