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Dutch pianist loves our sushi
By Chris Wong
Members of Amsterdam-based Instant Composers Pool (ICP) Orchestra have been described as "zany, wacky Dutchmen." I got a taste of their eccentricities when connecting with ICP's Misha Mengelberg.
I reached Mengelberg at his Amsterdam home at a pre-arranged time, but the pianist asked me to call back because he had to go "shopping." During my interview with the 67-year-old the next day, I asked whether he's fond of Vancouver. I thought Mengelberg would say he's enamoured with our city because of the music community's openness to adventurous music. Instead, he said: "I like Vancouver very much, not in the least because of the very excellent Japanese food that is available there. It's one of the last places on earth where you can find really good fish."
I didn't expect to hear that, but Mengelberg has made a compelling career out of doing the unexpected, with ICP and in his solo work.
Mengelberg, drummer Han Bennink and saxophonist Willem Breuker co-founded ICP in 1967. While the personnel has frequently changed-Breuker left in 1973 and went on to form his Kollektief-the orchestra has developed an international reputation as an audacious, theatrical and utterly creative group that can freely improvise and read dissonant and melodic written material from ICP's singular repertoire.
ICP, performing March 21 at Norman Rothstein Theatre in the JCC, now consists of Mengelberg, Bennink, clarinettist and alto saxophonist Michael Moore, clarinettist and tenor saxophonist Ab Baars, tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, trumpeter Thomas Heberer, viola player and violinist Mary Oliver, cellist Tristan Honsinger and contrabassist Ernst Glerum.
Mengelberg said there is no leader per se. "They all have the possibility, the liberty to do their own things, make their own plans with the orchestra." So the band is a democracy? "It sounds like a democracy but I don't think it is. I think it has more of anarchism than democracy."
Regarding his long association with the irrepressible Bennink, who is adored by Vancouver audiences, Mengelberg said their relationship is one of "profound respect mixed with angst." Angst? "I hate him, partly," he said, with a healthy dose of irony.
As for the tunes ICP will play on a North American tour that just started, Mengelberg said: "We are still very much involved in total improvisation, so there is a kind of repertoire that has a more or less spontaneous character." Mengelberg added that he was planning to arrange Thelonious Monk's "Played Twice" for the tour.
Monk was an important influence on the Kiev-born Mengelberg.
The Dutch master (along with Bennink) also played on the last recording of another American jazz icon, Eric Dolphy. But Mengelberg became a leading player in Amsterdam's creative music scene by developing an engaging style that's distinct from the American jazz tradition. "For me it was important to dig out possibilities of European music as material for improvisation and leave the concepts of swing music, bebop and all that. I wanted to have a kind of fresh start in a way. We did that to a certain extent I think."
These days, American and European musicians seem closer together in sound and spirit. Mengelberg's superb Four in One (on the Vancouver-based Songlines label), with Bennink, trumpeter Dave Douglas and bassist Brad Jones, affirmed that trans-Atlantic affinity. "I play some jazz from time to time," said Mengelberg about collaborating with artists like Douglas. "That's still fun. You could say it [jazz] is almost a corpse. But it's nice to dance with the corpse."
Does ICP, which has interpreted works by Monk, Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols, play jazz? "The moment you call it something, it loses its faculty to be dangerous. One of the aspects of doing something interesting is that it should not be jeopardized in some way by a formal attitude or traditional attitude, anything that is killing the stuff."
At the same time it would be inaccurate to portray Mengelberg and ICP, which easily shifts between chaos and calm, as being resolutely anti-tradition. "I have made a lot of pieces that you could see as traditional pieces with chord changes that reappear and things like that. I'm not completely into the destruction of all that."
Mengelberg summed up his approach this way: "It doesn't matter if it's improvised music or music from a score. There are only two categories of music: interesting music and uninteresting music. That's all."
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