Dutch singer Greetje Bijma is a special talent, a pyrotechnician with a virtuoso command of vocal timbres, Exorcist growl to Tibetan throat-singing to theremin high notes, possibly all in one breath. She can function as a human sampler, grabbing a syllable or short phrase (her own, or a bandmate’s) and subjecting it to timbral permutations as she loops it around, as if twiddling dials. Her range is intimidating, and she can get intense, but she leavens the intensity with playfulness and humor. Bijma has a phonographic memory, seems to have soaked up everything she’s ever heard, from songs everyone else has forgotten to a barely audible comment some drunk in the second row just made. She mostly avoids the dead ends and amateur gaffes that parroting leads to in open improvising.
Her talents are so particular, it can be hard to get her into a proper setting that works on record. She set a high standard with Tales of a Voice (Enja), with her longtime ally Alan Laurillard, which brought her attention in the early 1990s; on “Haden,” she acts out the Spanish Civil War. In that decade she also had a wide open free-associative duo with composer Louis Andriessen. Their improvised sets had zigzag energy and rolling momentum. He’d try to lead her from the piano, she’d resist, he’d move on to something else, she’d go back to his first idea: Bijma wouldn’t be led, but might follow. But their sole disc Nadir & Zenit (BVHaast) – more formal, working from texts – didn’t do the sportive duo justice.
Picatrix puts her in a very congenial setting, with two women who occupy other corners of Holland’s new music scene: Mary Oliver, with her long history of playing contemporary scores before getting rowdy in the ICP Orchestra; and pianist Nora Mulder, new-music interpreter and playful improviser who’s recorded with Cor Fuhler’s springy Corkestra (on cimbalom) and in the freewheeling trio Trolleybus. Oliver and Mulder can go for big gestures, or little ones: pieces range from a 10-minute, wide-ranging collective improvisation to a 20-second epigram. Oliver and Mulder may follow Bijma out on a limb, or hold the limb steady.
That leaves Greetje plenty of room to move. She brings high-art vibrato and commitment to “Donaudampfschiff”; juggles a triplety phrase on “Get ’em up”; ‘samples’ a pulsing beat from Oliver’s line on “South Pole” and then spins it like a top. Greetje starts the boisterous “Frigus Mundi” evoking late Billie Holiday and ends the same passage in a Hazel Dickens mountain holler – that’s smart dial-twirling. That one’s admirably short too, the album in a nutshell. Seven pieces are under two minutes, keeping everyone on point.
The trio is also a splendid vehicle for Oliver. Her technique is superclean – she can saw some precisely alarming minor seconds – but her resourceful choices are personal. After a couple decades roaming the Dutch landscape, she has many and varied and specific violin birdcalls under her fingers, as demonstrated by her avian obbligati (often in deliberately far keys) throughout “Birds,” which turns out to be Bijma’s surprisingly tender and straight reading of “Caged Bird” – Abbey Lincoln’s adaptation of a Maya Angelou poem inspired by a line from poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. So we get Oliver riffing on Bijma riffing on Lincoln on Angelou on Dunbar. Oral traditions are a beautiful thing. (I’d bet Bijma references other ‘found’ melodies/lyrics I don’t recognize.)
The oldest tune is the Cecil Sharp chestnut “The Water Is Wide,” appearing as “Wally Wally,” where Bijma comes close to channeling Joan Baez, and where Mulder and Oliver walk a very fine line, playing it straight but in their own voices, Mary on hardanger fiddle with its sympathetic drone strings, Nora strumming autoharp chords inside piano, and lightly outlining a slow bass (drum) line in prepared low harmonics. At least that’s what they all do before and after the free interlude the trio ease into and out of without wrecking the mood or breaking character. Oliver’s counterline on the last chorus is a beaut.
Nora Mulder has her own wild side, can take the lead, drop a depth charge or churn up the river bottom. But she approaches every situation like a member of an ensemble, or maybe comedy-team straight woman: Fletcher Henderson to her mates’ Bessie Smith and Joe Smith if you will. Like any self-respecting pianist who plays new music (and who’s friends with Cor Fuhler), she knows impacted harmony and a whole lot of procedures for treating/distorting piano sound in real time, junk shop to gamelan. She also knows such timbral devices are often most effective when the focus is elsewhere. Mulder can deftly underpin action already in progress without riffling the surface: jabbing bass tones on the airy kids-song “Le Petit Prince” where Greetje ghosts an owl.
It’s real selfless collective musicmaking, one for all. There is, in some Dutch-scene improvising, even today, a lingering, almost quaint macho quality notably absent here. You can hear this smart trio now, or (if there’s any justice) next summer, when they’re hailed as “the surprise hit of the festival.” –Kevin Whitehead
Concert Review: ICP Al Teatro Garibaldi Di Palermo (2019), by Maurizio Zerbo
Instant Composers Pool
Teatro Garibaldi
Palermo
1/11/2019
Il tempo della memoria costituisce la chiave interpretativa di volta per valutare questo magnifico concerto dedicato a Misha Mengelberg, leader carismatico dell'Instant Composers Pool. Il commosso ricordo del geniale pianista, scomparso nel 2017, ha trasfigurato le consuete trame iconoclaste dell'ensemble olandese in pannelli swinganti di lirica bellezza. Meno irriverente rispetto ai suoi standard, l'ICP si è concentrata maggiormente sulla distesa rivisitazione di ampi stili facenti parte della storia jazzistica.
