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dOeK Festival of Improvised Music #7 – a report by Kevin Whitehead
Stichting dOeK was founded as a co-operative of emerging and mid-career improvising artists. One of their stated aims is “to support new musical initiatives,” not least through an annual festival. The 2008 dOeK Festival was a transitional edition: one co-founder was departing the organization (Tobias Delius, who’s moved to Berlin) and a new musician came aboard, from the “fourth generation” of Dutch improvisers, Oscar Jan Hoogland, who like his older colleagues is a self-starter. (He runs his own improvising concert series.)
Before giving an account of the individual concerts, we might note some common themes in this year’s two-day fest: international bands (every group had at least one person born abroad); a continuing commitment to improvisation as a means to make music, across a stylistic spectrum including jazz, instant composing, folk music, new classical and electronica; a rethinking of traditional ensembles roles, sometimes coupled with so-called extended techniques; a profusion of excellent drummers, established and new.
Oscar Jan Hoogland kicked off the program, Friday 19 December in the Bimhuis, with the trio eke: Brazilian transplant Yedo Gibson on reeds, Gerri Jäger on drums, Hoogland on clavichord, the baroque-era keyboard that allows for key-controlled pitch-bends. But Hoogland’s clavichord is amplified, tuned an octave low, and used to raunchy effect; sometimes he manipulated amplifier feedback like a guitarist. His fellow players also made less than obvious choices. Gibson often made pivotal use of percussive notes popped out of the horn in the manner of a 1920s “gaspipe” clarinetist; at times, these precisely placed rhythms/pitches made him the band’s de facto drummer, if at that moment Jäger elected not to keep time, being engaged with rustling textures.
The trio’s loosely organized pieces were distinct from one another, because the players isolate certain strategies on individual pieces. On one number, Hoogland barely touched the keys, using the clavichord as a resonating box to amplify small objects, while Gibson played pressurized notes on soprano with pads closed, and the bell muffled against his calf. On another, Hoogland coaxed sounds from cat’s yowl to video game sound effects from his keyboard. Jäger touched on but didn’t overdo the rock beats; the drummer kept the time open.
If eke’s sound might suggest an improvising rock band, the Ed Prubufu Four—Frances’s Christian Pruvost on trumpet, England’s John Edwards on bass, Australia-born Berliner Tony Buck on drums, and Dutch dOeKer Cor Fuhler on piano—was at times an improvising chamber ensemble. It sound is noisy and delicate at once, with subtle internal voicings. The players share an interest in non-standard techniques; Buck like eke’s Jäger finds myriad ways to get the drums vibrating without striking them with a stick (though he might do that too). Edwards is a master of wolfish, dissonant bowed tones and textures.
For Cor Fuhler, depressing the keys is but one way to get piano strings to sound. He is a master of applying mechanical and electronic drivers directly to the strings (whirring fans, a guitarist’s electromagnetic E-bows), for humming and shimmering textures. At one point in the Four’s improvised set, the band sounded like a groaning sawmill, but then soft tremolo chords emerged from the piano keyboard, like sunlight breaking through factory smoke.
The set’s show stopper: Pruvost stretched a rubber band between his mouthpiece and his mouth, and plucked it like a one-stringed instrument, using the body of the horn as a resonating chamber. It was typical of this set in that you might mistake it for a gimmick, until hearing the variety of sounds he coaxes from it.
Cornetist Eric Boeren has often looked to the American composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s music to inspire his own distinctive projects (and ear-worm tunes): he’ll take an idea of Coleman’s and run with it along his own path. So it was with Eric Boeren’s Seven, which builds on Ornette’s “double bands”: groups with a double rhythm section, in this case dOeK’s Wilbert de Joode and Australian visitor Mike Majkovski on basses, and Holland’s Han Bennink and Germany’s Paul Lovens on drums—which means the band had two of the best drummers Europe has produced. (Completing the septet were multi-reedists Delius and Michael Moore on saxes and clarinets.)
Where Coleman keeps his players doubled up and densely layered, Boeren heard that as but one option; his set was an exercise in recombination. At various points one might hear: a (remarkably uncompetitive) drum duo; an alto and tenor saxophone interlude; trumpet booted along by riffing saxes; Lovens plus two basses; a Boeren/Bennink duet; Moore’s alto backed by four rhythm players (with explosions erupting unpredictably out of the polyrhythmic accompaniment); the basses plucking or bowing in unison, or tugging against each other like antagonists. The sonic landscape shifted constantly, the combinations punctuated and sparked by Boeren’s catchy melodies—a deft balance of spontaneous and pre-plotted elements.
Saturday afternoon’s well-attended children’s show was presented by Kidsamonium, whose principal figures include drummer Tom Bancroft (playing “the King,” looking like the fat Elvis Presley in a fright wig) and three very strong brass players: trumpeter Claude Deppa and tubist Oren Marshall, both coming from the UK, and trombonist Joost Buis (who also played “the Dutch tourist”). Their presentation was a bit long and shaggy, with about two too many audience participation bits, but it seemed to hold kids’ interest, and Bancroft found clever ways to make it spontaneously bilingual (by, say, pulling an adult from the front row to translate a key phrases or two—and leaving room for whispering parents to fill in details). Kidsamonium does a very good job of making the concept of improvised music accessible to children. It also had plenty of low silly humor—and everyone went home with a kazoo.
