Guus Janssen and his Orchestra

Dancing Series
Geestgronen

Leo Cupyers
Zeeland Suite & Johnny Rep Suite
Bvhaast

By Ken Waxman
May 30, 2005

Mythmaking abounds in improvised music – as much in European free sounds as in American jazz – after all, this genre has been the romantic music for more than 100 years.

Sadly, empirical research can reinterpret many of those fables as efficiently as it demythologizes other subjects. This brings up the tales of anarchistic Dutch jazz/free music. Since the majority of jazz fans – i.e. North Americans – didn’t start to pay attention to the Netherlands until late 1980s, it appeared as if the mixture of zany humor and serious musicianship that characterized high-profile aggregations like the ICP Orchestra and Willem Breuker’s Kollektief (WBK) was a universal concept. Later bands lead by composers like pianists Guus Janssen and Michel Braam seemed to confirm this.

In truth New Dutch Swing, as some call it, was the result of a painstaking musical process that matched the natural Calvinism of the Netherlands with provocations from American Free Jazz and the 1960s’ New Left. Simultaneously, Europeans had to evolve past their American musical models and sound pastiches to spin political instigation, Energy Music and 20th Century, so-called classical music into something original.

This involved a lot more than a single “Eureka!” moment, and you can trace this hit-and-miss evolution on the two CDs reissued here. Pianist Leo Cupyers, one of Breuker’s closest initial associates and co-founder of the Bvhaast label, reflects the growth pains of this maturing style in two landmark suites, recorded in 1974 and 1977 by similarly constituted septets. A generation younger, Janssen’s Dancing Series, recorded with an 11-piece ensemble in 1988, shows how this bravura procedure evolved and eventually intersected with assorted other sounds.

Just as the orchestral voicings of Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk hung over early New Thing advances, so, in a way, both these sessions pay homage to the ideas of both the WBK and the ICP’s chief conceptualizer Misha Mengelberg. Until he had a spat with Breuker, Cupyers was part of the WBK from its conception until 1979. Thus it’s no surprise to find Breuker, performing sideman duties featured on all tracks but two on the CD. Janssen, who has developed a parallel career as a so-called serious composer in the Netherlands, first had his talent confirmed by Mengelberg, with whom he studied in the 1970s. In fact, with its mixture of styles and jump cuts from one genre to another Dancing Series sound a bit like Mengelberg’s and Breuker’s earlier, more anarchistic compositions, not to mention John Zorn’s POMO pastiches, recorded around the same time.

From 1974, Johnny Rep Suite, the earliest tracks here, finds Cupyers leading a mostly WBK crew with the one ringer tenor saxophonist Hans Dulfer – Candy’s father – who doesn’t solo at all. The four tunes include a soccer anthem, driven by drummer Rob Verdurmen, plus other pieces that have more in common with American Free Jazz than the composer probably realized at the time. Most instructive are “Floris & Rosa”, “Kirk” and “Rank Jump” which join irregularly vibrated energy explosions with call-and-response reed lines and vocal screams. Mixing a faint flamenco beat and what sounds like “The Volga Boatman” into his solo on the second number, the pianist has to put up with a heavy drum backbeat and Breuker trying to emulate Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing two saxes at once. Sadly, unlike Kirk, he merely plays the theme on one sax and honks with the other.

Two humans playing one sax each – Breuker and altoist Piet Noordijk – fire trilling vamps and buzzing tongue flutters in broken octaves at one another on “Rank Jump”. Together they sound like what would have resulted if Ornette Coleman and one of his primary duplicators, say Byron Allen, had recorded together. Meanwhile Dufler and trombonist Willem van Manen expel the Netherlands’ version of circus sounds.

Only Cuypers is clearly his own man, with a Monkish piano exploration that includes pedal pumping and speed skating over the keys. A concluding duo with the drummer confirms this individualism, as he matches Verdurmen’s crashing cymbals with prepared piano-like action, soundboard string scratches and drumming on his instrument’s sides.

More audacious is the nine-part Zeeland Suite recorded three years later with mostly the same cast. The only changes are Martin van Duynhoven in for Verdurmen; Noordijk and Dulfer replaced by Bob Driessen on soprano, alto and baritone saxophones; and South African Harry Miller adding his bass to that of longtime WBK bull fiddler Arjen Gorter.

