Improvising is like everyday life, it's like crossing the street.
- Han Bennink
I first learned about ICP, the legendary Dutch record label, in 1987 when I bought this CD at the Jazz Inn Record Shop in Den Haag.
I was then and still am a big Herbie Nichols fan - I wrote about him here:
I first heard about Herbie Nichols from his Blue Note releases and was surprised to find his face on this ICP Orchestra CD released on ICP. At that time, I was only aware of Willem Breuker’s BVHAAST label. I had seen Breuker’s Kollektief play at the North Sea Jazz Festival and liked them, so I had noticed his BVHAAST CDs in the record stores.
The Netherlands is renowned for the number of small and independent artist-owned record labels started in the 1960s and into the 1980s. Besides ICP and BVHAAST, there was Ketchup, Hummeloord, DATA, Claxon, and Coreco, to name just a few. These labels endeavored to present an organic Dutch sound deliberately separate from the American-inspired jazz offered by major Dutch labels Phillips and Fontana.
Beginning with the liberation in May 1945 and ending in the 1970s, the Dutch people’s postwar perspective of jazz music changed dramatically. It changed from the music of the American liberators to a music deliberately separated from the American model. The baby-boomers, who had been born between 1945 and 1955, and hit their adolescence in the early 1960s, brought about this different perspective. They felt that American jazz had become stagnant. At that time, three important Dutch musicians, pianist/composer Misha Mengelberg,
drummer Han Bennink,
and reed player/composer Willem Breuker
started to move away from the American jazz model.
In the Dutch magazine Jazzwereld, Han Bennink stated:
(The American-avant-garde) has stopped progressing since 1964. No, even worse: it has gone downhill. You know what is crazy? I’ve read that there are jazz-excursions from the Netherlands to America. There’s no need for that, as far as I’m concerned. Those trips go the wrong way. They should have trips for Americans, to come our way!... There is no American avant-garde. There is no European scene either. Believe me, currently the best music can be heard in the Netherlands.
To make their independent statement, they dropped the word jazz altogether and replaced it with improvisatiemuziek (improvisation music). More importantly, because the jazz establishment did not take their music seriously and Dutch record companies were not interested in recording this new “improvisation music”, they created their own recording opportunities.
The first was a landmark recording by Willem Breuker on the pop-oriented Relax Record company, started in 1965 with an album of B.B. King’s music, recorded Willem Breuker’s first album: Contemporary Jazz From Holland - Litany For The 14th Of June, 1966.
Breuker wrote in that album’s liner notes: “Jazz had to throw off the shackles of conventional swing. This liberation is closely connected to parallel developments in other forms of art and social life.”
Therefore, in the manner of Sun Ra’s own Saturn label, Mengelberg, Bennink, and Breuker, founded in Amerstdam in 1967 a co-op with their own independent, self-supported record label: ICP – Instant Composers Pool.
ICP - Instant Composer Pool
The ICP was simply one of the most important vehicles for experimentation and improvisation in the history of creative music. On the ICP’s website, they explain the source of this name:
In 1958, guitarist Jim Hall, in liner notes to a Jimmy Giuffre album, used the term “instant composition” to describe improvising. A few years later, Misha Mengelberg, knowing nothing of this, re-coined the term, and it stuck. A quiet manifesto, those two English words countered notions that improvising was either a lesser order of music-making than composing, or an art without a memory, existing only in the moment, unmindful of form. Misha's formulation posited improvisation as formal composition's equal (if not its superior, being faster).
Yes but: Misha says he was thinking of “instant coffee,” stuff any serious java drinker recognized as a sham substitute. He deflates his lofty idea even as he raises it. In the mid-1960s Mengelberg became involved with the Fluxus art movement, which he found inviting because it stood for nothing, had no ideals to defend. What bound together Fluxus's conceptualists, shock artists, early minimalists, musical comics et cetera was a need for a performance format that could accommodate them all. (Hence that symbol of '60s kookiness, the multimedia Happening.) Eventually he formed a band with that kind of flexibility: the modern ICP Orchestra.
The ICP’s first album, New Acoustic Swing Duo, was recorded on November and December 1967 at Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The original covers were handmade by Han Bennink. In his own words, “I was just coming from art school, becoming an artist. I did lots of work on the covers, night after night, making little drawings, all different, and all by hand. I’d put a little screw through one. I’d cut them, put strange stamps on them. I walked over them with ink on my feet…. in Stedelijk Museum we had a Saturday afternoon concert of the New Acoustic Swing Duo. We brought about four of five boxes of these records. We sold like 68 at that concert, incredible. But we sold them for only ten guilders; for that people got a record and a drawing from me.”
Here is one of my copies of those early Bennink covers:
..and another:
Here’s what that first ICP album sounded like:
I think when you compare this album with Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, you hear a completely different sound – an entirely different approach to the music.
In 1974, Breuker left the ICP to form the Willem Breuker Kollektief, a longtime flagship of Dutch improvised music. Mengelberg and Bennink continued to carry the ICP torch and, even after Mengelberg’s death in 2017, the ICP continues to perform.
Here’s a fun video from 2009 called Steigerpijp (scaffolding pipe) by the ICP Orchestra:
BVHAAST
During his years within the ICP, Breuker had become less interested in free improvisation and started to distance himself from Bennink and Mengelberg. Frustrated by the lack of discipline and interest in his compositions, he left for his own 11-piece band. The real difference between the earlier music of the ICP recordings and later BVHAAST recordings is that Breuker brought to his Kollektief pre-composed material within improvised music ensembles.
BVHAAST’s first album was Leo Cuypers – Shaffy Theater Live Recording ("Live" In Shafty), recorded in September 1974. Although it is not necessarily indicative of the music on the album, I like the song Freule Pinard:
here’s a more representative example of the BVHAAST sound:
Breuker’s BVHAAST sound was much more composed and theatrical than the ICP sound of his earlier days. Through it all, perhaps what I liked best about the ICP and BVHAAST records is their commitment to art. Their music and their record labels always had an eye on the artistic nature of jazz.
For example, here is the Willem Breuker Kollektief’s Heibel, released by BVHAAST in 1991. The CD is packaged in a cheese box.
I bought this from Willem at a 1993 Kollektief concert in Chicago. After the show, I started to talk to him in Dutch. He was surprised that an American could speak Dutch and called over to Boy Raaymakers. We talked for a few minutes about my time in the Netherlands, and I asked if they’d sign the CD box:
In 1978, understanding that there needed to be something specifically Dutch to describe the improvised music that had grown out of the Netherlands since the 1960s, journalist Bert Vuijsje coined the term Hollandse School. Interestingly, that was a label that had been reserved for the Dutch painting masters from the 16th and 17th centuries, like Vermeer and Rembrandt. A bit strong, naturally, but I think it does capture the pride the Dutch had for their improvising musicians and the labels they created to nurture their musical ideas, even though they remained a marginal sub-culture, either despised or largely ignored by the cultural establishment. There is something to be said for that….
Here’s one more for the road, recorded by Guus Janssen in 1981 on another obscure Dutch record label Claxon. I hear some Herbie Nichols and Thelonious Monk in the first song Blokken.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll stay in Europe and ride down the Rhine River first to Wuppertal in the Wupper valley east of Düsseldorf and Peter Brötzmann’s BRÖ record label and down to SABA in the Black Forest and then over to the Spree River to Berlin and the FMP record label, all three historic European independent record labels that documented Free Jazz development in Germany.
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey and would like to share this with someone you think might be interested in learning more about our great American art form: Jazz, just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page. Also, if you feel so inclined, become a subscriber to my journey by hitting the “Subscribe” button here:
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….