A distinguerla, il saper integrare modalità e forme del teatro musicale d'avanguardia con la scrittura orchestrale classica, che da Duke Ellington a Charles Mingus procede per sontuose piramidi sonore. Gli omaggi all'arte di Herbie Nichols e Thelonious Monk sono stati emblematicamente esemplificativi di una condotta lirica sul filo dei ricordi, per inglobare con grande classe la consueta composizione istantanea dentro il prevalente alveo della rispettosa idiomaticità esecutiva. Emblematica in tal senso la trascinante rivisitazione di un classico (”Happy Go Lucky Local”) del Duca, in equilibrio tra gli squarci dissonanti e le voci sinuose dei vari fiati.
È stata una prova magistrale e diversa nei contenuti, da parte di musicisti straordinari nel donare al pubblico imprevedibilità, fantasia e tensione emotiva. Talora la rilettura dei più celebri standard jazzistici è stata condotta all'insegna di una energia interpretativa unica nell'aprirsi a forme aperte ed oscillazioni di tactus , con decelerazione graduale e fluttuazione di movimenti binari e ternari. Più che principi formali, gli elementi musicali di questo set non sono forse la poetica trasfigurazione artistica degli imprevisti, nonché degli alti e bassi che la vita ci riserva?
Album Review: Icarus (2018), by Mark Keresman, The New York City Jazz Record.
Important locales in the timeline of jazz: Kansas City in the ‘30s; NYC in the ‘50s; and Amsterdam in the ‘60s. Of the latter scene is legendary drummer Han Bennink, who worked with Eric Dolphy, Wes Montgomery and Dexter Gordon before going on to become a central figure in Euro-free circles. At 76, Bennink is still going strong and Icarus is his latest project, a duet with a countryman clarinetist who could be his son: Joris Roelofs, born 35 years ago this month.
Bennink and Roelofs share a playful, joyful approach to free improvisation, the former especially possessed of an impish, absurdist streak. The album opens with the ominously dramatic “Carmen”, clarinet wailing like a wounded beast while Bennink has at the drums and a piano simultaneously; the pair then stalk one another through darkened Hitchcock-ian hallways.
Most of the music herein is improvised but there are a few interpretations: Kurt Weill’s “This is New”, played with a definite lilt and carefree swing; Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender” essayed as a pensive, somewhat restless ballad with drums providing stormy counterpoint to soulful bass clarinet; Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che” as classically elegiac. Bennink makes the drums crackle on “Broad Stripes and Bright Stars” while Roelofs offers mournful, high lonesome clarion calls, then lithe, gently swirling, bop-flavored lines. These performances, while free-ranging, are concise and punchy, most tracks hovering at the three-minute mark.
Icarus is a set of stimulating, fascinating duets where questing freedom and merry tunefulness, serious musicianship and goofy, burlesque-ish moods overlap and intertwine.
Mark Keresman
Album Review: Icarus (2018), by Peter Margasak, Downbeat.
French-born, Amsterdam-based clarinetist Joris Roelofs has built his career balancing intense discipline and deep commitment to post-bop tradition with a measured exploratory streak. He’s worked extensively in the Vienna Art Orchestra and he maintains a wonderfully buoyant trio with the American rhythm section of Ted Poor and Matt Penman. But this new recording suggests that his attraction to freedom is growing stronger. Icarus is a lovely duo project with the veteran free jazz drummer Han Bennink, a perfect match for the reedist. The percussionist is both a master of chaos and one of the most naturally swinging musicians on the planet, and he provides both grounding and provocation to his much younger associate.
Most of the music is freely improvised and the album opens with a blast of disorder on “Carmen,” with Bennink banging out piano clusters and injecting some discordant cymbal explosions, while Roelofs blows harsh squawks. Suddenly a wild gear-shift occurs and a tender, breathy melody that sounds like a lost standard and a loping, rumbling groove takes over, indicating the sort of polarities that the pair giddily explore throughout. The clarinetist’s lyric gifts are so strong that when the duo tackle jazz standards like Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender”--presented with an attractively slack drag from Bennink that deftly adds tension to the in-and-out-of-focus treatment of the theme--or Charlie Haden’s indelible “Song for Che,” they feel entirely of a piece with the spontaneous creations. Icarus captures an electric dialogue: raw, giddy, trusting. Here’s hoping this conversation continues.
Peter Margasak
Album Review: Pech Onderweg (2018), by Kevin Whitehead, Point Of Departure.
