Shadow Man (Tim Berne album)

Reception

The Allmusic review by Thom Jurek awarded the album 4 stars and stated "Shadow Man's experiment, in trying to capture Snakeoil's live performance in detail and dynamic, is not only successful, it reveals this band at a peak of instinctive, intuitive creativity and imagination".

Writing in The Guardian, John Fordham commented "mingling wide-interval melodies that sometimes sound like contemporary classical music and sometimes trampling funk, quiet solos or intimate duets, tonal contrasts (warm clarinet lyricism, glimmering vibraphones, free-jazz sax wailing), dynamic percussion and unrelenting eventfulness. It's edgy, pattern spinning contemporary music, but austere it certainly is not".

The All About Jazz review by John Kelman said that "Shadow Man is an even more impressive outing from a quartet that, in a career highlighted by strong associations, may well be Berne's most impressively cohesive group yet" while Troy Collins stated "Emboldened by the sterling contributions of Berne's youthful sidemen, Shadow Man surpasses the refined austerity of Snakeoil's debut, providing a far more archetypal example of the protean ensemble's abilities".

The JazzTimes review by Thomas Conrad enthused "This band’s eponymous ECM debut last year was one of the most acclaimed jazz recordings of 2012. Shadow Man is stronger. It is wilder and deeper, an oceanic extravagance of strange sonic shapes and colors. Yet it coheres according to proprietary logic".

Track listing

All compositions by Tim Berne except as indicated

1. "Son of Not So Sure" - 6:41
2. "Static" (Marc Ducret, Tim Berne) - 8:01
3. "Psalm" (Paul Motian) - 4:14
4. "OC/DC" - 22:55
5. "Socket" - 18:52
6. "Cornered (Duck)" - 16:15

Personnel