The variably sized ICP (Instant Composer’s Pool) has been around for over fifty years, and in recent years it’s suffered the lingering illness and then death of founder and pianist, Misha Mengelberg. After that, what’s a pandemic? An inconvenience, maybe, but there are ways around that. So in October 2020 the ICP’s surviving founder, drummer Han Bennink, convened a downsized version of the band plus a couple old friends at Le Brocope, an inn, performance space and gallery in the northern Dutch town of Oldeberkoop.
Setting matters. For while the ICP has had its share of great players, they’re at least as renowned for the musicians’ willingness to play with the audience as well as each other. If you’ve caught one of their concerts, you might have seen Bennink, who is as much a slapstick comedian as a musical provocateur, abandon his drum stool to wander the hall and hawk records mid-tune. Or maybe you noticed a few musicians talking to each other, plotting a factional redirection of the piece that’s under way. Such antics are harder to capture on record, and sometimes ICP hasn’t even tried; their discography includes mostly serious examinations of individual composers, as well as hybrid constructions of swinging jazz, parlor orchestration and rambunctiously improvised chaos.
But on Komen & Gaan (Come and Go), the audience-free venue gives the ICP an opportunity to enact the interpersonal dynamics that give rise to their music. If you head to their website, the video evidence reveals that they had the run of the inn, permitting them to indulge in food, wine, and all that the premises have to offer. That includes the proprietor’s pianola (player piano), which duets with reeds player Michael Moore, a man who has been described in other places as someone who knows far too many between the wars songs for a man who was born in the mid-1950s. It also includes a dog, which mutely defies the decidedly canine growls of trombonist Wolter Wierbos on the decidedly Charles Ives-ian “Komen en Gaan 1.” Unable to get the hound to respond, Wierbos goes from room to room, playing uproariously with one subgrouping and nearly getting frozen out by another.
Much of the album is devoted to improvisations by subgroups that are by turns impelled by collegiality and bristling with challenge. They differ nearly as much from one another as they all do from the twice-visited, Ellingtonian pastiche, “De Linkershoen, De Rechtershoen” (The Left Shoe, the Right Shoe). While it might have been more fun to be there, sneaking drinks from the bottles on the tables while the musicians played with and provoked one another, the music’s mercurial progress is amusement enough to put a smile on your face.
Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine