Born on 30 March 1949 in New York City, New York, USA, Berger began playing trumpet while still young and enrolled in the mid-1960s at Berklee College Of Music. He later pursued further training in composition and arranging at Ithaca College, the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, while also receiving trumpet instruction from Jimmy Maxwell and several additional teachers. Early in the 1970s he worked in New York City ensembles directed by Maxwell, Lee Castle and Mercer Ellington, and performed with Chuck Israels’ National Jazz Ensemble as well.
Numerous distinguished groups have presented his writing, among them the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, Lee Konitz, Buddy Rich, Clark Terry, Stanley Turrentine and Wynton Marsalis together with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, an ensemble Berger himself has led repeatedly for both studio dates and the televised program A Classical Jazz Christmas. Deeply drawn to Duke Ellington’s music, he has assembled orchestras for dedicated performances of that repertoire.
During the mid-1990s he created an extensive body of new material to accompany Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “The Nutcracker Suite.” The resulting work, The Harlem Nutcracker, expanded the original score roughly fourfold; Berger’s Sultans Of Swing presented it to widespread acclaim in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as for three consecutive seasons in Detroit. He has also supplied scores for motion pictures. A widely sought educator, he has given classes at the Hartt College of Music, New York’s the New School, William Patterson College and the Manhattan School of Music. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music as Professor of Composition and Arranging in its newly established Jazz Studies Program.
