Doek Festival Blog #4

Blog 4 by Kevin Whitehead

6 June Misha’s Weekend

Misha Mengelberg turned 80 yesterday, an event surrounded by some fanfare. Today, tweede mishadag, there’s a Mengelberg symposium in the Bimhuis (see you there), and music ahead on the same stage tonight. Yesterday afternoon there was an informal reception/preview for him in Amstelveen, where Koeien is rehearsing—his unfinished opera, newly realized and already sold-out: Mengelberg words and music, edited by Cherry Duyns (who wrote in a character who speaks in Misha interview quotes) and Guus Janssen, who added some operatic elaborations on Mengelberg melodies—literal soprano solos.

Misha has Alzheimer’s, doesn’t make many public appearances now. When he sees a friend at home, and words fail, he communicates by whistling and singing—and if you join in (I brought a harmonica), so much the better. You hear he’s still connected, still speaking the language of his beloved counterpoint, whose rules are so lovely, he loved to scrunch and subvert them: musical chess.

Mengelberg has been at the heart of so much good in Dutch music, it’s a little ridiculous. At the conservatory in the 50s chum Louis Andriessen said, Now I’ve really heard a boogie-woogie piano player who moves me. Misha: Jimmy Yancey. John Cage juggling cigarettes at Darmstadt? Misha was there for that. Also when multi-media Fluxus happenings hit Amsterdam in the ’60s. (ICP and his many theater collaborators thank them.)

Even before he was a bad-boy young composer, he was the Monkish pianist you’d stick behind visiting American oddballs like Eric Dolphy. The drummer would be Han Bennink, already his steadfast partner. Han and Misha had an acrimonious trio with Willem Breuker (three-way death chess). Their ’70s ICP Orchestra was a mess (when Breuker’s new Kollektief was kicking ass), but in the ’80s, everything came together, when Wolter Wierbos and Michael Moore formed the nucleus of a new band, smart and eager. ICP turned into one of the world’s most beautiful, versatile and weird pocket orchestras—because of the music Misha wrote, and the esthetic he imparted. They even took time out to help reintroduce the world to the music of Herbie Nichols.

Mengelberg’s influence on this week’s Dutch contingent (and the American too, from conversations I overhear) is deep, and direct in the case of ICP’s Wierbos, Moore and Mary Oliver—and Eric Boeren who’s toured with Misha and played forever with his people, and Oscar Jan Hoogland who’s very much in that Mengelberg-to-Janssen-to-Fuhler/Braam/Scheen trickster pianist tradition.

I wrote in the Doek festival program book about Mengelberg-Braxton parallels, and more and more keep popping out. After Thursday’s concert, there was a little panel discussion where Mary Halvorson, James Fei and Taylor Ho Bynum talked about what they’d learned from Anthony Braxton, and about him as a teacher: He didn’t even care if you were enrolled in school, he’d teach you just because you wanted the musical knowledge. But it was never about getting you to buy into any particular method, including his own. Find your own way. So many times in that little discussion, I wanted to interrupt: but that’s Misha!

That’s why the transatlantic bunch that braided at the festival this week has been such a knockout: compatible parents. Tonight the band will play (besides a new work by Michael Moore, and reprises of Fei’s gloriously dense and Ingrid Laubrock’s gloriously colorful compositions premiered a few days ago) a program of Misha tunes, picked by his sidefolk. Inevitably it will be played with same kind of focused freedom and love of conflicting signals and montage as an ICP gig. It won’t sound anything like ICP—not with the Doek/Tri-centric miracle rhythm section, including paired/unpaired keyboardists, guitarists, bassists and drummers.

I have been attending rehearsals all week; I like seeing how the clock works, and watching smart people come to an understanding. The rehearsals of Mengelberg material I skipped. At showtime, I will sit there and marvel at the tunes and laugh at the surprises, and maybe at some happy train wrecks too. It’s Misha Mengelberg music.