Album Review: Komen & Gaan (2021), by Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine

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

Album Review: Komen & Gaan (2021), by Richard Williams, The Blue Moment

Back in the 1970s it was an exquisite shock to hear musicians associated with Instant Composers Pool, the Amsterdam-based collective of free improvisers, playing a dance-band version of “Our Day Will Come”, the old Ruby and the Romantics hit, with no outward signs of irony. It was post-modern, in a way, but it wasn’t arch or condescending. It was just the way they saw things. And that was one of their contributions to the jazz of the last half-century.

Founded in 1967 by the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the saxophonist Willem Breuker and the drummer Han Bennink, ICP is still going strong, despite losing its state funding last year, and its members are still playing dance-band tunes, as you can hear in the clip above, where they perform “De Linkerschoen, de Rechterschoen”, a delightful tune by their bassist, Ernst Glerum, in best palais-glide style. It’s the first of two versions of the tune included in the latest album on their own label: Komen & Gaan by the ICP Septet + Joris Roelofs, Terrie Ex and Mara’s Pianola, which shows the ICP bunch to be as full of irreverent life as ever.

Recorded live at Le Brocope, a jazz and theatre café in Oldeberkoop, a village in Friesland, in north of the Netherlands, it represents an interesting response to the problems presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. To celebrate the venue’s 10th anniversary last October, the musicians were invited to spend a weekend there, eating and drinking and socialising and playing. I don’t know what the lockdown deal was in the Netherlands at the time, but the clip shows the congenial atmosphere they created.

I like this quote in the sleeve note by Mara Eijsbouts, the proprietor of Le Brocope: “As a painting chef, who also happens to be an interior designer, or a designing music lover who loves to cook, a mother of two beautiful daughters, and a historian who likes to write about matters that touch upon the future, entrepreneur, scatterbrain, and hostess in a house with walls that are made of musical energy, and as a jazz lover, I adhere to the adage of jazz: Just play what you like, as long as it fits.”

Throughout the album there are other fragments of the musical history in snatches of “The Sound of Music” and “Ain’t Misbehavin'”, thrown into the mix with the now familiar Dutch mixture of skill and irreverence. But there’s also a lot of free improvisation — sometimes unruly, sometimes exquisite — from the likes of Ab Baars on reeds and shakuhachi, Mary Oliver on violin and viola, Wolter Wierbos on trombone, the pianist Guus Janssen, Michael Moore on alto and clarinet, the great Bennink, the last survivor of the original founding trio, whose inimitable artwork is to be found on the album’s cover, and the two guests, the guitarist Terrie Ex and the bass clarinetist Joris Roelofs.

It’s hard to imagine a more gleefully anarchic piece of music being released in 2021 than the variations on Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor perpetrated on this album by Janssen and Ex. While Janssen fractures and reorganises Bach’s notes at a ridiculous speed, Ex strafes his efforts with skittering bottleneck noise before the two musicians accelerate together into a grandiose finale that includes a few seconds in which they sound as if they’re falling over each other’s feet. Ending with a pratfall thud, it’s a typical piece of ICP surrealism, being simultaneously funny and rather beautiful.

Richard Williams
https://thebluemoment.com/2021/03/19/icp-in-friesland/

Album Review: Goede Reis! (2020), by Kevin Whitehead, Point of Departure

Since Misha Mengelberg (born 1935) helped found Dutch improvised music in the 1960s, at least one Hollander from each subsequent generation has carried on his legacy of smart, playful, subversive pianism, some kind of way. First came the more rigorously whimsical Guus Janssen, born 1951 (who took over Misha’s chair in the ICP Orchestra), then Cor Fuhler (1964, who’d subbed for Mengelberg in ICP after the master’s 1997 heart attack) – not forgetting Cor’s worthy contemporaries Michiel Braam and Michiel Scheen. The fourth generation’s loose cannon of the keys is Oscar Jan Hoogland, born 1983, in some ways the most anarchic of the bunch. He and Han Bennink have an occasional duo (in that long line of Han’s piano-drums duels, roping in all of the above), finally heard on record with Goede Reis! – Dutch for ‘have a nice trip.’ That, the duo do. It’s an excellent introduction to the junior partner.

