Scene: Amsterdam Avant-Garde, 1980s-2000s
Amsterdam – Holland’s cultural capital and a European crossroads – has a jazz/improvising/composition scene unlike any other. Music has flowed freely across genre lines for so long, conceptual hybrids are second nature. So the canal city gives us classical composers like Louis Andriessen, influenced by minimalist repetitions and boogie-woogie syncopations, and political punks the Ex, who work with Ethiopian elders and acoustic improvisers whose rude sounds reinforce their own. The Amsterdam String Trio mixed chamber music with free-wheeling game pieces; South African exile Sean Bergin’s MOB, a ten piece band of A’dam all-stars, play his catchy melodies influenced by Durban street music. American expats Michael Moore and Michael Vatcher play music from around the world in Available Jelly, and explored the back pages of Bob Dylan’s songbook in the co-op Jewels and Binoculars. Madcap drummer Han Bennink pushes the heck out of any combo, trio or duo lucky or accomplished or strong enough to snag him.
It mostly started in the 1960s, when Bennink, pianist Misha Mengelberg and reedman Willem Breuker founded the Instant Composers Pool, one of the flagship groups of what became known as “European improvised music.” In search of their own identities apart from American jazz, German and English players rejected ca-ching-a-ching swing as an option, but Mengelberg and Bennink kept the swing in. It helped that the drummer dug great American forebears like Kenny Clarke, and conservatory composer Mengelberg championed the compositions of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols in Holland, before they caught on in the States. Misha’s jazz band/chamber ensemble the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra inspired similar midsize outfits, like Bergin’s MOB and trombonist Joost Buis’s Astronotes.
Buis is among the next generation of players, who made Dutch improvising a real tradition; others include cornetist Eric Boeren (whose influences include Ornette Coleman’s flexible blues and the tang of Peruvian brass bands) and saxophonist Benjamin Herman, a devotee of Mengelberg tunes, Eddie Harris’s jazz-funk, and pop-culture ephemera from B-movies to the Hawaii Five-O theme. (And there’s a generation behind them.) The constants amidst all the diversity: brains, superb playing, and a sense of fun bordering on absurdity.
