Philadelphia Weekly

Thar she blows: Tim Berne and his hot horn reunite with Bloodcount after a 10-year absence. (Claire Stefani)

Bloodcount's name means nothing in particular, but it evokes qualities in the music itself: corpuscles, guts, the human machine with gears exposed, pulsing with funky, serrated rhythm. "I never knew quarter notes and eighth notes could be so twisted," says Jim Black, remembering his early days as the group's drummer.

Well, the preeminent cult jazz band of the '90s is back, and still plenty twisted. After a 10-year hiatus, Tim Berne's Bloodcount are testing the waters with three Northeast gigs, including a Philly engagement sponsored by Ars Nova Workshop.

The reunion mini-tour follows the release of Seconds on Berne's Screwgun label. It contains two live discs from '97 and a dadaesque DVD from '94 entitled Eyenoises: The Paris Movie, all previously unreleased. Now we can peer more deeply into Bloodcount's origins, just as the group takes a new step forward.

"I didn't want to do a retrospective," says alto saxophonist Berne, a pioneer on New York's downtown circuit since the late '70s. "Unless I had new music, I wasn't going to restart the band. That's how I motivated myself." No one, not even Bloodcount, knows exactly what the quartet will arrive at after 10 years of growth apart. But Black describes the current batch of music as "classic Tim, with new stuff inside."

The original lineup is intact, with Berne, Black, tenor sax/clarinetist Chris Speed and double bassist Michael Formanek. (Part-timer Marc Ducret, the super-twisted French guitarist, can be heard with Bloodcount on the Seconds DVD and the recently reissued Paris Concert I-III.)

Berne formed Bloodcount in 1993, enlisting his contemporary Formanek along with Speed and Black, up-and-comers from Seattle who'd been playing together since age 14 (they look like children on the '94 DVD). "I wanted a young group I could rehearse with a lot, and start over," recalls Berne, now in his mid 50s.

The benefit, Black adds, was mutual: "We were these kids playing with Tim and Formanek, and that brought us out of obscurity. We were having our asses kicked, our ears ripped open."

"When I listened back to Seconds," Berne says, "I realized the music was so tight we could actually fuck it up in an interesting way." It's a method they'll likely stick with now: combining meticulously written passages with extended free improvisation, a bumpy road between cohesion and sound-spatter. According to Black, "The whole art was transitioning over a long period from one section to another. Sometimes we would chain together five really different ideas." A 12-minute Bloodcount piece, in other words, is short. The entire Seconds DVD is devoted to one composition, "Eye Contact."

This is stark, tonally ambiguous, metrically demanding music. "When you're presented with a piece that's 30-some bars long with odd time signatures and constant syncopated rhythm, what do you do?" asks Black. "Do you play in it, around it, against it? I would try all those, and eventually my body would just take over. Also, we had to find a lot of room in a limited dynamic range some nights, so it really taught me how to play quiet."

Since Bloodcount went dormant in 1998, Berne has led an array of compelling groups including Paraphrase, Science Friction, Hard Cell and Big Satan. Speed and Black continued to hone their rapport with Pachora and AlasNoAxis, among others. Their early group Human Feel, featuring guitar star Kurt Rosenwinkel, just enjoyed their own reunion (see last year's Galore).

So the reconvened Bloodcount is no longer two veterans and two young bucks, but rather a meeting of equals. "Now everybody's pretty relaxed about their careers," says Berne. Don't take this to mean the music will be relaxed, however, for Berne courts risk as a point of principle. "Being comfortable is generally a bad thing," he says. "I start to worry, 'This is too easy, this is working. Now what do I do?' That's how you keep growing."

Bloodcount
Sun., Feb. 10, 8pm. $12. International House, 3701 Chestnut St. 215.895.6546. www.ihousephilly.org