The album self-consciously places Hoogland in the lineage just laid out, including as it does tunes by Mengelberg and Fuhler. (The disc is dedicated to Cor, who died in Australia a month before Goede Reis! was recorded in an empty Bimhuis in August 2020.) The “De Bokkenrijder’s Race” kicks off with and makes pivotal use of Guus’s signature syncopated “hi-hat” lick, played on the piano’s fast-decaying almost pitchless top keys. The nattering sound overlaid on that piece – the Bimhuis-TV skim of the album-release concert reveals – comes from multiple portable record players spinning “Bokkenrijder” ( = goat rider) from the late altoist Paul Termos’s LP Solo 84–85 at right and wrong speeds. (Some enterprising label should get to work reissuing the Claxon catalog.) There’s also a tune or three by Mengelberg heroes Ellington and Monk. “Hornin’ In,” coupled with Misha’s oft-revived ‘60s ballad “Peer’s Counting Song” could almost be the Mengelberg-Bennink duo – quick piano scrambles and turnabouts, bonked-out clotted chords, fff to ppp dynamics in short order – save perhaps that Han never tries to drown the pianist out. A Blindfold Testee might only sense a trap when Oscar Jan voices the melody in the bass; he’s got a strong left hand.

Hoogland has more tells than that. Here as elsewhere, he deploys a bevy of noisemakers, including crackle box, electric clavichord, those portable record players (also spinning what sound like a few global-music records), cassette players loaded with who-knows-what, and battery-powered megaphones. Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” with its own twinkling repetitions, is played straight and gently fragmented, and overlayed with (recorded, and ghostly sounding) shakuhachi or hotchiku. Bamboo flute makes no conceptual sense, save perhaps that the tune dates from the same era as Far East Suite, but it works somehow; Oscar Jan explicitly ties the layers together when piano and Japanese flute’s pitch-ranges converge halfway through. Bennink is mostly under wraps, although when piano misbehaves a little toward the end, drums back its play. At 79 when Goede Reis! was recorded, Han may give the impression he’s mellowing a bit, but his reaction time hasn’t slowed, and he minds those shifting dynamics. Better to say he’s intent on drawing his partner out – and hardly for the first time, when working with pianists he likes.

The drummer’s firm pulse enlivens the sound-collagey “Propeller,” boasting solo and call-and-response chants (West African?), crackle-box glissandi, looped (Afropop?) guitar and plenty of Hoogland’s electric clavichord, with its key-pressure–sensitive pitch bends (sometimes sounding oddly like bass guitar), and enough space to let Han poke through in the closing minutes. That clav sets Hoogland apart. There’s more collage-ing – and OJ furiously attacking the clavichord – on “Musique Automatique Typographique.”

Brevity works in the program’s favor; 39 minutes seems just right. (Misha played a few short sets himself – and thought high-energy free jazz would make good singles music, because a little goes a long way.) The longest all-over-the-place jam, at eight minutes, settles down before the back half into a long thin/thick drone, eventually giving way to Cor Fuhler’s lovely “Rhythm Three,” a ballad built around simple materials: falling minor-thirds and similar intervals, falling like snow. It serves as a fitting memorial to that much-beloved improviser, composer, bandleader, and inventor – of the keyboard-violin hybrid, the keyolin – whose chaotic last years in Australia threw his many friends back home for a loop. (Fuhler liked comic collagey stuff himself, in his guise as DJ Cor Blimey.)

Like his forebears Hoogland has studied the particulars of Monk’s piano sonority and clustery voicings, catching same on a romping “Epistrophy” (adding a few subterranean bass arpeggios – Han drawing an exact bead on the melody’s rhythms right with him) and a surprisingly tender slow-to-medium “Ugly Beauty,” played almost totally straight, save for a distended (and, second/last time through, unresolved) ending. Han’s engaged but keeps a low profile, selflessly giving OJ the spotlight. It’s his time now. –Kevin Whitehead

Album Review: De Hondemepper (2020), by Bill Shoemaker, Point of Departure

This collaboration between ICP Orchestra and Nieuw Amsterdams Peil – another pool, oriented towards composed works – is about as close to an Amacord Misha Mengelberg as is likely to be heard. The album is a full body of work scan of a composer who irascibly resisted definition. de hondemepper traces Mengelberg’s roots (Karel, his composer father, and the jazz trinity of Ellington, Monk, and Nichols), retrieves seldom-heard pieces from the Orchestra’s book, and recasts pieces he penned in the 1970s and ‘80s for, respectively, Okest de Volharding and Hoketus, both led by Louis Andriessen. Although the album vaults from one aspect of Mengelberg’s sensibility to another track by track, it is a remarkably cohesive program, one of the more persuasive cases for Mengelberg as a composer on disc.

NAP comes to this recording with relevant history – co-leader Gerard Bouwhuis was Hoketus’ pianist when they premiered “Een Hutje van Gras” in 1985. They also bring other assets to the table: NAP co-leader and violinist Heleen Hulst and cellist Mick Stirling buttress ICP’s strings section, bassoonist Dorian Cooke and Patricio Wang, who plays mandolin and chromatic panflute, expand the color palette, and Bart de Vrees thickens the percussion textures. Most importantly, they contribute to the cracking, close-order ensembles that permeate the program, essential to multi-sectioned works like “Dressoir,” in which quirky, vernacular-driven punchlines require straight-faced delivery.

The polishing of Mengelberg’s compositions by no means diminishes their subversions. Instead of blossoming into a full-bodied exposition, the lovely triple canon that opens “Een Hutje van Gras” peters out, leaving only a Minimalist pulse flecked with exotic accents that lingers almost too long before the closing reiteration of the canon. The reading of “A La Russe” by Cooke, Stirling, and Mary Oliver (heard on viola) plays upon classical conventions with the sardonic piquancy often associated with Prokofiev. The title piece vaults over follies-worthy romps, dour melodies, and texture-driven intrusions, the ensemble’s every landing nailed.

The NAPsters are also impactful on the repertory pieces. Cooke and the strings add to the frenzied energy of Guus Janssen’s clarinet-rich arrangement of Nichols’ “Cro-Magnon Nights,” which is very much in line with the deceptive looseness ICP has honed over decades, where swerves, jolts, and lurches are smartly placed. The same holds true in the passages of Ab Baars episodic “Pools and Pals” that draw on the hard-swinging “Depk” from Ellington’s Far East Suite. While Wang’s pan flute effectively punctuates the improvised sections of Baars’ piece, and adds jaunty color elsewhere, it is not well suited as a lead voice in Michael Moore’s otherwise sumptuous expansion of Mengelberg’s chart for Monk’s “Reflections.”

Ultimately, despite its many pleasures, de hondemepper begs an important question: Having made this impressive homage, can ICP now foreground the works of its deep bench of composers? Making such a transition is complicated by the one-two punch of the pandemic (Tristan Honsinger and Thomas Heberer are currently on the wrong side of the Atlantic) and the loss of long-term support from the Fonds Podiumkunsten (the Dutch Foundation for the Performing Arts). How the next chapter unfolds in a new normal will be keenly watched. –Bill Shoemaker

Album Review: De Hondemepper (2020), by Rinus van der Heijden, Jazz.nu.

De Instant Composers Pool en Nieuw Amsterdams Peil brengen met ‘De Hondemepper’ een fantastische aubade aan de in 2017 overleden componist en ICP-bandleider Misha Mengelberg. Daarmee is deze cd opnieuw een mijlpaal in het uitgebreide oeuvre van de ICP.

Over de Instant Composers Pool (ICP) zijn talloze artikelen geschreven. Je kunt er met gemak een dik boek mee vullen. Die artikelen gingen veelal over de invloed die Misha Mengelberg op zijn hofje had. Volkomen terecht. De in 2017 overleden leider/pianist was een eenzaat die muziek voor zichzelf maakte én voor zijn geestverwanten, onder wie de musici van zijn ensemble. En als er dan ook nog mensen van buiten zijn kring naar luisterden, vond hij dat prima. Evengoed als er niemand luisterde.

Maakte ICP daar ‘musicians music’ mee, zoals dat zo mooi heet? Welnee, zijn klanken waren vanaf het begin onweerstaanbaar. De groep, die in 1967 werd opgericht, moest echter altoos tegen de stroom in roeien. Haar muziek werd in het begin, in de jaren zestig en – ook nog enigszins – in de jaren zeventig door het toenmalige luistervolk opgepikt en naar waarde genoten. Maar naarmate de keurigheid in de jaren daarna oprukte, werd het luistervolk ook ‘netter’ en ging de schoonheid van ICP ten onder aan de door de tijd verprutste en geconditioneerde oortjes.

