Festival Blog

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.…

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).…

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.…

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.…

Braxton’s Birthday: Blog #2 by Kevin Whitehead
Photography by Sara Anke Morris

Anthony Braxton turns 70 today, 4 June 2015, and I may not have to tell you he will be celebrating in high style at the Bimhuis tonight, as part of the ongoing Doek Meets Tri-Centric festival. Braxton the saxophonist will be playing some of his recent Falling River Music—ensemble improvising guided or stimulated by his abstract images and open-ended narrative elements, a way to tap into the intuitive side of music-making.…

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.…