Both bassists are showcased on “Two bass shit” (sic), though the constantly hardening walking bass lines border on the Swing Era as much as the bebop tune parodied in the title. Cuypers’ piano voicing, set against the horn vamps brings up memories of Count Basie, not Bud Powell.

Enjoyable on the whole, Zeeland Suite’s one shortcoming is its constant musical shifts. A piece like “Memories” for instance, ratchets from mid-tempo Swing with Breuker’s bass clarinet in the lead, to a Phil Whitemanesque sweet ballad, to a finale that finds the reedist mocking the excesses of Energy Music, fragmenting his solo with body tube trilling and scratchy growls.

Intentional or not “Something else” cross breeds slick movie studio jazz with a feature for the ‘bone man where he mixes bebop’s speed with pre-modern coloration. Despite its title as well, “Joplin” is more Boogie than Ragtime with the pianist twisting out two handed bass lines and one of the saxmen – likely Breuker – using a dike-wide vibrato in a frenzied Illinois Jacquet homage. “No plooi at all Blues” is a cocktail lounge blues with the pianist’s licks more Floyd Cramer than Big Maceo Merriweather. Supplemental, almost-corny plunger tones from van Manen and a soprano sax solo that conjures up a vision of Sidney Bechet in a Nudie cowboy suit are added on top.

Then there’s the take on the classics – a long-standing WBK jape – entitled “Bach II and Bach I”. This gives the pianist scope to burlesque Baroque inventions and, before the sped-up tune ends with a contrapuntal dissolve, both soprano saxists build fruity glissandi to a double-tongued line mid-way between “Rhapsody in Blue” and a whine.

Even so, Cuypers’ own compositions – like Mengelberg’s and Breuker’s congruent attempts – sometimes end up more like Frankenstein’s monster than breakthrough experiments. But you can certainly praise him for musical audacity. By the time Dancing Series was recorded a decade later, POMO pastiche was expected as a matter of course from advanced bands from the Netherlands. In his case then, it’s a tribute to Janssen that some of his pieces sound as original as they do.

Using an expanded palate, the pianist has four orchestral sections at his disposal. Trumpeter Herb Robertson, trombonist Wolter Wierbos and hornist Vincent Chancey made up the brass section. Ab Baars on soprano and tenor saxophones and clarinet plus alto saxophonist Paul Termos are the reeds. Violist Maurice Horsthuis, cellist Ernst Reijseger and bassist Raoul van der Weide are the string contingent. Added are former ProgRocker Jacques Palinckx on guitar and Janssen’s brother Wim on percussion.

Janssen’s compositions also apportion more solo space than WBK or ICP numbers do, and the trombonist and alto saxist make the most of it. Best-know for his work with the ICP, Wierbos brings a distinctive primitivist-modern style to his outings. While Termos (1952-2003), who died of pancreatic cancer, was a longtime associate of Janssen, he’s mainly known as a notated chamber composer. Here, nonetheless, he plays whatever part is necessary to elevate the tune.

Consider and contrast “JoJo Jive” and “Mambo” for instance. On the former, the 11-pieces get a polyphonic sound not unlike Duke Ellington’s early Jungle band, most obviously borne on Wierbos’ tailgating trombone and in Baars’ spiky solos. Even though there’s a similarity between this tune and “East St. Louis Toodle-oo”, Janssen himself –like his mentor Mengelberg – solos with more modernist Monk-Nichols inflections, themselves extensions of Ellingtonia. Complementing these piles of ringing reed cadences and two-handed, flashing arpeggios are Termos’ alto – sounding like a florid and smooth Johnny Hodges – until he too initiates reed squirts and duck quacks.

Before the horse whinnying trombone coda, the entire horn section vamps, van der Weide slaps his bass like Pops Foster, the drummer produces heavy bass drum accents and snare tap dances, while the pianist breaks up the time.

