Michael Berardi’s musical journey

Copied from the Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation Weekly News Update

Ken Dreyfack

Woodstock Times - Two years ago, Burrill Crohn and a friend were in the midst of a conversation on Tinker Street when, as Crohn recalls, “this little guy, whose hands are shaking, who had been looking at us, came up and, stuttering, asked if we were talking about music. When we told him that yes, we were discussing the solo classical and jazz concert by pianist Warren Bernhardt that we had just attended, he asked to join the conversation. An hour later, after he had told me his story, it was as if a voice was speaking to me, telling me I’ve got to make a film about this guy. I had no money and no commercial intent. I started filming the next day.”

Woodstock resident Crohn, whose film credits include several award-winning documentaries about jazz made during the 1980s and 90s, discovered that ‘the little guy whose hands were shaking’ was Sangeeta Michael Berardi. A jazz guitarist who has played with many of the pioneers of ‘free jazz’ including Roswell Rudd, Archie Shepp, Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Karl Berger, Eddie Gomez and Pharoah Sanders, Berardi has recorded under his own name and on the albums of many others. He has been described by trombonist Roswell Rudd as “the original cat with the cosmic fingers.” Now 73, Berardi has been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for the past dozen years — an incurable degenerative disease that impairs movement and coordination, affects nearly one million Americans. What’s unusual about Berardi is that, rather than resign himself to his physical inability to play the guitar as before, he is integrating the disease into his music, to, in his words, “translate the unique rhythms of my Parkinson’s tremors into musical statements.”

Crohn’s film, Playing with Parkinson’s, aims to document Berardi’s startling approach and determination. The film, now ready for editing and sound mixing, centers around a two-day recording session at NRS Studios in Catskill in June of last year. Produced by pianist/composer John Esposito on his Sunjump Records label, the session was Berardi’s first in 15 years. Not coincidentally, Esposito had produced Berardi’s previous session and performed on it as well, as he did during last year’s two-day session.

“There’s something magical being in the studio,” Berardi recounted during a two-hour phone interview from his California home. “It was something that I’ve always loved. I had for a number of years thought it was lost forever. I recall a few years back talking with [drummer] Peter O’Brian and John Esposito and saying, ‘Man, one of the saddest things about this situation — I don’t dwell on that, I’m realistic — is that I’ll never be able to make music with you guys again. I had more or less accepted it was time to move on.’”

Although Crohn and Berardi had never met prior to their chance Tinker Street encounter, Berardi is no stranger to the Woodstock area, which he visits regularly. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was Music Director at Group 212, a local multimedia arts cooperative that included a theater group, painters, a rock and roll trio and dancers in both the folk and modern traditions. Before Berardi moved to San Francisco in 1972, he launched a weekly concert/workshop series on the SUNY New Paltz campus that included musicians ranging from blues master Eddie Kirkland to local saxophonist Eddie Xiques.

Originally, Esposito had thought that Berardi would be unwilling, and unable, to play for the June 2011 session, which would feature Berardi’s compositions performed by others. No one, including Berardi himself, had imagined how the one-time virtuoso guitarist, rather than fighting the symptoms of Parkinson’s, would actually integrate them into his playing.

“I got a used acoustic guitar and discovered that I could, in a more limited way, still make some good-time music,” Berardi explained. “Also, I started using my voice, which in a way goes way back, because when I was kid, I used to sing along with my solos.”

The result was a session during which Berardi not only played guitar but also percussion — building upon the stuttering tremors and rhythms of his disease — and sang. Here are the lyrics to Mr. P, one of the tunes he composed and performed for the session:

Mr. P you took my hands from me, my silver hands
That sailed the six-string seas (C’s?)
Most days you take my voice, but you left it today — ay-ay
So thank you, I’ll make music that way
Mr. P you stole my melodies and left rhythm behind-ind-ind
In every cruel game you play I’ll look for something kind
I spent nights and days asking why, why me
I can’t live like this, no please, I pray on bended knee
One night as I fell deep into my dark lament
I let it all go and felt a surge of strength
Why not me I heard through wide open ears
Why should it be someone else drowning in tears
A light came on inside my head, driving darkness away-ay-ay
A new me emerged inventing new ways to play
Next morning my shaking hands rang bells from a cereal bowl
Mr. P, not bad, I said, as bells continued to toll
Without struggle strange rhythms rang and rolled from the bowl
Without struggle strange rhythms rang and rolled from the bowl

Berardi’s performance of Mr. P is among the highlights of the poignant 17-minute trailer for Crohn’s documentary (www.playingwithparkinsons.com), which captures the joy and spontaneity of the recording session. “This still moves me,” Crohn said, his eyes starting to water, after showing the Mr. P clip to a visitor.

“You have to let things happen and let your playing happen,” explained Esposito, who teaches music at Bard College. “The operative word there is play. For people who are not artists, they may think of play as meaning something not serious and not respectable. Artists know that the capacity for play is about as serious as we get as humans, about as deep as we can really get.”

The trailer is one of the tools Crohn is using to complete funding for the documentary, in conjunction with an online funding effort via kickstarter.com. He is hopeful the film can be completed and sold for distribution sometime this fall, the same time frame for several other Berardi-related projects. John Esposito, who released Earthship, the first of Berardi’s two CDs from the 1996 session in 2008, plans the U.S. release of the second album, Calling Coltrane in the coming months. Esposito hopes to release one or two CDs from last year’s session as well. Also on the drawing board is publication of a collection of Berardi’s autobiographical writing. In the meantime, samples of Sangeeta Michael Berardi’s artwork and poetry are available on the Sunjump Records website, www.sunjumprecords.com. ++

To contribute to this project see www.kickstarter.com and search for ‘Playing with Parkinsons.’

http://www.woodstockx.com/2012/06/04/without-struggle-strange-rhythms-rang-burrill-crohn-films-michael-berardis-musical-journey-playing-with-parkinsons/