Sasha Berliner – The State of the Vibraphone

by Fritz Byers

I came to the vibraphone early in my jazz listening, and I’ve been there ever since, as the Jazz Spectrum archives document. And in this decade, the instrument has become ever more prevalent on the show, as it is on the current scene. I don’t know if you can call it a renaissance, since brilliance on the vibes has suffused the music for decades, but jazz today is awash with great players

If you’ve been listening to the show for the last several years, you’ve heard lots of Patricia Brennan, whom I’ve featured several times and played repeatedly, since she seems to everywhere, playing with everyone; and Joel Ross, whose album nublues I showcased in 2024.

And Sasha Berliner. She’s been establishing her place at the forefront of the music for the best part of a decade now, making her case for the vibraphone as a full compositional instrument with a dynamic range that yields forceful improvised lines as well as shimmering coloristic accents.

As I said, my fascination with jazz vibraphone goes back a long way. I’m surprised by this, but I think the first John Coltrane track I really heard was his recording of “The Night We Called It a Day,” with Milt Jackson from Bags & Trane. I’m not dissembling to say that what most caught my ear about that record was the stepwise ascending-descending line that Hank Jones plays at the start, with Milt’s tasteful filigrees, and then Milt’s taking over to state the melody with his customary full-toned precision and grace. This was in 1974, and it remains one of my favorite tracks; Jazz Spectrum listeners have heard it many times over the years.

That exposure to Milt led me to his pairing with Thelonious Monk on the early Blue Note dates. It’s not symmetry, exactly, but to my ears there’s a fascinating parallel with Milt and Hank’s opening passage in how Milt and Thelonious blend on the wide intervals that open “Misterioso,” and then Milt again finds that crystalline tone of his to apply to the beauties in Thelonious’s leaping melody.

That was then, this is now. And now, the vibraphonist I most want to hear is Sasha Berliner. This week on Jazz Spectrum Friday, we feature Sasha’s music, with particular attention to her marvelous 2025 release, Fantôme (French for “specter” or “phantom”). This is Sasha’s third release as a leader – her three records are a body of work built with notable purpose and beckoning promise.

On Azalea, from 2019, a remarkably assured debut, Sasha’s touch was already distinctive – clean and unhurried, filled with thoughtful spaces that a less confident player might have filled with flurries of notes. What I recall most about my initial impression of that record was Sasha’s compositions. She wrote all the tunes, and you could hear an advanced compositional conception working inside a skilled instrumentalist’s technique, eager to do more than run familiar changes. Rare enough in jazz, but especially striking for a 21-year-old’s debut. 

Sasha’s next album, Onyx, in 2022, takes its name, fittingly, from a stone credited in folklore with protective power. Her writing on this album bears the association out – knottier harmonic ideas, rhythms that criss-cross without ever becoming tangled, and a band that seems to effortlessly navigate Sasha’s spacious sense of the current avant-garde. Take a minute to listen to the first track, “Jade.” (The title made me think of Scott LaFaro and Wayne Shorter.  But the tune is unmistakably Sasha’s.) Against a shimmering ethereal background, altoist Jaleel Shaw enters with a meditative calm. Gradually, Sasha’s chiming vibes enter, first complementing Jaleel and then taking the lead with a hypnotically beautiful solo. And while you’re there, don’t miss Marcus Gilmore’s brilliance on drums. (Fantôme is the featured recording Friday, but the show concludes with Sasha’s two treatments of “My Funny Valentine” on Onyx, which are mind-bending glimpses into the inventions she can make from something familiar.)

And then, Fantôme, out last year. I’ve wondered about exactly what metaphor Sasha had in mind with this title. I don’t know, but I can feel in the album’s authoritative, bracing energy a resolve to shake loose, to get free of the wardens of jazz, whoever and whatever they may be. She’s assembled a band equal to the ambition – Taylor Eigsti on piano, Harish Raghavan on bass, Jongkuk Kim on drums, with guest turns from the trumpeter David Adewumi, the saxophonist Rico Jones, and the pianist Lex Korten.

The results are the least categorizable and most confident music she’s made; and the most enveloping. It’s worth noting that Sasha found her voice early and publicly, not only at the vibraphone but in prose, and ever since she has insisted that no one else will ever define her, her career, or her music.

“Khan Younis” is a powerful expression of humanistic sympathy in the face of mass horror and death, rising toward the end, in the entwined lines of Taylor’s piano and Sasha’s vibraphone, to an unresolved crescendo that I hear as moral disgust. I’ve written before of the difficulty and peril in casually assigning moral meaning to music, but here I find it unmistakable. And deeply affecting.

Each tune merits a full discussion, but for now, I want to mention Sasha’s interplay with the bassist Harish Raghavan on “The Worst Person in the World.” They move, together but distinct, through interludes of quiet harmony, bold assertion, and parallel invention. This tune is a marvel of musical empathy.

You’ll hear all of Fantôme Friday. And to round out the hour, two tracks from Palladium’s 2021 tribute to Wayne Shorter, Don’t Look Back: Wayne’s “Face on the Barroom Floor” and the Irish folksong “She Moves Through the Fair.”  Each of these tracks features Sasha, and the latter pairs her with the soprano saxophone of Emilio Modeste. (Notably, the credits for the album credit Sasha with “sound design.”)

Whether Fantôme represents an exorcism or a transcendence is far less important than that it unmistakably represents Sasha’s most recent declaration of independence. Welcome to the new world.