Jazz, we’re often assured, embodies elegance and refinement, and who can argue with those? But a listener may fairly crave more of a jolt from time to time, and of course jazz also has its rude, big-elbows side. Those opposites coexist more, and more peaceably, these days. But LOOT serves you the hard stuff from its opening moments, when tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Ab Baars honks on his two horns at once, evoking traffic-jam jitters more than Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
The quartet format is jazz classic -- tenor, piano, bass and drums -- but this is also classic (and intergenerational) Dutch improvised music. Amsterdam players going back 60 years prize deliberately uncouth playing, a Dada strain, even as they retained affection for limber swinging beats. Ab Baars -- 40 years and counting in Holland’s flagship ICP Orchestra -- gets a big wavering precarious tenor sound, and can break your heart with a plaintive ballad, even as he tests the limits of expressive intonation. (As Ornette Coleman said, you can play flat or sharp in tune.) Like other Netherlanders, Baars prizes a 1963 oddity, where emerging free-jazzer Albert Ayler met a straight-ahead Danish trio, and they sound like they’re calling in from different planets. Baars may aim for that kind of shock value even where the band’s in sympathy -- as on “MMM (triple M)” whose melody and jocular gait nod to (Dutch hero) Monk and ICP founder Misha Mengelberg, who’d been inspired by Monk’s confounding hesitations, piano minefields behind a soloist, and jaunty ensemble feel.
Tipsy timing, tipsy intonation, tipsy melody: LOOT catches a bit of what national composer Louis Andriessen once called, with some pride, “lousy Dutch wooden-shoe timing.” All ten compositions are by 40-ish pianist Oscar Jan Hoogland, who’s picked up on forebear Mengelberg’s Monkishness, rude fun, and love of a good tune, and Guus Janssen’s Lennie Tristano-inspired quick articulation. Hoogland has the knack of suggesting Monk without aping him too closely, though he’s rather fond of the clank of adjacent keys sounded together. “Tilted Television” sometimes moves like heavy objects falling down a flight of stairs -- an irregular tumble, ever forward. Drummer Onno Govaert and Latvia-born bassist Uldis Vitols are on top of every micro-deviation, as 21st-century rhythm players need to be. Start-and-stop timing on “Impala” is casually precise. Oscar Jan fingers some supple keyboard analogs to a guitarist’s hammer-ons and pull-offs, building on Monk’s unorthodox attacks.
So it’s not all honk and bonk. Much depends on contrast. “Reiger” is a tone poem for clarinet; drums played with mallets, bass with a bow. “Lamantine” is quiet and spacious, nearer to Morton Feldman’s spare chamber music than jazz, save for quietly responsive bass and drums. The closing “Over het Zijn en het Hoera” starts with a few high, dappled pedal-down piano notes: stars appearing in an early evening sky. Then Hoogland’s slow rising left-hand ostinato sets up a reflective clarinet melody, followed by a 30-second pause before they pick up where they left off. With LOOT, the sublime effectively frames the outlandish and vice versa. Elegance and refinement sneak in the back gate.
Marc Schots, dependable engineer frequently behind the board at the Bimhuis, recorded and mixed the music at Amsterdam venue Splendor over four days in July 2023. With some 60 albums under his belt, Schots knows the drill: plump, natural bass tone, fidelity to wide dynamics, every instrument present in tight formation. Drum hits pop. Faint sounds are clear. His ears don’t miss a thing so ours won’t.
—Kevin Whitehead, The Audio Beat. October 30, 2025.
—purchase LOOT on CD, LP, or Bandcamp.