More than 550 performances were recorded and later digitized for an archive that was purchased by the Columbia University Library in 2012. DeJohnette, Cecil Taylor and Dave Holland joined students in improvising groups. He moved to Woodstock in 1972 and inaugurated the Creative Music Studio, which settled into a nearby mountain lodge with residences and performance spaces. Coleman and an advisory board that included John Cage, Gil Evans, Buckminster Fuller and Willem de Kooning. Berger started the Creative Music Foundation with Ms. His lean, linear, freely melodic vibraphone playing repeatedly made him the top vibraphonist in the Down Beat magazine musicians’ poll. He went on to make more than two dozen albums as a leader and many others as a sideman. Berger made his debut album as a leader, “From Now On,” in 1967, and recorded with Mr. Berger to New York City to play on “Symphony for Improvisers,” a landmark free-jazz album. He moved to Paris and joined a group led by the trumpeter Don Cherry, who had been learning world-music melodies from shortwave radio broadcasts. But by the mid-1960s he had turned to music. in musicology and philosophy in Germany in 1963 and held philosophy professorships at two universities in Germany. Berger learned modern jazz in late-night jams with American musicians from military bands stationed nearby. In the 1950s, as the house pianist at the Heidelberg club Cave 54, Mr. She survives him along with their daughter, Savia. In 1953, he joined a group that included Ms. He began studying classical piano at 10, but at 14 he heard a jazz jam session that made him decide to play his own music.

Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany.

There, internationally known musicians from jazz and other traditions worked with musicians at all levels of skill, from amateur to virtuoso. Berger and other artists performed and taught. The foundation ran the Creative Music Studio, in various locations in and near Woodstock, where Mr. Berger and his wife, the singer Ingrid Sertso, founded the Creative Music Foundation in the early 1970s, to focus on improvisation and musical cross-pollination. Berger was a pianist and vibraphonist who performed and recorded with leading jazz musicians including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John McLaughlin, Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Pharoah Sanders, Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz, among many others. He was 88.īilly Martin, the studio’s executive director, said the death, at Albany Medical Center, was caused by complications following gastrointestinal surgery.

Karl Berger, a musician, composer, educator and author who taught improvisation and his concept of an attentive, collaborative “music mind” to generations of musicians and artists at his Creative Music Studio near Woodstock, N.Y., died on April 9 in Albany, N.Y.

All together dead