Last Sunday, we lost a true titan of the Hudson Valley—and planetary—music community: influential jazz composer, musician, and educator Karl Berger.
Born in Germany in 1935, Berger and his wife, vocalist and educator Ingrid Sertso, immigrated to the US in the 1960s. In 1972, Berger, Sertso, and Berger’s mentor, Ornette Coleman, cofounded the educational Creative Music Studio retreat in Woodstock. The facility drew important musicians from around the globe to study and teach, and its pioneering status as a center of the fusion of jazz and world music is still radiating throughout the music world today.
Here’s my 2008 profile of Berger for Chronogram.
Our sympathies go out to Ingrid Sertso and everyone else in Karl Berger’s truly endless musical family.
This article appears in April 2023.
