Musical Style: Jazz

Described a "young mallet master" by JazzTimes, Sasha Berliner is an award winning vibraphonist and composer based in Los Angeles, CA. The Downbeat Critics Poll #1 Rising Star Vibraphonist and NPR Jazz Night in America's Class of 2024 Youngbloods pick has notably shared the stage for recent projects with Christian McBride, Tyshawn Sorey, Marcus Gilmore, Justin Brown, and Cecile Mclorin Salvant, and leads her own quintet for international touring. She is also a faculty member at University of California Irvine and a frequent lecturing guest of California Institute for the Arts, both for jazz ensemble and composition courses.

She has two studio albums, Azalea (2019) and Onyx (2022) on JMI Recordings, in which she embraces a futuristic jazz concept that is equal parts acoustic and electric instruments and post production effects, as well as the introduction of political concepts, sampling, and harmonically advanced composition and improvisation. JazzWise described her music on Onyx as a “unique brand of obliquely impressionist Milesian electric jazz and (a) Gary Burton-inspired four-mallet approach” that exhibited “great promise” since her debut release, which has only grown “even stronger” on her sophomore recording. She also has a live album from her 2021 SWR New Jazz Meeting residency in Germany entitled Sasha Berliner and Tabula Rasa (2023). One of her central musical missions is to continue to discover new sonic backdrops for the vibraphone to exist in, and she will continue to explore that in future recordings and shows.

She endorses Vater Drumsticks, with whom she has a signature mallet model with, as well as Marimba One vibraphones and Alternate Mode for their electronic midi vibraphone, the MalletKAT. Glide Magazine urges listeners to “add Berliner to the new vanguard of contemporary artists that are reshaping jazz with unconventional compositional approaches”.

Her latest album, Fantome, released March 28th on Outside In Records, heralded as an “exhilirating collection of originals” (WBGO). The album has been described as “complex and accessible, effortlessly borrowing from pop, rock, and funk while remaining resolutely jazz – vibrant, lyrical, and imbued with a poetic sensibility [...] never before have I heard a vibraphonist display such power, nor one who composes with such contemporary relevance and acute understanding of orchestration”

(Thierry De Clemensat, Paris Move). Dee Dee McNeil (Making a Scene) wrote that Sasha is “splatter-

painting her colors in iridescent hues across the canvas of our minds.”

QUOTES

“Berliner is already a very mature instrumentalist [...] maybe she’s the best

vibraphone player to emerge in decades.” - Arnaldo DeSouteiro, Brazilian record

producer (Verve, CTI, JSR, Milestone, Sony), music historian, and journalist.

“Naturally percussive, with an ever-expanding grasp of harmony and counterpoint [...] vibraphonist Sasha Berliner is one of the most exciting voices in jazz today.” - Andrew Bradbury, Stetson Stories.

“Berliner plays, composes and leads her band with maturity and artistic presence rarely attained. [...] Berliner is in the firmament of the here and now in modern jazz, and appears likely to occupy that upper stratosphere for some time to come.” - Paul Rauch, All About

Jazz.

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