Doek Festival Video Blog #3
Excerpts of Saturday and Sunday’s concerts with commentary from Kevin Whitehead. By Elsie Vermeer and Seeltje van Boeckel.
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Doek Festival blog #6
Blog 6: Monday 8 June
Withdrawal
by Kevin Whitehead
photography by Sara Anke Morris
Sunday, the final day of the Doek/Tri-Centric festival, let us listeners quietly come down from all the excitement the orchestra built up last week. A few American guests lingered to play yesterday’s four-stop bicycle tour. Still high from Saturday’s Misha Mengelberg retrospective, wherever we went musicians were playing his tunes. We only made it to half the biking gigs—partly because everyone has to sleep sometime, partly because when a house manager tells us we’ll need to don blindfolds in order to be seated, as at the Pianola Museum, we are tiptoeing backwards out the door.…
doek festival blog #5
Blog #5 June 7
Sounds checked
by Kevin Whitehead
The Doek/Tri-Centric orchestra was playing the slow parts of Ingrid Laubrock’s “Offering,” soundchecking on Saturday afternoon. Glowing chords wafted up from the ensemble, and the beautiful blend of distinctive voices sounded eerily like some lost Gil Evans classic of the early 1960s: you could listen to those harmonies all day. This band/ensemble/musicians pool of 19 achieved that delicate balance of individual voices and collective strengths that makes jazz such a popular metaphor for societal relationships (and vice versa).…
doek festival video blog #2
Excerpts of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday’s concerts with commentary from Kevin Whitehead and a word from Anthony Braxton! Video by Elsie Vermeer and Seeltje van Boeckel.
…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.…
Doek Festival Blog #3
Give It Up or the Band: Blog 3 Friday 5 June
by Kevin Whitehead
photography by Sara Anke Morris
Jazz festivals love to slap together combinations of well-known musicians, but some star-studded bands that look good on paper fizzle on stage—sometimes, frankly, because certain stars turn out to be jerks who aren’t easy to work with. Of course 20 nice people don’t necessarily make an ensemble either. This transatlantic bunch are especially congenial; you can see how much they enjoy each other’s company.…