Steven Bernstein Celebrates His Roots with Bay Area Grooves and Latin Soul

“Anytime you need to shut me up, just say stop,” offers the trumpeter and bandleader Steven Bernstein, with a contagious chuckle.

“I got too many stories, man,” he adds later, and indeed, Bernstein, one of jazz’s finest raconteurs, knows how to spin a yarn. A born New Yorker who actually grew up in Berkeley, the 64-year-old is as unforgettable as an old-school character actor.

He can tell you about serving as a music producer on Robert Altman’s Kansas City, alongside his dearly departed friend Hal Willner. Or he can recall how he helped John Lurie shape one of the ’90s’ best film scores with Get Shorty. He might dip into a tale he accrued as an integral part of New York’s Downtown scene, or touch upon his experiences with Levon Helm, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Henry Butler and other titans. He’ll keep you rapt with anecdotes about the bands he helms, among them the Millennial Territory Orchestra and the long-running, beyond-genre quartet Sexmob.

The latter, with Briggan Krauss on saxophone, Tony Scherr on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums, formed in the mid-’90s, in part to give Bernstein an opportunity to hone his skills on the idiosyncratic slide trumpet. Over the past 30 years, Sexmob has developed into something like the hippest repertory band in improvised music, blending originals with covers from all over the record shop and proving nightly how seamlessly avant-garde strategies can pair with a groove. Their most recent release is Let X=X, a collaboration with Laurie Anderson. (Outside of Sexmob, Bernstein’s new leader recording showcases the wide-open chemistry of his ResoNation Trio with bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits.)

The trumpeter returns to the Joe Henderson Lab with Sexmob on July 16-19, to pay tribute to the sounds of his Bay Area upbringing and spotlight a pair of guests he’s known for many years. On the first two nights, the band will perform a program of “Psychedelic SF Grooves,” joined by guitarist Liberty Ellman. For the last two nights, the theme will be “Latin Bay Area Soul,” featuring veteran percussionist John Santos as special guest. It’s an inspired way for Bernstein to reflect on the impossibly rich cultural landscape that formed him. And, of course, it undams a flood of great stories and reminiscences.

He moved to Berkeley from the Massachusetts suburbs in 1968, when he was in elementary school. “This is a memory,” Bernstein begins. “I swear [my family] saw the Grateful Dead in ’68 or ’69 in Golden Gate Park. We used to walk through [there], go to the Japanese Tea Garden. And I always had this memory of, ‘Oh, that was the Grateful Dead.’”

But soon enough Bernstein would set out on a different path. In the summer following sixth grade, his friend Peter Apfelbaum, now a renowned saxophonist, gave him a few choice jazz LPs by Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver and Maynard Ferguson. In seventh grade, Bernstein was already checking out sets at the legendary San Francisco jazz club Keystone Korner. His first two shows that year were Eddie Harris and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. “If you listen to that music in seventh grade,” he says, “rock music just sounds like whatever.”

But as the years went on and Bernstein collaborated with rock icons, he came to realize that Bay Area psychedelia was simply part of his soul. “That music was what you heard coming from every hippie house, commune, VW bug,” he says. When he toured with Hot Tuna decades later, he experienced déjà vu as he was learning the songbook: “I realized, ‘Oh, right, I heard all these songs when I was 10 years old.’ … So that’s my relationship. It’s structural DNA.”

Bernstein said that audiences can expect a healthy survey of the Bay Area psychedelic repertoire, and listed off the Dead, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. “And even though it’s not officially the Bay Area, I feel like you have to do a Hendrix tune,” he says. “Especially because Jimi Plays Berkeley was recorded at the theater in my high school.”

Speaking of spellbinding guitarists: Liberty Ellman, one of the most respected guitarists in jazz, performs with Sexmob July 16–17. A strikingly versatile player, he’s probably best recognized for his work with cerebral bandleaders like Henry Threadgill and Vijay Iyer, but his relationship with rock was foundational. In a Zoom interview, Ellman mentioned that his drummer father was a member of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, and held up a photograph of his mother and Hendrix backstage at Monterey Pop in 1967. (According to Ellman, Pete Townshend is just out of frame.)

“[Jimi’s] got a bag at his feet there which has lighter fluid in it,” Ellman says, referencing the fiery climax to one of rock’s most epochal festival sets. Ellman lived in New York as a child and, like Bernstein, relocated to the Bay with his family when he was in grade school. “I came up playing rock guitar,” he says, “as a lot of guitar players did before they really committed to playing jazz.”

“It’ll be a blast,” he says of the upcoming dates. “I really enjoy creating sonic landscapes. I can’t help but be myself, so in terms of the lines I play it’s still gonna be me doing my voice, but just with more colors.”

For “Latin Bay Area Soul,” Bernstein aims to illuminate the adaptive history of Latin jazz, rock and grooves in the region: Cal Tjader, Santana, Malo and Jorge Santana, Azteca, the Escovedo dynasty, the John Handy hit “Hard Work” — even the Latin-tinged work of Sly Stone and Bobby Hutcherson. They’re all part of an utterly singular legacy — but what makes it so unique, especially against the Afro-Cuban tradition that flourished in New York? The San Francisco-born percussionist John Santos, an absolute authority on Afro-Latin sounds and the founder of bands including Machete Ensemble, offers an answer. “I believe there are several factors that make the Bay Area Afro-Latin scene unique,” writes Santos, who guests with Sexmob July 18-19. “Among them: our specific Latino community demographics from México and Central America in greater numbers than the Cuban/Puerto Rican eminence prevalent on the East Coast; our strong presence of rock, Latin rock, folk, blues and jazz in relatively equal parts; the lack of a predominantly dancing public to dictate where the music should go and not go; the relatively small, close-knit community.”

“Come see us create something,” Bernstein encourages. “’Cause if you grew up in the Bay Area, you know Azteca, ‘Hard Work,’ Cal Tjader and, I mean, everyone knows Santana. … This is the heart and soul of the Bay Area.”

Steven Bernstein and Sexmob perform in the Joe Henderson Lab, 7/16-19 with guests Liberty Ellman (7/16-17) and John Santos (7/18-19) Tickets and more information are available here.

Evan Haga is the Senior Content Writer for Music & Arts, part of the Guitar Center Company. He was previously the editor-in-chief of JazzTimes magazine and an editor and curator at the music-streaming platform TIDAL. He lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland.