Jazz Behind the Dikes

The pull of tradition against the attraction of innovation...

This week, let’s start with a tune about a decision: Reason or Rhyme.

A canoeist paddles down a big river and happens upon a fork. The main river runs straight. The small fork to the left offers what appears to be a narrower, apparently quicker pace. But what is beyond the left fork’s bend and to where does it lead?

There is a moment of contemplation, when the heartbeat quickens with anticipation and curiosity. A decision needs to be made….

At the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1988, I had such a moment of contemplation.

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The pull of tradition against the attraction of innovation are the two polar forces of a Jazz drama in the Netherlands during the mid1960s. But before we go there, it is important to think about the history of Jazz in the Netherlands through the context of their post-war recovery.

The first jazz records were made in New York in 1917. Two years later, a society combo called The Original Jazz Syncopators started working together in Den Haag. At that time, not many musicians came to the Netherlands, but the Dutch musicians did travel. Around 1920, the Blue Band, a quintet from Leiden, recorded 10 songs in Berlin and London, for Odeon and Columbia. In 1926, the piano player for The Original Jazz Syncopators, Theo Uden Masman, took over leadership of The Ramblers, by far Holland’s most famous big band, which lasted in some form until the 1960s.

In 1935, Coleman “The Hawk” Hawkins went to England to join Jack Jack Hylton's band, who was making a continental tour. After playing in Paris, the band went up to the Netherlands. However, when Hylton's band moved on to Germany, Hawkins stayed behind - black folk were not welcome in Hitler’s country.

Theo Uden Masman offered him a guest job with The Ramblers, and the Hawk cut this side with his band in 1935:

Even though the effects of World War II devastated the Netherlands, The Ramblers had continued to record during war in Hilversum, the Dutch broadcasting capitol. Finally, in the autumn of 1944, Allied armies liberated the southern parts of the Netherlands. The rest of the country still faced an exhausting winter and famine. On 5 May 1945, the German army in the Netherlands finally surrendered. The country was liberated. However, less than 10 years later, their recovery was halted by "de Watersnoodramp", simply translated as “the flood disaster”.

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On the night of 31 January – 1 February 1953, many dikes in the province of Zeeland, and the southern parts of the province of South Holland, proved unable to resist the combination of spring tide and a northwesterly storm. Here is interesting British footage of the disaster:

By the late 1950s, the Netherlands was finally emerging from the mud and was a clean slate; nicely remodeled, sleek as a Mondrian painting, and headed for prosperity.

However, from a jazz musical standpoint, their transition from the old musical world of The Ramblers to the new, modern musical world had been severed not as much by the war, but by a slow recovery. By 1976, the year of the first North Sea Jazz Festival in Den Haag, that musical transition was well on it way.

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The three-day North Sea Jazz Festival was founded by Paul Acket , businessman and jazz lover, who had amassed a fortune in the 1960s with the music magazines Music Express and Popfoto. When Acket sold his company in 1975, he was able to independently develop and finance the North Sea Jazz Festival. Importantly, he made a conscious decision to present a diversity of jazz styles, not just straight ahead American jazz, but also American and European avant-garde.

When I walked into the 1991 North Sea Jazz Festival, I was admittedly there to see Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and then later the Gerry Mulligan Concert Band. Blakey was scheduled to start at 7:00 PM. I got there earlier in the afternoon for the Carlos Santana Band with Wayne Shorter, which ended at 4:30 PM. I hung around after the show, got some food, and just checked out the scene. While standing outside one of the tents, I heard this song playing. I went in to listen:

Nice. Morribreuk is a tribute song to the great Ennio Morricone. This is an interesting song. If you listen closely, at about the 1 minute mark, you’ll notice a brass ensemble playing very faintly in the background. It’s actually two trumpets playing in unison at the back of the hall. As they move toward the stage, they become progressively louder all the way to the 2 minute mark. This is classic Breuker. He was always trying to bring another dimension to his music, most not detectable on LPs and better experienced live.

As I stood there listening, I was thinking, “Who is the Willem Breuker Kollektief?” This was music I had not heard before. As I look back now, it was perhaps the first time I had heard what might be termed free jazz. The Kollektief was inserting free improvisation within the context of their conventional jazz combos. I found this intriguing. More importantly, these guys were having fun!

In 1961, the first Dutch group to experiment with free improvisation was The Original Dutch Free Jazz Group formed by Pierre Courbois, who was inspired by Ornette Coleman’s idea of playing free of preconception.

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From earlier experiments with free jazz, like The Original Dutch Jazz Group, a distinctive jazz movement developed in the Netherlands that came to be known as improvised music. The movement developed around key musicians such as Willem Breuker, Han Bennink, and Misha Mengelberg - all experienced jazz players no longer satisfied with conventional BeBop combos and big bands and looking for new ways of making music.

Here’s a 1966 example of this improvised music or what Breuker perfers to call “Contemporary Jazz”. You can clearly hear the Ornette Coleman influence.

Please, someone tell me what drummer Victor Kaihatu is doing here? Be sure to listen to the interview at the end of the song. Very interesting.

Again, the pull of tradition against the attraction of innovation. This drama pushed forward these questions:

• To what extent are traditional forms a requirement?

• Without them, is there chaos?

• Are time-honored forms a hindrance or a help?

At this point in my Jazz Journey I was only mildly aware of free jazz or improvised music. It’s hard to remember the first contact I had with it, but certainly in a live format, the Willem Breuker Kollektief at the North Sea Jazz Festival is the one I think of now. Like the canoeist on the big river, who first notices a fork, I decided to follow it. I had no idea that fork started with Willem Breuker, who had been at the heart of this drama in the Netherlands.

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It is important to trace this drama back to the the 1920s, to a conversation the Italian composer Ferruccio Bursconi had with a pupil of his. Bursconi had completely lost patience with the conventionality of German music, the “Kappelmeistermusik” of the end of the nineteenth century.

I think this painting captures his frustration and how he had visions of a day when music would be free. He would write, “Music was born free: and to win freedom is its destiny.”

For the Jazz player, their execution is instant and changeable - the performer is the master. In classical music, the execution is not changeable - the performer is the servant. I think this is the distinction that Bursconi was making and that Breuker was now following as he challenged the Dutch jazz community.

For now, it’s important to recognize that I sensed a freedom in Willem Breuker’s Kollekteif that I had not yet experienced in a live performance. The soloing was different, for example, from the BeBop improvisational solos of Sonny Fortune in Dizzy Gillespie’s band at Fat Tuesday’s in New York. Breuker’s musicians seemed more free. We are not yet ready to cover the improvised music movement in the Netherlands and greater Europe. We’ll save that for another day in our journey….

The Willem Breuker Kollektief at the North Sea Jazz Festival was my moment of contemplation. I dug in my paddle and steered toward that small fork to the left with the narrower, quicker pace.

I plan to take next week off, so our journey will pause for a short break. When we start up again, we’ll be leaving Europe and returning to Carmel, California. By then, I was deep in the current of that Big River called Jazz, but now looking for new forks to explore….

I wish you all a very Happy Holiday!!

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Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….

Until then, keep on walking….

Happy holidays