Live on KUVO video series: Sasha Berliner on YouTube, Twitch | 7/3 at 11 a.m.
Up-and-coming vibraphonist Sasha Berliner visited KUVO Studios when she was in town last month. Her session from the Bonfils-Stanton Performance Studio will be posted on our YouTube and Twitch channels on Thursday, July 3, at 11 a.m.
Described as a "young mallet master" by JazzTimes, Sasha Berliner is an award-winning vibraphonist/composer based in Los Angeles. 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 the University of California, Irvine.
Her latest album, “Fantome,” released March 28, 2025, on Outside In Records, is heralded as an “exhilarating 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 “splatterpainting her colors in iridescent hues across the canvas of our minds.”
She also has a live album from her 2021 SWR New Jazz Meeting residency in Germany entitled Sasha Berliner and Tabula Rasa (2023). Her two studio albums, Azalea (2019) and Onyx (2022) on JMI Recordings, embrace 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”. She endorses Vater Drumsticks, with whom she has a signature mallet model, as well as Marimba One vibraphones and Alternate Mode for their electronic MIDI vibraphone, the MalletKAT.
Sasha Berliner
Javier Santiago
Max Gerl
Alonzo Demetrius
Myles Martin
SET LIST
Seraphim - Sasha Berliner (soloists Alonzo Demetrius and Sasha Berliner)
OBtain - Sasha Berliner (soloists Javier Santiago, Myles Martin, and Sasha Berliner)
The Worst Person in the World - Sasha Berliner (soloists Max Gerl and Sasha Berliner)
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