The Bay Area’s creative music scene is no stranger to ambitious recording projects. In 2025 Berkeley bassist Lisa Mezzacappa’s Queen Bee Records launched the consistently absorbing 12/12 initiative, releasing a dozen albums by 12 different ensembles over the course of a year.
Rather than spreading out his musical bounty, Berkeley clarinetist Ben Goldberg marked his 66th birthday on Aug. 8 with a numerologically resonant torrent on his label BAG Productions, releasing eight albums on that date via Bandcamp. 8/8 features a disparate array of projects, encompassing two clarinet/percussion duos, three trios, two quartets and a quintet. His compatriots include an intriguing roster of players, from new music percussion maestro William Winant and groove-centric guitarist Will Bernard to powerhouse jazz pianist/composer Myra Melford and capacious bassist Greg Cohen.
Taken together, 8/8 offers a revelatory window into peak Goldberg, who is one of our most consistently lyrical artists. Most of the albums document unscripted improvisations, though two sessions involve previously composed material. His music mostly elides that distinction, darting in aphoristic dialogue or unfurling in extended lines guided by his gift for probing disquisition. Whatever the setting, Goldberg’s tone is a thing of beauty, lithe, sneaky, and quicksilver malleable.
All of the music was recorded in the past three years, capturing “the general current of the creative life,” 
Goldberg said in a recent phone conversation from New York. “I’m trying to get stronger and learn more how to step aside from myself and let the music flow through me.”
Releasing eight albums on Aug. 8, echoing the eight letters of his first and last names, might seem excessive, but it reflects the playing he’s been doing in recent years, much of it out of view of Bay Area audiences. Over the past decade or so, Goldberg has spent a good part of each year in New York City, and 8/8 documents relationships forged or renewed during that time.
There’s the duo project Dog Hypnotic with inveterately inventive New York percussionist Kenny Wollesen, who was recently in town for Sex Mob’s SFJAZZ residency (and is back next month for a West Coast tour with Laurie Anderson’s Sex Mob collaboration). Playing bass marimba, vibraphone and sundry percussion, Wollesen creates a flexible, jangly sonic matrix for Goldberg, who plays a slippery E-flat Albert system clarinet (an instrument with a slightly higher register and different tuning than the standard B-flat clarinet).
They started playing together in the early 1980s when Wollesen was a teenage wunderkind in Santa Cruz and went on to perform around the world in Goldberg’s groundbreaking New Klezmer Trio. A volatile duo album from 1992, The Relative Value of Things, started their dialogue, a conversation that resumed some three decades later with 2020’s quietly beguiling Music for an Avant-Garde Massage Parlour.
Several albums feature the exceptional New York rhythm section tandem of bassist John Hébert and drummer Hamir Atwal, who grew up in the East Bay and first earned renown on the Bay Area scene. There’s Spillway 4 with saxophonist John Ellis, a hard bouncing quartet session featuring compositions that Goldberg initially captured as late-night voice memos and later transcribed as sketches for the studio. They served “like a doorway that can be opened in a useful way to the flow of musical imagination,” he said.
The tune titles mostly stem from the numbers bestowed on the tracks by his phone, though the album opens with the down-low, blues-inflected “For Bobby part four,” a tune dedicated to legendary cornetist Bobby Bradford. That piece also featured on the 8/8 trio session, For Bobby).
Atwal has been playing with Goldberg since graduating from Berklee College of Music and moving back to the Bay Area in the late aughts. He and Hébert have become frequent collaborators since connecting via Goldberg, who first met the bassist when they shared a 2006 San Francisco Jazz Festival double bill. Their paths occasionally crossed, and as Goldberg’s frequent New York forays increased, they started playing together around the city.
Hébert performed in the Bay Area recently with trumpeter Ralph Alessi, but he’s worked in California most frequently as a member of pianist Fred Hersch’s exquisite trio. A player known for thriving in liminal spaces between free improvisation and composition, Hébert said he connects viscerally with Goldberg’s sound, and intellectually with his approach.
“Ben can go anywhere, totally melodic in-the-tradition jazz, but also completely out, which I really appreciate because I’m straddling both of those worlds myself,” he said. “The feeling is, ‘let’s just go for it, and whatever happens it’s going to be beautiful.’ It doesn’t always work, but that’s okay when you’re playing with people who are totally open.”
Playing on half of the 8/8 albums, Atwal is the driving force on the most surprising session, Optical, featuring Will Bernard. The Berkeley-reared, Brooklyn-based guitarist has always contained multitudes, but the stripped-down trio takes him into loose and wide-open terrain. “We’re really stretching and trying different things,” Atwal said. “Will is such an amazing slide guitarist, and he was able to use that in the session creating such amazing soundscapes. I’m not used to hearing him go for that.
Over the past two decades Atwal has seen Goldberg’s music evolve from unbridled virtuosity to a more intensely distilled place, “where everything is the heart of what Ben is, not as technically demanding,” he said. “His tone is amazing. Everything is way more to the nitty gritty, taking the essence of all these things he’s learning and making it as lyrical as possible.”
Celebrating the release of the albums isn’t really feasible given the cost of travel, but after Goldberg returns to the Bay Area to resume teaching improvisation at UC Berkeley and leading the Nu Jazz Collective, he’s playing a typically diverse roster of gigs. On Aug. 20 he performs at the Ivy Room in Albany with Strolling Gnomes, an improvisational ensemble featuring storied guitar maverick Fred Frith, ROVA Saxophone Quartet’s Larry Ochs, multi-instrumentalist Thomas Dimuzio, and drummer Scott Amendola, a frequent and long-time Goldberg collaborator.
He’s at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery in the S.F. Mission district on Aug. 21 with Insect Life, a quartet featuring tenor saxophonist Raffi Garabedian, cellist Ben Davis, and trombonist Danny Lubin-Laden. And on Aug. 23, he’s part of New York trumpeter Kenny Warren’s quartet at Bird and Beckett Books & Records in Glen Park, with Raffi Garabedian and guitarist Liberty Ellman.
Goldberg finishes out the month in a most fitting setting, accompanying staff physicist Desiré “Laser Chick” Whitmore at the Exploratorium while she discusses the science behind the LASER Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and the most recent results, illuminating the hidden depths of the universe dating back billions of years.
