Tim Berne's Snakeoil - The Deceptive 4 (Live) (2020) [Hi-Res]

Tim Berne's Snakeoil, this group that has grown into a conspired unit over many years, presents with The Deceptive 4 an extraordinary live double album. "This double-disc live document, The Deceptive 4, traces the evolution of both Berne's writing for Snakeoil and the way the band interprets his compositions onstage ­– from the group's nascent beginnings to not long before the recording of its most recent studio release, and first for Intakt, The Fantastic Mrs. 10 (Intakt 340).

Disc 1 presents a Snakeoil concert recorded in 2017 within the studio-like acoustics of Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut. Disc 2 combines music from the foursome's second and third shows ever, before Berne had even settled on a firm name for the band. The first three tracks on the second disc were recorded in 2010 at the intimate I Beam space in Brooklyn, New York, with the fourth track – an homage to Berne's key mentor, saxophonist-composer Julius Hemphill – taped in 2009 at the theater Roulette, also in Brooklyn.

The quartet music captured on The Deceptive 4 flows from sinuous lyricism to expressionistic fierceness and back again like sonic quick­silver, the players utterly attuned to each other and the questing, even head-spinning dynamism of the material' writes Bradley Bambarger in the liner notes.

Tim Berne, alto saxophone
Matt Mitchell, piano
Oscar Noriega, bass clarinet
Ches Smith, drums, percussion