From the East Bay EXPRESS
THE ICP ORCHESTRA
At Mills College
Concert Hall, Oakland,
Sunday, September 10.
By Derk Richardson
If an earthquake had leveled the Mills
College Concert Hall last Sunday night,
the world would have lost one of its
premiere avant-garde ensembles, and the
East Bay would have bid good-bye to the
creative music scene as we know it. Of
the two hundred listeners present for
the Bay Area debut of Amsterdam's
pioneering ICP Orchestra, at least half
seemed to be musicians and/or presenters
on the local improv circuit. As it was,
both the building and the listeners
withstood the musical temblors generated
by the radical nine-piece band, but no
one was left unshaken.
At the epicenter of the raucous turmoil
(relieved by moments of
chamber-music-like delicacy) was
58-year-old Dutch drummer Han Bennink,
who cofounded the ICP-Instant Composers
Pool-in 1967 with 65-year-old Kiev-born
pianist Misha Mengelberg. With his small
drum kit set up in the middle of the
stage, the athletic, shorts-clad Bennink
pulled out all his percussive tricks:
tossing cymbals on the ground, resting
his foot on or throwing a towel over his
tom-toms, beating on a board. To his
left, trombonist Wolter Wierbos,
trumpeter Thomas Heberer,
clarinetist/tenor saxophonist Ab Baars,
and clarinetist/alto saxophonist Michael
Moore offered strange harmonies and a
variety of logic-stretching solos. To
his near right, the string section of
violinist Mary Oliver, cellist Tristan
Honsinger, and bassist Ernst Glerum
provided sometimes velvety, sometimes
scratchy textures not typically
associated with jazz; and to Bennink's
extreme right, Mengelberg hunched over a
grand piano and plunked out jagged
chords and runs in a style owing to both
Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor.
In two 45-minute sets, the orchestra
tangentially touched base with modern
classical composition (a new Honsinger
work and a Charles Ives piece), swing
and bebop (Ellington-Tizol's "Caravan"
and Herbie Nichols' "Spinning Song"),
Afro-calypso (a segment of the ICPO's
own "Jubilee Varia" suite), and much
more. Born from the same collectivist
aesthetic that spawned Chicago's
Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM), the ICP
(along with the more overtly comic
Willem Breuker Kollektief) epitomize
what critic Kevin Whitehead has called
"New Dutch Swing." But going back to
1964, when Bennink and Mengelberg
recorded with Eric Dolphy, its members
have always been rigorously
internationalist in their
collaborations, and their borderless
music has consistently transcended
provincialism. The orchestra may never
rock the world of commercial music,
it's capable of bringing down the house
every time it plays.
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