Drummer Han Bennink was celebrated with a 3-day residency on his 82nd birthday and beyond. ‘I’m nearly 83,’ as he happily confided to the Cafe Oto audience.
Bennink is a lynchpin of the European free jazz and improvisation scene rooted in the 1960s. Playing drums as a teenager, he discovered that percussion was his vocation and soon he was playing with leading American jazz musicians on tour, notably Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Eric Dolphy whom he and pianist Misha Mengelberg accompanied on the historic Last Date live recording (although it is not Dolphy’s actually final recorded performance).
Bennink, Mengelberg and Willem Breuker founded the Instant Composers Pool collective in 1967 with its eponymous record label – now with a catalogue of over 60 albums – and the ICP Orchestra, which has often performed, with Bennink at its heart, in Dalston’s Vortex and Cafe Oto. Bennink’s art student days nurtured the Dadaist inclinations in his art, featured on many ICP album covers, and in his music.
One of the most disciplined, imaginative and witty drummers in jazz he has collaborated in a variety of other musical contexts from post-punk to Ethiopian. At Cafe Oto his fellow performers ranged from saxophonist Evan Parker, with whom Bennink and Derek Bailey recorded the iconic Topography of the Lungs in 1970 to Joanna MacGregor, best known as a leading contemporary concert pianist, and harpist Áine O’Dwyer – ‘I never played before in combination with harp!’
Night 1
The opening set had Joanna MacGregor and Bennink maintaining perfect balance as they explored melody and rhythm in tandem, passing the initiative back and forth, and heading off obliquely as the occasion demanded. MacGregor reached in to the piano to dampen the bass note strings and, with characteristic humour, Bennink evoked Tommy Cooper by name with reference to his own headgear. MacGregor was at home with the jazz strands that ran through the set – with the duo improvising loosely around (possibly) Caravan. I heard also that the set with Hannah Marshall and Maggie Nichols went well.
Night 2
The second night featured duos with complementary flavours, the first with Áine O’Dwyer and the second with Evan Parker. Bennink tapped with soft-headed mallets while O’Dwyer plucked out single notes, as they made their first steps into virgin territory. Gradually, the pace increased, a cymbal was crashed and O’Dwyer released graceful, fluid washes. The tom skin was scraped, cymbals brushed lightly, the body of the harp gently caressed and tapped. The poetic dialogue ebbed and flowed, paused only for a neat, solo spot from Bennink.
Parker followed Bennink’s percussive opening rush with gentle figures on his tenor to set a measured, inquisitive tone. Flurries of action led to a loping rhythm with Parker delving deep, recalling Lester Young’s phrasing, and releasing barely audible notes following a straight-down-the line, funky backbeat. Bennink introduced sharp accents, snuffed out when he placed a towel over a tom and intense runs flew from Parker with snatches of Dolphy’s 245 and Coltrane’s Miles’ Mode (Red Planet). Bennink removed hat and chunky pullover to swing with Parker’s hints of ‘Fascinating Rhythm’, rounding off with skilful hands on drum skins.
Parker mentioned later that the muted checked shirt he was wearing was in homage to Breuker, whom he met first time with Bennink in Wuppertal for Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun rehearsals and kindly confirmed his quotes from Dolphy and Coltrane.
Night 3
The final duo sessions were with Bennink’s frequent collaborator, Joris Roelofs, on bass clarinet and Thurston Moore on guitar. Roelof’s reedy vibrations with Bennink’s rolling mallet undercurrents, exchanged for one wood stick and one soft mallet, led to Roelof’s jaunty phrasing in the footsteps of Eric Dolphy, who put the bass clarinet on the map in contemporary jazz in the ’60s. They launched in to an intense interpretation of Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife, crafted from the heart, recalling Dolphy’s version with the Sextet of Orchestra USA. A Misha Mengelberg song, voiced by Bennink, fittingly concluded this powerful set.
With Thurston Moore to his right with guitar on lap, Bennink declared, ‘We have to make some noise!’ From Moore, whose territory takes in the sharp end of extruded sound, scratchings, scrapings and feedback found their way in to the soundscape. Bennink responded to the juddering, rumbling, raw emanations with sticks on sticks, one crashing, hollow thwack, and a spell of determinedly chunky beats mixed with careful brush work. Roelofs was invited back for a trio format improvisation where Moore provided the low-level backdrop to the bass clarinetist’s melodic initiative which had Bennink smiling, and to conclude, Bennink powered away at full throttle with Moore bringing out resonant sounds echoing as if in a cavern.
Bennink remarked, ‘So many people, so many styles,’ and that he’d never collaborated with so many female musicians! An enriching residency which had Bennink thinking on his feet and showing what an accomplished drummer and improvisor he is.