If this piece sounds like Paul Whiteman at his loosest – an admitted influence on Cupyers and Breuker as well – then “Mambo” could be right out of Perez Prado’s book. With Termos coming on like the lead player with Machito and Wim Janssen hitting his cowbell and applying friction to other Latin percussion, the rest of band vocalizes Indian war whoops – and ersatz Spanish interjections.

On top of a shifting rhythm, Termos extends his solo in double-time. Of course the rub and rattle of the percussion and the vamping call-and-response in double or triple counterpoint from the sections don’t mask the tune’s POMO characteristics. Janssen for one, melds allegro rhythmic vibrations and a right-handed, Latinesque melody that’s as Monkish as it is montuno. Leaping gnome-like over the keys, he pumps the beat more rapidly, racing along the keys from the very highest level to the lowest.

Although at almost 12½ minutes, the performance is overlong, Janssen maintains excitement in its penultimate minutes by banging conga-like on the wood of the piano’s back and bottom frame, soundboard and trusses, an – emulated? – technique favored by Cuypers as well. Finale is a thematic reprise by the pianist followed by rest of band, climaxed with a high-pitched flourish from all concerned.

Elsewhere the orchestrations are organized to produce versions of everything from a weaving fox trot to two versions of punk rockers’ leaping pogo dance, with most tunes the musical equivalents of cinematic film cuts, replete with many false climaxes. Janssen also isn’t afraid to expose other band members’ talents, often playing off different sections and pressing contrapuntal lines against one another. Palinckx’s distorted flanging has as much prominence at one point as the Horsthuis-lead collated strings – sounding out a legato melody – do at another. Former Arkestra-member Chancey has scope for his burnished tone, but most of the other oral oscillations include reed and brass mouthpiece kisses, braying trombone timbres, trumpet triplets and quaking reed lines.

To boot, the pianist, whose own output includes knuckle-dusting high frequency action, isn’t averse to compositionally exploiting the false fingering and ghosts tones of the horns as well as the sul tasto, sul ponticello and just plain instrument rib and belly scratching actions of his string players.

In hindsight, though, Dancing Series’ weakness is that by 1988 these pastiches were usually predictable in most Netherlands’ improv sessions, with Cuypers’ hit-and-miss creations replaced by POMO professionalism. Perhaps that why younger Dutch players are now exploring pure swing, electronica and formal composition.

Still both these discs are valuable souvenirs of – and contain memorable sounds from – two specifically historical musical times and places.

May 30, 2005

Willem Breuker Kollektief

With Strings Attached
Bvhaast

i compani
Fellini
icdisc.nl

By Ken Waxman
February 7, 2005

Tributes, recreations and interpretations appear to fascinate advanced improvised musicians in the Netherlands even more so than in other places. Part of the reason is that instead of numberless CDs dedicated to Miles, Monk and Ellington, Dutch jazz and improv players and composers extend their accolades to other spheres.

Saxophonist Bo van de Graaf for one, has made the cornerstone of his work with the i compani band, multi-media tributes to Italian director Frederico Fellini and Nino Rota, who composed most of the soundtracks for that director’s films. Featuring rearrangements of Rota tunes, plus original works by van de Graaf and other members of the 11-piece ensemble, Fellini demonstrates how you can honor your influences without having to be a slave to existing material.

With Strings Attached goes even further. Consisting of a never-before-released performance of a new piece by the Norwegian composer Alfred Janson as well as a series of reissued numbers from 1982 to 1995, it’s part of Willem Breuker’s ongoing determination to carve a unique niche for himself in the world of modern music. Featuring a more-or-less consistent line up of about 10 musicians plus an orchestral-sized string section of violas, violins and cellos, it’s not quite jazz, but certainly not so-called classical music either.

Compositions designed to illustrate Breuker’s distinctive worldview, the material is a mixture of familiar and out-of-the-ordinary. The pieces include George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, Erik Satie’s “Parade”, “Metropolis”, by Paul Whitman’s arranger Ferde Grofé, Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ “Sensemayá”, plus Leroy Anderson’s novelty “The Typewriter”. Then there’s the premiere of the collaboration with Janson. “Passacaglia Vendetta”, features the whole 18-piece group with the composer himself sitting in on accordion [!] and vocals [!!] and the other chief soloists Norwegian trumpeter Ole Edvard Antonsen, who works in both improvised and notated music, Breuker on soprano saxophone, and Kollektief (WBK) member Alex Coke on tenor saxophone.

