ICP in San Francisco

[Peterdubya]

I saw the ICP last night at the Great American Music Hall, and what a great show it was.

This was probably only the 5th or 6th time I've seen tthe band, but it was easily the finest performance I've seen from them.

None of the titles were announced, but the show started with a short duet with Michael Moore and Misha Mengleberg (clarinet and piano), then the whole band came out. The next piece was, somewhat short, but was really nice, angular with a bit of swing.

Han Bennik started the next tune, and he was starting to burn, the piece I found out later was written by the trumpet player, Tomas Herberer, and it was really nice. Sounded a bit Mingus like, Ab Baars was featured as was Walter Wierbos (sp?).

The next piece was pretty exciting, they broke into some duos, but the horns started riffing behind the soloists.

Finally, they went into Perdido, which was just fantastic. The band swungg so hard, and took a lot of chances.

there were many great moments in the show, each member had at least one shining moment.

They are heading east, hitting Ann Arbor, Texas, chicago... I hope some of you can catch them.

-Peter

[BFrank]

Wish I had gone. After reading this review in the NY Times last week, I was seriously considering it. Sounds like a great show.

+++



March 23, 2006
Jazz Review
ICP Orchestra's Experimental Jazz Swings at Tonic
By NATE CHINEN

For the first 10 minutes of the ICP Orchestra's early set at Tonic on Tuesday night, the pianist Misha Mengelberg and the drummer Han Bennink indulged in an improvised duet, something they have been doing together for roughly 40 years. Their styles were complementary, if a bit bizarrely so. Mr. Mengelberg gave the impression of a man groping for the doorknob in a darkened room. Mr. Bennink occupied the same room, but with a different temperament, impatiently and heedlessly knocking things around.

That somewhat comedic contrast has always characterized Mr. Mengelberg's rapport with Mr. Bennink; as an exploratory pair, they have as much in common with Laurel and Hardy as with Lewis and Clark. In 1967, they applied their collective energies to the formation of a Dutch avant-garde movement called the Instant Composers Pool, or ICP. (A third founding member, the multireedist Willem Breuker, left the organization within its first decade.) The ICP Orchestra, a flagship in a small fleet of like-minded projects, took shape in the early 1980's, with Mr. Mengelberg and Mr. Bennink at the helm.

The 10-piece group still adheres to Mr. Mengelberg's mandate of "instant composition," a term that's best understood in opposition to the formless expanse of free jazz. At Tonic, most of the music was spontaneously conceived, and a good deal of it bore the hallmarks of free-form experimentalism: clarinet squeals, saxophone shrieks, twitchy arco bowing on viola, cello and double bass. But there were signposts embedded in the music. Coordinated ensemble figures cropped up unexpectedly, hinting at a secret discipline and a fondness for bygone jazz styles.

Swing — the jump-band variety, not the polished orchestral fare — was a shadow presence throughout the evening. On one tune, horns and reeds attacked a scrap of melody with ramshackle exuberance, while Mr. Bennink's bass drum thumped four beats to the bar. Mr. Mengelberg, soloing with the rhythm section, reached for a modern sensibility; he sounded more than a little like the Duke Ellington of "Money Jungle," a 1962 outing with Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums.

Every other member of the orchestra had at least one solo turn; a few, like the clarinetist Michael Moore, the cellist Tristan Honsinger and the trumpeter Thomas Heberer, made multiple contributions. The most engagingly emphatic was Tobias Delius, playing tenor saxophone on a set-closer; he began in the hard rhythmic style of Illinois Jacquet, and gradually pushed toward catharsis.

Mr. Delius was essentially riding the wave of the ensemble's propulsion, which transported the song from crisp Ellingtonian swing (circa 1930's) into cacophonous group improvisation (late 60's). In that moment, and on an equally immersive rumba, ICP lived up to its name; not just the first two letters, but also P, for "pool."

[mke]

The LA Times's Don Heckman doesn't really agree:

Group's efforts at spontaneity don't guarantee combustion
By Don Heckman
Special to The Times

March 27, 2006

The story "The Emperor's New Clothes" kept coming to mind Friday night during the performance by the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra at Club Tropical. The 10-piece Dutch musical collective led by pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink has gone through various incarnations over three decades in pursuit of the wide-open combination of freedom and spontaneity implied by the ensemble's name.

But freedom, despite Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" line, is more than "just another word for nothin' left to lose." Especially when it comes to improvisation. And the ICP players' performance underscored that there's a great deal left to lose by anyone who approaches improvisation as a license for the creation of what's little more than musical chaos.

The ICP's opening set began as a pair of pieces featuring small ensembles — piano, tenor saxophone and cello, followed by trombone, clarinet and violin. Each juxtaposed the sort of pointillistic bursts and smears of sound often associated — sometimes jokingly — with contemporary concert music against dissonant, apparently composed, tonal clusters. A few showcase solos took off into unrelated, uninteresting musical space.

Several pieces (no titles were provided) took a more mainstream tack, starkly exposing the ensemble's limited formal jazz skills. One, suggesting unfulfilled Thelonious Monk ambitions, cranked forward stiffly, its herky-jerky rhythms revealing no real sense of dynamic swing. Another piece began with a humorous drum-roll count-off before proceeding into a lead-footed jazz march. A third displayed attractive compositional qualities, phrases tossed back and forth among the players.

Much of what the ICP played dated stylistically to American avant-garde jazz of the '60s. But although Mengelberg and Bennink are participatory veterans of the decade, having played with many of the American players who were surfacing in Europe at the time, this ensemble lacks comparable imagination, musicality and articulateness.

Give the ICP points for effort — jazz freedom, spontaneity and instant composition deserve continuing exploration — and a much lower grade for accomplishment.
(http://www.calendarlive.com/music/ja...y?coll=cl-jazz)

[Jon Abbey]

Originally Posted by mke

And the ICP players' performance underscored that there's a great deal left to lose by anyone who approaches improvisation as a license for the creation of what's little more than musical chaos.

it's pretty sad that there are still critics at major papers who are so clueless about an area of music that's been around for close to forty years now. ah, well.

[Surfer]

That's horrible review. Quoting "Me and Bobby McGee"?!?!?!

Man, I wanted to go, completely spaced on that one. What a bonehead I am.

But it was pouring last night so it would have been tough to get up there.

[Dan G]

Heckman obviously has no idea who the guys in ICP are, or he wouldn;t be saying they have "limited formal jazz skills". Moore? Bennink? Mengelberg?...nope, no jazz players there.

Chinen at least pretty much got it, though I disagree with his third paragraph about the instant composing. Misha pretty much gave that up with this band. I'm not sure what he thinks the "signposts" and "coordinated ensemble figures" the "cropped up unexpectedly" are, but I've seen this band several times and it's a pretty structured affair I think. Yes, there's lots of freedom in the solos, but the level of control that Misha maintains is pretty high. Not scripted to the extent that Breuker has moved on to, but still pretty much based on compositions.