As much time as he spent at the keys, duking it out in duo with Han Bennink in the 1970s – that decade before the ICP Orchestra blossomed into his real instrument – Misha Mengelberg could seem indifferent to the piano. The one he had at home for many years was broken-down looking, if functional. At the same time, he was among the most delightful of pianists: didn’t just dig Duke, Monk and Nichols as composers. Misha’s later trio records, like the essential Who’s Bridge (Avant), show how much he loved to play in time and on forms, and also to scribble over same. His composer’s piano chops (and instantly analytic ear) gave him all the resources he needed on the bandstand, to steer the orchestra or keep it at bay.
Mengelberg never treated piano as a temple, Köln Concert–style. For him, the instrument was more scratchpad, daybook, chalkboard to scrape, and graffiti wall – never more than on his first of four all-solo albums, Pech Onderweg, recorded at the old old Bimhuis in 1978. (The follow-ups: FMP’s 1988 Impromptus, ICP’s 1994 Mix, and Solo on Buzz, 1999.) Originally issued by his antagonist and occasional ally Willem Breuker’s BVHaast, Pech Onderweg is again out on vinyl from ICP, reproducing the original sleeve, graced by Amy Mengelberg’s fanciful drawing of her husband taking the plunge at a sympathetically round-shouldered keyboard. The remastered sound is brighter on top and has more oomph down below.
The program looks forward and back. “Pech Onderweg 2” kicks off with a fast boogie shuffle in the left hand, reaching back to 1950s student days when Misha and chum Louis Andriessen were enamored of the great Chicago boogie pianists. But Mengelberg appears to screw up the pattern going into the first chord change, and (as he often did), turns that mistake into an opportunity to change direction, in this case toward ruminating over the drone of a faintly reiterated A-flat, which leads him into one of his favorite tacks, heard elsewhere on the album: an episode of fast tight nervous on-the-beat chords, perhaps mutating one or two notes at a time. Such sequences are akin to series of Eadweard Muybridge stop-motion photographs: harmonic movement frame by frame. That escapade leads him back to the original boogie shuffle at a slightly more manageable gait, with traditional and untraditional knockabout patterns on top. After a spell he repeats the early interruptus – broken-off bass, the quietly insistent A-flat – and what had sounded spontaneous a minute ago now reveals a compositional function. That reboot eventually leads him into a bout of Mengelbergian melodizing, incorporating one of his arrival-of-the-lesser-royals marches, a couple of prepared-sounding notes, music-hall and concert-hall touches, and a surprisingly gentle ending, befitting the Sweelinck Conservatory’s professor of counterpoint. Misha was a collagist, fond of such capacious forms; he likened his grab-bag piece for Orkest de Volharding from the year before, the delightful Dressoir, to the sundry contents of an old dresser.
“Wie jeuk heeft, als moet men zich krabben” (one of his ungrammatical titles, translated on the sleeve as “When itching who, if people scratches”) begins with what sounds like the intro to some forgotten Monk ballad. But it soon reveals itself to be a workshopping of what eventually became Misha’s bread-and-butter song, the one he’d sing in animated Dutch at the end of a night, “De Sprong, O romantiek der hazen” aka “Romantic Jump of Hares.” It is rather more broken-stride Monkly in this early incarnation; the timing isn’t quite there, and he keeps the tune’s prettiness at an ironic distance. He shied away from his sentimental music, until the mature ICP showed him how good it (and this tune in particular) could sound.
Mengelberg had little patience for the hifalutin, ever mindful of how great uncle Willem, Dutch classical music’s tastemaker, had demonstrated his refinement by continuing to conduct the Concertgebouw orchestra during the Nazi occupation. So a (deliberately misspelled) “Raspodie Soliée Bref” that starts with tender harmony and swirling romanticism can be counted on to swiftly go too far, swooning over itself as clouds race past the moon, and bass passages get profundo. In hindsight all that wrist-wringing is a long striptease; excess is gradually pared back to lay bare a dopey descending diatonic one-finger melody with a galumphing cadence, a trifle which proves to be one of the composer’s insidious earworms, stuck in the head for days.
Deflationary gestures likewise infect the five-part “Banana Suite.” Under the clonking in part 1, theatrical coughing and deliberately bad singing (hey, it was a BVHaast record – Willem liked his slapstick), verbal and pianistic yammering. Part 2 sounds like a parody of hard-edged repetitive Dutch contemporary music, laced with traces of Abdullah Ibrahim’s rolling pianism (and then it moves off, into something sweeter). Part 3, a short slow blues gets abused. Part 4, bad-boy low-end pummeling is tempered with some bright octave-clamor on top.
In the suite, and elsewhere, there are generous amounts of dense, seemingly directionless keyboard churning, as if – having encountered pech onderweg, trouble en route – Misha were scanning the piano sound for chance material he might develop. It does work out that way, sometimes, but it’s also about being uncouth for its own sake, a rude gesture toward good taste. Once such churn kicks off the opener “Pech Onderweg 1,” but hidden in the first 40 seconds are glancing references to Mengelberg’s tune “Kwela P’kwana,” the very melody he abruptly quotes to end “Banana Suite”/the LP – an album-spanning callback that suggests the crackpot pianist had known his mind all along.