Ali Berkok composes, designs sound, and plays piano and keyboards. He has produced six albums as a leader for jazz outfit Arkana Music, and later, electro-acoustic ambient improvising group Aurochs. His solo piano album, Never Get Lost for Long, features reinvented jazz standards (“Cheek to Cheek,” Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”) and spontaneous extemporized compositions.
His music for the screen includes a self-produced chamber score for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, short film Advances, and the comedy series You’re Never Alone (Thought4Food).
Berkok’s sound design and composition credits for theatre include Carol Shields’ 13 Hands (Alumnae), Marina & The Cryptids (Silent Protagonist), What I Call Her (Crows) and Unsafe (Canadian Stage). As well, as a more recent Ottawa mainstay, he has created music and sound for The Unplugging, Benevolence, Beowulf in Afghanistan, and Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre (GCTC).
Chief amongst his research interests is polytemporality, the simultaneous presence of two or more asynchronous rhythmic layers, for creative effects such as destabilizing listeners’ sense of pulse. Berkok holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Toronto.
Throughout his career, Berkok has engaged in deeper collaborations or briefer sideperson appearances with Rez Abbasi, Kiran Ahluwalia, Dave Barton, Jane Bunnett, Alex Dean, Yoon Sun Choi, Andrew Downing, Nick Fraser, John Geggie, Kurt Elling, Jamie Holmes, Mike Murley, Don Palmer, Sage Reynolds, Greg Runions, Gerri Trimble, Peter Van Huffel, Pete Woods.
Press
Ali Berkok’s spine-tingling sound design accompanies [Martin] Conboy’s shadowy visuals, making for a high level of engaging detail for the story-within-a-story framing device to flourish.
-Alexa MacKie, Intermission
The show’s lights and sounds dazzle, and the actors use every part of the stage and set to evoke the strange, raw emotionality of war.
-Kimberly Lemaire, apt613.ca
The performances are further enhanced by the sound and lighting design (designed by Ali Berkok and Martin Conboy, respectively), especially in the war scenes and reenactments of the Beowulf story. With a minimalist stage and limited props (set design by John Doucet), the items that are used are impactful and the direction, by Kate Smith, adds to the ethereal atmosphere.
Courtney Castelino, Broadway World