One bit, performed partway down the staircase outside the Bimhuis, was a secret introduction to three-chord harmony: a musician or volunteer kid hopping from one to another of three rings taped to the floor cued/controlled/conducted the band’s choice of harmonies. (Stand within two rings, get a polychord.) It’s surely the only show interrupted by a band of free-jazz playing children, marching through the auditorium while dressed as giant chickens.
Saturday night, Wilbert de Joode’s initiative brought three worlds of improvisation together, drafting Fuhler on small electronics and amplified objects, and classical new music improviser Frances-Marie Uitti for the improvising trio ScrutinizerS. De Joode and Uitti are both virtuosos of attack; the bassist’s plosive pizzicato has the force of a percussion instrument; Uitti has made a specialty of using two bows, in one or both hands, for a dense arco sound. Although from different ends of the improvising spectrum, they are close and responsive listeners. One came away feeling their mutual respect.
Fuhler on improvised electronica might gravitate toward a squealy high register above the low-sounding strings, while reinforcing the bassist and cellist’s elastic sonic conception. The sonorities could be harsh, but there were melodic moments too, often escaping the cello in little bursts—as if the no-rules context freed up this specialist in complex composed music to indulge her tonal side.
Usually, trombonist Wolter Wierbos’s Wollo’s World—the umbrella name for his ad hoc units—is an improvised meeting. But this year as he did once before, he designed a setting for another musician. In this case it was the duo Boi Akih: guitarist Niels Brouwer and Dutch-Moluccan singer Monica Akihary, performing numbers from their repertoire. As their orchestrator for a night, Wierbos added drummer Michael Vatcher, whose bass-drum beats were the heart of the set, and Layba Diawara from Guinea on the big, plucked-string kora or xylophone-like balofon.
Here, on a festival heavy with abstract improvising, Wierbos demonstrated how diverse influences converge: how Brouwer’s percussive, repetitive acoustic guitar figures parallel or echo West African kora and highlife guitar patterns, incidentally creating a richer backdrop for the singer’s undulating lines. A Moluccan background gives a singer new possibilities for scat syllables. In solidarity with Akihary, and consistent with his commitment to improvising, Wierbos reserved a spontaneous role for himself, as ‘second singer.’ He made particularly good use of Harmon mute with the stem removed, manipulating his palm over the stem-hole for vocalized wah-wahs. The set was an effective, offbeat close to a rich two days of music. Again, improvisation glued different worlds together.
Saturday’s opening set was the valedictory performance by departing dOeK member Tobias Delius. His D/L/T, a trio of Berliners, was so cohesive it was hard to believe this was their first gig, let alone one played under difficult circumstances: bassist Clayton Thomas’s bows had been lost in transit, and he had to make do with borrowed ones. That didn’t prevent him from getting all manner of sweet and scrapey textures. His rhythmically incisive playing might recall Abdul Wadud’s rhythm-guitar like cello in the ’70s—Thomas using an idea not so much new as rediscovered or reinvented.
But D/L/T’s drummer, new to Amsterdam, was the discovery of the festival. You can hear that 24 year old Christian Lillinger comes from the same tradition as Bennink and Lovens; he likes cracked cymbals and crackling metallic sounds, like a so-called ‘junk percussionist,’ but he’ll also swing like a jazz drummer, playing flexible ride patterns on a crunchy-sounding cracked cymbal. The three players, again, are close listeners able to turn the music around quickly, but with subtlety—they maneuver through fast but plausible transitions rather than postmodern jumpcuts.
There is insufficient space here to discuss Delius’s extraordinary lyricism, restless rhythmic energy, and a pliant, plush saxophone sound that references the best of the 1930s and 1960s in a contemporary voice. Or his ability to structure sets on the fly with shifts in texture or time feel, and to make improvised tenor saxophone statements that bear the load of a composed melody
Delius is the first alumnus of dOeK, the first member to depart the co-op, which makes him a good case for examining the dOeK esthetic/legacy. These players first of all share a smart curiosity about and respect for past masters including figures sometimes overlooked (for example Lucky Thompson, in Delius’s case). Like a good dOeKer, Delius loves to swing but doesn’t insist on doing it all the time, because that just limits one’s options. That’s one reason these festival bands have fascinating rhythm sections: in a familiar/classic Dutch way, they appropriate everything they love about jazz without feeling any compunction to be historically accurate or loyal to a single style. They step into and outside of swingtime, easily and often.
But the dOeK musicians are about more than a fluid concept. They are all concerned with the quality of their sound—you hear it in Wierbos’s and Boeren’s many brass voices (like great radio actors), in all the ways de Joode and Fuhler and Hoogland have devised to coax a long metal string into giving up all the sounds latent within, hiding in plain sight in the overtone series.
Seeing Delius breaking in his young Berlin colleagues on the bandstand, and seeing Stichting dOeK welcoming a player from a younger generation (Wilbert was born in 1955, Oscar Jan in 1983), is to see how the Dutch/dOeK outlook and esthetic fan out, in time and geographical space. The five players who first banded together are now well known to audiences in Berlin, Chicago, Melbourne and Vancouver, known for doing what they do on this festival: showing how improvisers with the ideals and sterling technique can fit in with anybody from anywhere.
Kevin Whitehead
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