Watch: Tim Berne’s Snakeoil Performs “Small World in a Small Town”
The arc of this 2015 performance of “Small World in a Small Town” by Tim Berne’s Snakeoil is perfect. It starts calmly, saxophone lines twisted around bracing piano patterns. But the flecks of dissonance and the cracks in Berne’s own tone hint at what is to come—sweat-inducing stuff with ricocheting drums and variations that seem to collide with one another at severely acute angles. It is dense and physical, at least until it collapses into a diaphanous haze and then bounces into something like hard bop. What a band. See them at Big Ears 2019.