Het is goed dat ICP na de dood van Misha Mengelberg is blijven voortbestaan. De kleine kern van muziekliefhebbers die zijn muziek naar waarde weet te schatten, is het waard. Dit jaar kwam een nieuwe cd uit, De Hondemepper, in november 2018 opgenomen in het Bimhuis. Het is de Instant Composers Pool, die hier samenwerkt met Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, op zijn best. Met het merendeel stukken van Misha Mengelberg en ook van diens vader Karel, van Tristan Honsinger, Duke Ellington en Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk en Misha Mengelbergs favoriete jazzcomponist/pianist Herbie Nichols.

Onnodig te zeggen dat De Hondemepper uitbundig luisterplezier oplevert. De samenwerking met Nieuw Amsterdams Peil – met Hoketus, de voorloper van dit ensemble al daterend van 1985 – biedt ICP oneindige mogelijkheden. Niet alleen in de verdubbeling van een aantal instrumenten, maar vooral door de afwijkende visie van NAP. Waardoor het kan gebeuren dat wanneer twee eigenzinnige geesten met elkaar in de slag gaan, er wonderbaarlijke dingen gebeuren. Dat is op De Hondemepper zeker ook het geval.

Voor wie ICP en Misha Mengelberg niet kent – zijn die mensen er nog? – is één stuk op De Hondemepper een meer dan aangename kennismaking: Dressoir van Mengelberg. Het is een suite die uit negen korte deeltjes bestaat. We kunnen niet nalaten die even bij naam te noemen: Tinnen rookset, Lepelvaasje, Trouwfoto, Theemuts, Naaimand, Spaarzegelboekje, Dominospel, Flanellen tafellaken (opgevouwen) en Koektrommel. Welke uitermate scherpzinnige geest zou al die kleinoden op een dressoir hebben zien staan? Juist ja, Misha Mengelberg. De muziek waarmee hij ze vorm geeft is navenant. Van can-can tot fanfare, roept u maar!

In Nederland is in die voornoemde roerige jaren zestig en zeventig een prachtige symbiose gegroeid tussen geïmproviseerde- en eigentijds gecomponeerde muziek. Inmiddels wereldwijd bekend. ICP is er een sprekend voorbeeld van, Hoketus, Orkest De Volharding en Ebony Band eveneens. Misha Mengelberg was een van de voormannen van deze opmerkelijke stroming. Opmerkelijk omdat deze richting geen grenzen kende, noch accepteerde. Of het erom gedaan is, is niet zo belangrijk, maar De Hondemepper is een zeldzaam mooi portret van Mengelbergs veelzijdigheid, die evenmin grenzen kende en accepteerde. En ook al kon Misha M. van de opnamen geen deel meer uitmaken, is dit album een majestueuze mijlpaal in het oeuvre van de Instant Composers Pool.

Laten we hopen dat het niet de laatste is. Al ziet het daar wel naar uit. Het Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten gaat de subsidie die ICP voor de komende Meerjarige Productiesubsidies 2021-2024 heeft aangevraagd (125.000 euro), niet toekennen. Daarmee verwijst zij Misha Mengelbergs erfenis voorlopig naar de vuilnisbak. Hoewel de beoordelende commissie vindt dat ICP voldoende kwaliteit heeft, mist zij de aanwezigheid van Mengelberg binnen het ensemble. Opvolger Guus Janssen ‘heeft niet hetzelfde muzikale overwicht dat voor de karakteristieke absurde momenten in de improvisaties zorgt’. Ja, dank je de koekoek. Janssen is niet Mengelberg en zo lijkt het of diens dood ook de doodsklap wordt voor ICP.

Zou die commissie naar De Hondemepper hebben geluisterd als deze cd ten tijde van de beoordelingen in haar bezit was geweest? En dan hebben bemerkt hoe Guus Janssen op zíjn manier de pianokruk bezet? Hoe hij Mengelbergs invloed op zíjn manier in zijn bijdragen aan het orkest heeft verwerkt? En hoe de andere bandleden van ICP zónder Misha Mengelbergs aanwezigheid de Instant Composers Pool nog bij elke noot naar een eigen hemelvaart voeren? Nee dus. RINUS VAN DER HEIJDEN