The almost 21-minute showpiece leads the band into new territory, since Janson’s accordion playing and vocals add a folkloric quality to a score already informed by his background as a jazz pianist and orchestral composer. Playing triplets, but with a legato tone, Antonsen’s horn provides counterpoint to Janson’s primitivist squeeze box textures. Brass flutter tonguing arches on top of orchestral harmonies, then the composer’s veloce but rubato accordion slurs presage orchestral passages built up like a renovator’s addition to a small house.

Breuker’s atonal, double-tongued sax solo is first framed in horn riffs, then polyharmonic string passages that soon descend to syrupy romanticism. Antonsen’s muted, half-valve solo is backed by a swinging band section that could have come from the pen of Neil Hefti, and soon he’s slurring out rubato grace notes. With the Norwegian brass man cast as Buck Clayton, American Coke, a legitimate Texas tenor, snorts and blasts, loosening the tune from its formalism, and introduces an accordion solo that’s all extended reed sounds. Oscillating string lines frame the trumpeter’s conservatory-oriented flares, but its brassiness is buried under cat yowling string dissonance. With drummer Rob Verdurmen pressing the backbeat, the level of excitement and controlled chaos rises -- closer to “Rites of Spring”, than “Ascension” -- as sound shards break up, reaching a climax of spraying contrapuntal discord that finally relaxes into harmonic orchestra color as the finale.

“Passacaglia Vendetta” is an important reification of the band’s status in premiering New music compositions. But Breuker seems to want it all. The other 20th century pieces on the CD appear to have been picked to situate the WBK within a certain tradition. Outside of the “The Typewriter”, which is pure good-humored fun, the other pieces stride the fine line between composition and improvisation and sometimes fall over into the legit area, with a results that are more serious than may have been imagined.

Especially noteworthy is Breuker’s championing of work initially played by Paul

Whitman’s symphonic jazz band of the 1920s. For a start, pianist Henk de Jonge, a powerful two-handed player proves himself a better soloist than most classical formalists when it comes to “Rhapsody in Blue”. With a swinging left hand, control of dynamics and the ability to add a Latinesque tinge to interpolations of cascading arpeggios, he brings a quirkiness to the melody and the WBK responds in kind. Plus Breuker gets to play the famous descending gliss that launches the piece.

“Metropolis” is more problematic. Because Grofé was a professional dance band arranger, he tried to knit too many musical strains into this semi-classical fantasia from 1928. This is symphonic jazz that gives equal prominence to a tinkling celeste (de Jonge) and raucous tuba (Bernard Hunnekink). Transitions are often awkward, some of the string climaxes sound as if they come from Silent Movie cartoon soundtracks, and de Jonge’s low frequency piano playing awash with over-emphasized dynamics occasionally resembles the style of Frédéric Chopin more than Ferdinand LaMonthe aka Jelly Roll Morton.

Symphonic, quasi-Dixieland, the score often has the band breaking into a fox trot, while 19th century style romantic strings dripping emotionalism and zart face off against Broadway theatre-type themes and staccato novelty percussion. At one point, for instance, the strings are outlining a quasi-romantic passage while the pianist gets hot on “Japanese Sandman”.

Not only do these Liberace-like tinkles distract, but half way through, Breuker on lead vocal and others must pretend to be the Rhythm Boys with Bing Crosby and do some rhythmic scatting.

Theme recapitulations come from a Dixieland trumpet and clarinet duo, rasping brass, mulched reeds and tuba burps, plus pit orchestra harmony. By the finale, the simple call-and-response section and variations show their age, with frantic bass drum and cymbal smashes and over-the-top flying grace notes, polyrhythms and counter harmonies on show, rather than smooth section work. Before a finale of sweeping, string harmonies, overt orchestration is transparent, its diffuse textures suggesting a movie score.

