Promoters are billing the upcoming Vancouver debut of Broken Shadows as a tribute to the great jazz composer Ornette Coleman—and, in a way, it is.

Saxophonists Tim Berne and Chris Speed, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King will borrow the instrumental format of Coleman’s second great quartet, and delve deeply into his still surprising, and surprisingly melodic, songbook. But if anything’s being honoured, it’s the city of Fort Worth, and all of the jazz innovators that have emerged from that Texas town.

In addition to Ornette tunes, the band will also interpret the music of saxophone-playing Fort Worth natives Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill, the former being a frequent Coleman collaborator and the latter one of Berne’s great musical mentors. But, mostly, the band’s exis­tence is due to the easy camaraderie between Berne and Speed, the nearly lifelong musical conversation that Bad Plus bandmates King and Anderson have enjoyed, and the multiple connections they have with the now deceased jazz masters whose music they’ll explore.

“Really, this started just because me and Chris wanted to play together,” Berne explains, in a telephone interview from his Brooklyn home. “And we’re friends of Reid and Dave, so it just sort of popped out of our mouth: ‘Hey, let’s play with Reid and Dave!’ We were thinking about a project that wasn’t going to turn into a composition thing, with everybody kind of writing for it—and then, just because we were talking about doing one gig in New York, we decided to pick material that everybody liked that we could all just learn and not have to rehearse.

“I think Chris said, ‘Let’s do some Ornette stuff,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do some Julius. Let’s do, like, a Fort Worth thing.’ That became the theme,” he continues. “And the gig, aside from a lot of people coming out for it, was just really fun to play. It kind of sounded like a band right away.”

That one successful gig turned into a week at the legendary Village Vanguard nightclub, three U.S. tours, and a soon-to-be-released LP on Newvelle Records, a French, vinyl-only audiophile label. “I wrote him just on a lark,” says Berne, referring to label owner Elan Mehler. “I didn’t even think he’d know who I was, but he did, and he was interested. I sent him a couple of tracks from a concert and he wanted to do it, so that was super easy to do.”

Easier, in fact, than releasing it on Berne’s own Screwgun label, although the Newvelle deal allows the saxophonist to issue the music digitally in the not-too-distant future. And if there’s a follow-up, it will likely clarify the fact that while Broken Shadows takes its name from an Ornette Coleman tune, the quartet’s interests extend beyond the man with the white plastic saxophone. Berne plans to investigate Fort Worth–born John Carter’s compositional legacy, for instance, and has some intriguing news for those who love Hemphill’s rough-hewn yet prismatic approach to creative music.

“We’ve got quite a few of Julius’s tunes in the book now, and there’s a gazillion more that have never been recorded that are floating around,” he reveals. “[NYC reed player] Marty Ehrlich’s been doing his archives, so I actually got a chance to see all the stuff that’s sitting there. It’s pretty amazing.”

The Coastal Jazz and Blues Society presents Broken Shadows at the Western Front on Saturday (September 21).