Shadow Man is the second ECM album by Tim Berne's acoustic quartet Snakeoil, released in 2013. It followed a debut that made the DownBeat critics' list of the ten best records of 2012. The album rests on three long pieces where written counterpoint and improvisation keep passing into each other. Berne's own name for the sound he was after is "transparent density".
By then the quartet had been together for four years. Oscar Noriega plays clarinet and bass clarinet, Matt Mitchell piano, tack piano and Wurlitzer, and Ches Smith drums, percussion and vibraphone. The band rehearses a great deal, and Berne says he no longer needs to direct the improvisation. The session took place in January 2013 at the Clubhouse studio in upstate New York. Manfred Eicher, who had produced the debut, was not there; Berne co-produced with David Torn, himself a former ECM artist. The aim, Berne said, was to capture how the band sounds live, "except with studio-quality sound so that you can hear detail in the writing".
OC/DC, Socket and Cornered (Duck) each run between 16 and 23 minutes, built from many sections rather than head and solos. Socket starts with a Mitchell piano solo, moves through a percussion passage by Smith and ends with Noriega wailing on clarinet. Static, written with the guitarist Marc Ducret, is compact and tightly wound, and Smith's vibraphone colours the slow-burning opener Son of Not So Sure. At the centre of the album is a spare duo reading of Paul Motian's Psalm, played without an arrangement, with Mitchell inventing his part as they went.
In The Guardian in 2013, John Fordham heard melodies close to contemporary classical music next to "trampling funk" and concluded: "It's edgy, pattern spinning contemporary music, but austere it certainly is not." In Jazzwise, Daniel Spicer wrote that among musicians blurring composition and improvisation "there are few doing it with as much élan as Berne and his collaborators".
CD, ECM 2339, released in October 2013. Six pieces, five by Berne (one of them written with Ducret) and one by Motian, for a little over 77 minutes.
