# Sasha Berliner: It was a surreal moment: Photos, Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/07/03/sasha-berliner-it-was-a-surreal-moment-photos-video/
- Published: 2019-07-03T12:43:34+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**When 20-year-old vibraphonist Sasha Berliner received the call, letting her know
that she’d won the 2019 LetterOne RISING STARS Jazz Award, she couldn’t believe 
it.**

“It was a surreal moment,” Berliner says. “It seemed too good to be true. I thought,
I hope I’m not being scammed. But it was real and it’s another incentive for me 
to work harder. I just want to make the most of all of it.”

Berliner had good reason to be shocked. The contest drew entries from 230 aspiring
jazz musicians. After narrowing the field to 20, the judges — a record producer,
a jazz journalist, the director of the Montreal Jazz Festival, and vocalist Dee 
Dee Bridgewater — selected her. The prize includes a seven-city North American tour,
including the Rochester and Montreal jazz festivals, and a year of career promotion.

Before winning the award, Berliner was already turning heads. After hearing her 
play, one of the most acclaimed multi-instrumentalists in jazz, Tyshawn Sorey, asked
her to join his sextet. “I’ve learned so much from being in his band,” Berliner 
says. “He’s a hero to me.”

Growing up in San Francisco, Berliner began on the drums. But when she auditioned
for Oakland School of the Arts, there were better drummers. She was offered admission
on the condition that she study vibraphone.

Her first major influence was Gary Burton, whose grip and style were introduced 
to her by her teacher. “I loved all of his stuff,” says Berliner. “He was one of
the first people to do what he did on the vibraphone.”

Practicing several hours a day has given her a command of the instrument, but there
are still challenges.

“It’s definitely one of the most difficult instruments in terms of moving around
it,” Berliner says. “It’s more specific than drums because you’re hitting specific
notes. And it’s a big instrument. One thing I’m always jealous of with Joe Locke
or Gary Burton: they’re really tall. They can see the whole keyboard, no problem.”

Adding to the challenges are pedals: “You have a foot on the sustain pedal ready
to go, and you need to figure out how to navigate your other foot,” Berliner says.
If that’s not enough, there’s the four-mallet technique.

“Four mallets is definitely more difficult because it’s harder to control dynamics,
especially loud dynamics,” she explains. “You can get blisters. It requires an additional
level of awareness and multitasking.”

That does not deter her from using four mallets on her composition “Mallards and
Sea Turtles: For Neel Foon.” Written for a classmate who died, “It really creates
an atmosphere verses just musical notes,” she says.

![Image result for sasha berliner](https://i0.wp.com/www.sfjazz.org/globalassets/
discover/blog/blog-images/sasha_5050callout.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

Another original piece demonstrates Berliner’s need to express her ideas through
music. “Between the World and Me” was written after she read the book of the same
name by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“I was having a lot of thoughts about what it means in today’s world to be a white
person playing black American music and approaching these issues of discrimination
that exist now: racial discrimination, sexual discrimination,” Berliner says.

“It’s not in explicit forms anymore,” she says. “There’s a lot of nuance and intersectional
factors. It’s very complicated and it’s not stressed enough. The book really touched
on that. The reality of what’s happening in America — gun violence, police brutality—
I wanted to communicate my emotions about that in a piece.”

![PHOTO COURTESY CGI ROCHESTER INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL](https://i0.wp.com/media2.
fdncms.com/rochester/imager/u/zoom/10434365/sasha.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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