Album Review: Komen & Gaan (2021), by Brian Morton, Downbeat

It’s tempting to say of this one that “you really had to be there.” An Instant Composers Pool concert has always been more of a happening than a regular gig, and this one finds a relatively unusual lineup (no Tristan Honsinger, no Tobias Delius) taking over a small café/restaurant/gallery in the north of Holland and making music not just in the venue, but with the venue. Players move from room to room, hence the “coming and going” title. Le Brocope’s dogs get involved. There’s a pianola on the premises, which gets an airing. Huge fun is had by all. It’s easy, though, to underestimate the seriousness of what ICP does, and its deep connections with the jazz tradition. The ringmaster is Han Bennink, whose rhythmic intelligence is often seconded (by critics, if not by Bennink himself) to his appetite for clowning. There’s a respectful nod on “Kroket” to the late Misha Mengelberg, best known outside Europe for having recorded with Eric Dolphy, who was Lord of Misrule in Dutch improvised music for decades. He’s missed, but the baton has been passed on. (4 out of 5 stars)—Brian Morton

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: Pech Onderweg (2018) by Duck Baker, THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD.

There is no doubt that Misha Mengelberg was an excellent, even a great, jazz pianist. He was already close to that when he recorded with Eric Dolphy at the end of the latter’s career and he certainly was there by the mid ‘60s, when he was leading a quartet with alto saxophonist Piet Noordijk and drummer Han Bennink. But Mengelberg, like Bennink, was a musical maverick rarely content as a performer to play ‘just’ jazz and this is reflected on the solo record Pech Onderweg, recorded 40 years ago and recently reissued on vinyl. He mixes in elements of almost every piano style you can name: classical music, boogie-woogie, ragtime, schmaltzy pop music and occasional percussive banging and vocalizing that sounds drunken, if not deranged. The first of the “Pech Onderweg” pieces is a montage during which the pianist evokes many of the elements cited above, in stream-of-consciousness fashion (the title translates along the lines of “troubles coming on the road”). During “Pech Onderweg 2”, Mengelberg introduces passages of boogie-woogie that transmogrify into insistent banging discords repeated long enough to be nearly annoying, then in a flash he’s back playing the insistent boogie figures. This may sound like a merely clever device, but Mengelberg brings it off so well it succeeds in being much more. Listening to “Banana Suite”, which takes up much of Side B, one wonders whether Charles Ives would have sounded like Mengelberg had he been born 60 years later and been Dutch. Yes, Mengelberg is edgier, as was the world he lived in, but, like Ives, found many things he could revere, even as he lampooned a lot of them. We hear something a bit different on “Wie Jeuk Heeft, Als Moet Men” though; this is an early version of a song the ICP Orchestra would perform many times in later years, called, “De Sprong, O Romantiek der Hazen”, but the solo version involves a gentler approach, similar to that employed by Monk on pop songs like “There’s Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie”. This is sentimentality that is wise to the world, evincing a vulnerability that’s the more open for not being naïve and it may be the high point of this rewarding recital.