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"The New Dutch Masters"

ICP Orchestra

Sunday, March 26 • 8pm

“This magnificent Dutch band has been swinging for decades…. Long may they thunder.”
—Chicago Tribune

Led by pianist Misha Mengelberg, “one of the daddies of the Dutch experimental jazz scene” (The New York Times), Amsterdam's “Instant Composers Pool” has been combining and combusting musical genres for nearly 40 years. As the Chicago Tribune wrote of a 2004 show: “If there was a facet of jazz expression that [ICP] didn't address..., it probably wasn't worth mentioning.”

Program Notes

Only in the past decade have the international contributions to the jazz idiom become widely recognized and embraced here in the U.S. Foremost of Europe’s improvisational units is Holland’s ICP Orchestra, which for 30 years has been intrepidly exploring all the nooks and crannies of free instrumental expression under the masterful leadership of Dutch piano virtuoso Misha Mengelberg. A disciple of Thelonious Monk, he is an improviser par excellence whose performances are delightfully unpredictable—at any given notice he can move from lyrical grace to pounding blasts on the keys. He plays pensive music, makes quirky reflections and fractures melodies. Within the parameters of a piece, he may break into pockets of scintillating speed, then decelerate to pounce lightly on the keys before returning to breakneck velocity. As critic Kevin Whitehead writes: Mengelberg “often attempts, via composition or improvisation, music that defies analysis, whose logic slides away like a pedestrian on a banana peel. Mengelberg’s Amsterdam-based Instant Composers Pool Orchestra is a “conducted improvising” band that thrives on its leader’s spontaneity. Its scope of influences encompasses a wide range of modern music, including Ellington and Monk, European dance band music, chamber music, free jazz, Kurt Weill, South African kwela, and beyond.

Whitehead, whose book New Dutch Swing is the authority on Holland’s jazz, sings the praise of the ICP Orchestra as a band whose offering is “jazz/improvised music at its most deft and sophisticated.” He writes, “ICP’s music drifts from one locus to another like action in a dream, where the guiding intelligence may thwart rational progress. Some compositions feature glaring wrong notes or brazenly dumb ideas; no piece exists in a definitive state...From one performance to the next, a piece may sound radically different.”

— Dan Ouellette