Tim Berne's Snakeoil

You've Been Watching Me is the third ECM album by Tim Berne's Snakeoil, and the one where the New York band grew from a quartet into a quintet. The alto saxophonist and composer added the guitarist Ryan Ferreira, whose electric textures widen the group's palette. Seven long Berne compositions, three of them over thirteen minutes, move between dense counterpoint, open space and sudden loud climaxes. It followed Snakeoil (2012) and Shadow Man (2013), and the latter had brought Berne some of the strongest praise of his career.

Next to Berne and Ferreira the band is Oscar Noriega on clarinet and bass clarinet, Matt Mitchell on piano and electronics, and Ches Smith on drums, vibraphone, percussion and timpani. It was recorded in December 2014 at "The Clubhouse" in Rhinebeck, New York, with D. James Goodwin as engineer. The guitarist David Torn, who had co-produced Shadow Man with Berne, produced and mixed it. Berne pictures the band as a U shape formed by Ferreira, Mitchell and Smith, with himself and Noriega fitting inside it.

Lost in Redding opens with Mitchell's electronics, and Ferreira's distorted guitar carries the piece from a slow build to its peak under Noriega's bass clarinet. The eighteen-minute Small World in a Small Town starts as a late-night ballad for alto and piano, with Smith on vibraphone instead of drums for long stretches. Embraceable Me begins as a tender duet between Berne and Noriega, then gathers timpani, piano and harsher guitar into something close to film music. The short title track is a solo for Ferreira on acoustic guitar. The closing False Impressions, over thirteen minutes long, gives him one of his largest roles, with vibraphone and alto adding darker colours.

The reviews were strong. Carlo Wolff in DownBeat described "a quintet of huge ambition and power that punches way above its weight". On the Free Jazz Blog, Paul Acquaro gave it five stars in 2015 and heard "an evolution in the group's sound" rather than a change of direction. The producer, for his part, said that Berne does not get enough credit for the sheer beauty of his alto tone.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2443, first released on 17 April 2015.