Doek Festival Blog #1

Blog #1 by Kevin Whitehead
Photography by Sara Anke Morris

Doek Meets Tri-Centric: what a great idea. Ten musicians from the US (including Tri-Centric founder, saxophonist, official Jazz Master and classical composer Anthony Braxton) and ten-plus from Amsterdam, coming together to play big pieces by members of the ensemble, and to play in small, improvising combinations. This is my kind of festival; that combination of ad hoc groups and big anchor pieces recalls for me the Bimhuis’s 1991 October Meeting—the first place I saw many of the Dutch masters in person. Four years later, I was living in Amsterdam and writing a book about improvised music here.

The first couple of days of the six-day festival, Tuesday June 2 and today, Wednesday the 3rd, there are open rehearsals starting at noon in the concert hall of community center Zaal 100. There the players work on pieces to be performed in the same room the same evening. As a music journalist and curious fan, I love eavesdropping on rehearsals—that’s where you see how a composer’s mind works, and marvel at how quickly these players whip complex compositions together. After the morning session, someone commented, “It feels like we’ve been playing together for years”—and there’s some truth to that; among the Americans and the Hollanders, there are combinations of players who have worked together for a decade or three.

At the afternoon session, American cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum guided the more-or-less full ensemble through his three-movement piece, with all sorts of interjections cued in by the composer/conductor, superimposed lines moving at different speeds, brief solo segments that emerge from and recede into the pack, and what Taylor called a “super-tonal power-ballady part.” The music was complex to be sure, but he put the players at ease: “I trust your judgment.… When all else fails, trust your ears and you’ll be fine. I trust all of you guys’ ears.” (The “guys” in the band include five women, by the way.) At the end of the rehearsal, the ensemble did a quick run-through that sounded slightly shaky here and there—but on the Tuesday night concert before a packed house, everything gelled wonderfully; you had to marvel at the focus these players bring to the job.

First up on the evening program was “Offering” by Ingrid Laubrock, the German tenor saxophonist who’s a mainstay of New York’s creative music scene. It was inspired by full-bodied Tibetan chants, and really showed off the textural possibilities of an ensemble fortified by a double rhythm section: two guitars, two keyboards, two bassists and two drummers. (You can look all the players up.) There were thundering bursts from the terrific brass section, the rumble of two bass clarinets played at the bottom of their range, some intense shrieking from Mary Oliver’s violin, and fat mysterious chords from merged brass, reeds and strings.

The night’s third world premiere, by saxophonist James Fei from California, was a gloriously dense piece for nine players, as if a couple of ensembles had been superimposed on one another; Fei called the textures “static” but there was a a lot of lively byplay within that compressed sound—all the more so in the second half, where he opened things up to improvised variations. (These players are great at collective playing as unit—the ensemble improvising is about virtuoso listening and quick responses, and leaving your ego at the door.)

Interspersed among these big pieces were five improvising subgroups curated by Doek cornetist Eric Boeren, featuring almost every member of the ensemble. They ranged from the unlikely (a sort of loud chamber trio: Vincent Chancey on french horn, tenor sax howler John Dikeman, and skronky guitarist Brandon Seabrook) to a lyrical quintet (Bynum, Oliver, alto saxist Michael Moore, bassist Wilbert de Joode and pianist Kaja Draksler). And there were two fine improvised quartets. One mixed pairs of regular collaborators—Doek brassmen Boeren and trombonist Wolter Wierbos, Tri-Centric’s Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson)—that started with fast chatter and quickly turned lyrical. The other quartet served up a terrific burst of improvised electronic music, with James Fei on the crackle synthesizer (an eccentric—and rarely heard—device developed at Amsterdam’s STEIM in the 1970s), and Oscar Jan Hoogland on its tiny cut-rate counterpart, the crackle box (as well as electric clavichord); they were buttressed by the band’s highly compatible drummers Michael Vatcher and Onno Govaert, who came up with some electronic-sounding timbres of their own.

I’d tell you more, but today’s rehearsals start in half an hour as I write this, and I’d hate to miss a thing. Sitting in the stands yesterday as the players ran though the music, looking at the ensemble, I thought, it’ll be a long time before we see/hear an international ensemble this rich and extraordinary again. Can’t wait to hear what they come up with in rehearsal today—and realize in concert tonight.