Oscar Jan Hoogland Seizes the Moment.

I also want to mention a recording that’s been consistently lifting my spirits all week, the debut album from an Amsterdam quartet led by pianist and composer Oscar Jan Hoogland called LOOT. My ardor for the golden age of Amsterdam free jazz remains undiminished: the world sketched out by Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, and Willem Breuker that blossomed into one of the most exciting and distinctive eras in modern music history between the 1970s and 1990s, as masterfully chronicled by Kevin Whitehead in his essential book New Dutch Swing. In the current century the Amsterdam scene has changed signficantly, with a new, overwhelmingly international influx of young musicians working to forge its own identity. I’ll never know if the shift was a conscious rejection of the Instant Composer Pool aesthetic, but the effect definitely pushed out that old sound to the margins, leaving it to the post-Mengelberg iteration of the ICP Orchestra to represent. There have been other manifestations of that sound—a prankish attitude that simultaneously embraces a dig love and respect for jazz history, and a generative, tongue-in-cheek irreverence that guaranteed that nothing was sacred—including the Xavier Pamplona Sextet led by bassist Raoul van der Weide, or the excellent Berlin sextet Banquet of Consequences led by Italian bassist Antonio Borghini with resident ICP member Tobias Delius on reeds. But by and large it’s been up to the ICP Orchestra.

When Hoogland first emerged on the Amsterdam scene more than a decade ago I often heard him referred to as Mengelberg’s heir apparent. That’s a heavy weight to throw upon any musician, let alone one who was only in his early 20s and was heavily influenced by Misha, who died in 2017. The connection was obvious in Hoogland’s playing and his devilish performance practice, his own kind of absurdist post-Fluxus circus. He worked in an improvising band called the Ambush Party, which bore little resemblance to ICP, but I had a hunch that Hoogland consciously resisted playing music in Mengelberg’s mold with any frequency. But when he did, as on These Things Happen (Astral Spirits) a fantastic, sadly overlooked quartet album the pianist cut in 2016 with three Chicago musicians—reedist Keefe Jackson, bassist Joshua Abrams, and drummer Mikel Patrick Avery—there was little doubt that he could carry that torch as well as anyone. To be clear Hoogland didn’t hide his love for ICP, and in 2022 he released Goede Reis! (ICP), a fantastic duo album with Bennink that blended improvised pieces with tunes from Monk, Mengelberg, Ellington, and the sadly missed Cor Fuhler. There was no denial of where Hoogland was coming from.

With no advance notice Hoogland released the LOOT debut on De Platenbakkerij/ICP a couple of weeks ago. The band includes veteran reedist Ab Baars—another essential ICP Orchestra member—with the younger rhythm section of drummer Onno Govaert and double bassist Uldis Vitols, a Latvian native I’d never previously heard of. Straight out of the gate with “Krijshaan” we get a furiously bouncing bebop gem redolent of Herbie Nichols, a beloved figure in the Mengelberg pantheon. Baars opens the tune with stuttering phrases voiced simultaneously on clarinet and tenor saxophone (a la Roland Kirk), although he soon dispatches with the licorice stick to uncork a fabulous slaloming tenor solo that weaves through the liquid attack shaped by the rhythm section. I have been a fan of Govaert, and I’m not surprised that he flourishes in this context, but it’s nonetheless a deep pleasure to see him swing with such assurance and grace, something he rarely does in other contexts I’ve heard him in.

The nine superb original tunes that follow don’t feel quite as wedded to a specific voice, apart from Monk, although mostly through the jagged phrasing and tart harmonies. Hoogland has his own sound, whether it emerges through hall-of-mirrors bebop deconstructions or molasses-slow ballads. One of my favorite pieces on the album is “Lamantijn,” a slow motion vehicle where very little occurs on the surface, but beneath a very simple Hoogland sequence there’s an exquisite, gauzy interplay of ghostly arco bass, breathy tenor shadings, and sparse, meticulously executed percussive tattoos. Normally I’d only include a single track, but it’s too good to skip—check it out below. There are two subsequent ballads that are equally stunning, but they follow a more conventional model. Again, Hoogland’s reticence in following Mengelberg is purely conjecture on my part, but now that I have LOOT in my hands, I don’t really care. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year.

Peter Margasak
Nowhere Street
31 March 2025