Curt Bergmann

Biography

Curt Bergmann is a St. Paul alto saxophonist whose playing favors melody, swing and space: the conversational, straight-ahead jazz of the small-group tradition.

Curt leads Take Your Time, with guitarist John Pohl, bassist Maria Meade and drummer Jon Norstad, which holds a monthly residency at Showtime Studio & Coffee in Roseville. With the same rhythm section he plays alto in The Jazz Workshop Collective, a six- and seven-piece ensemble with vocalist Tory Clark, tenor saxophonist Charles Burdick and pianist Madeline Elmhirst. The Collective grew out of North Star Jazz Workshops and is coached by bassist, composer and educator Chris Bates.

He is also the newest member of Accent Deluxe, a Twin Cities band that brings swing, bossa nova and jazz manouche to clubs, festivals and private events, and he plays with the Minnesota State Band, the official band of the State of Minnesota since 1898 and the last state band in the country.

Curt is a committed student of the music. He rehearses twice a month in a North Star Jazz Workshops combo at Jazz Central Studios, sits in at Twin Cities jazz jams, and in 2025 spent a week at Jazz Camp West in the California redwoods, playing in its big bands and studying soloing with saxophonist Howard Wiley.

A second act

Curt came to the bandstand after a career in technology. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and built websites and client/server systems before returning to school at the University of Minnesota for mathematics and turning to statistics and data mining. He never looked back.

As a data scientist at Elicit, a Minneapolis customer-strategy and analytics consultancy, he built Bayesian multilevel models in R and Stan to find the signal in customer data, and spoke on the subject at Predictive Analytics World in 2018 (“The Benefits of Being Bayesian”). Now retired from the field, he still writes software, these days tools that help musicians practice smarter and keep their set lists in order.

Off the bandstand

Curt took up sailing in 2024 and was hooked from the first afternoon. That summer he earned his American Sailing Association certifications through Bareboat Cruising. He races 22-foot Pearson Ensigns on Bde Maka Ska with the Minneapolis Sailing Center and skippers charters on Lake Superior out of Bayfield. When the wind won’t cooperate, he’s happy to trade the tiller for a fly rod.

He and his wife, Susan, who holds master’s degrees in forest management and urban planning, live in St. Paul, where they raised two Suzuki violinists through years of lessons, group classes and recitals. Their daughter Rebecca earned a B.S. in emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in bioethics at Columbia University, and is now in medical school at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn. Elizabeth, who started the violin at three, earned her bachelor’s in violin performance at the University of Minnesota and her master’s in violin performance at the Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University in Georgia, where she is now pursuing an Artist Diploma on her way to a career as a professional violinist.

With that lineup, Curt happily claims the title of least-educated member of the family.