The Satie recreation, with its oddball instrumental passages and room in the score for sirens, gunshots and the like, may be interpreted by the WBK with more confidence, since its European avant-garde conceptions are close to what Breuker himself often creates. When polyharmonic and polyphonic climaxes feature everything from pistol discharges and typewriter clacks, the Kollektief’s links to vaudeville and the Art Ensemble’s tradition of little instruments are never clearer. Referencing “The Marine Hymn”, a waltz and a hornpipe in its penultimate selection also make more natural transitions than those in Grofé pastiche of Hot Jazz. Additionally, the speedy orchestration features the strings in a finale of straight sweeps.

With less of an agenda than Breuker’s CD, Fellini’s sole aim is to honor van de Graaf’s influence one more time. The band has been performing a Fellini/Rota program since 1985, along with other projects that included a stint, from 1989 until 1997, accompanying the Theatre of Utrecht’s celebrated International Christmas Circus, and a 1997 multi-media production called Gluteus Maximus, whose central theme was buttocks.

Van de Graaf has also played in trombonist Chris Abelen’s 6-tet, the Bik Bent Braam big band and in a trio with pianist Michiel Braam and i compani’s drummer Fred van Duynhoven. Van Duynhoven was part of violinist Ig Hanneman’s Tentet. Martin Van Duynhoven -- relationship with Fred unknown -- who plays electric drum set here, has worked with everyone from pianist Misha Mengelberg to reedist Ab Baars. Pianist and Wurlitzer organist Jeroen van Vliet plays in bassist Eric van der Westen’s band. Other band members are trumpeter Jeroen Doomernik, Frank Nielander on alto and tenor saxophones, Tessa Zoutendijk on violin, Hans Hasebos on keyboards and samples, Carel van Rijn on bass, Pieter Douma on bass guitar and vocalist Simin Tander.

Dispensing with the latter first, boasting a delivery that moves from little girl-like warbling to lyric soprano, Tander is rather underutilized, unless you understand Italian. Mostly she functions the way Laura Biscotto did on John Zorn’s The Big Gundown, which reinterpreted Enrico Morricone movie scores incidentally. She provides breathy, kitschy “sexy Italian vocals” and recitations.

Other places the exaggerated focus of the entire group is weakened with faux swing violin parts, curt rhythms and a Latinesque dance routine that collectively ends up sounding more like dramatic cues than composition.

To be honest when the bands strays farthest away from Rota’s somewhat baroque and overwrought themes with its original arrangements it sounds best. Case in point is the almost 11½-minute, five-part “Dolce Vita Suite”, and van der Graaf’s reworking of the main themes from “La Strada” and “Milano e Nadia”.

Drawing as much on the (Dutch) fanfare as the (Italian) banda tradition, for the first, the band blends walking bass and comping piano with long, clean staccato lines from an altoist. Along the way it moves from Rome to a “Parisian Thoroughfare” via suggestions of Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and ends with some fruity tenor sax lines, plunger brass and rippling piano arpeggios that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-war Berlin cabaret.

The cabaret influence is also felt on “La Strada”, as a speedy tarantella-like tune built on high-pitched clarinet and wah-wah trumpet features the rhythm section aiming for a rock’n’roll beat. Fellini’s most instrumentally impressive track, it showcases van Vliet applying darker, low frequencies with heavy pressure to the piano keys and both [?] drummers showering hard and heavy rebounds and clattering ratamacues before ending with press rolls.

Another 1960-composed artifact, “Milano e Nadia” features mocking riffs from the horns, a bluesy piano section and abstract counterlines from the trumpet that lob bent notes into the stratosphere. When the double-timed, strummed chords from the piano pair up with shimmering electric keyboard waves, the variations nearly push the theme into indolent near stasis. It’s then up to a smeared soprano saxophone to loosen up the sounds. Changing character completely “Milano...” is taken out with some forced Bubber Miley-like blusiness from Doomernik.

Other pieces depend more on skittering piano chords, sampled accordion and electronics, brassy trumpet pops, dance rhythms and either galloping or rubato reed vibrations.

Overall, if the vocals and some of the more frantic output are put to one side, Fellini’s almost 69 minutes provide the more consistent vista. Still the more than 76 minute panorama that is With Strings Attached shows that after more than 30 years on the road, Breuker and the Kollektief are still after new challenges.

February 7, 2005