After studying Dutch at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I was sent to The Netherlands. I lived in the tiny village of Elburg, an amazing moated city about an hour north of Amsterdam. While I was there, I went to the North Sea Jazz Festival and stumbled upon Willem Breuker’s Kollektief. I remember walking by their tent on my way to see someone else and thinking, “Whoa, what is that?” I had never heard music like that before. But it was not only the music that caught my attention, it was the showmanship. The Kollektief was presenting much more than just music. It was this mix of music and theater that drew me to Dutch music. Willem Breuker’s song Morribreuk is a perfect example.
After hearing them play that night at the festival, I bought their CD Bob’s Gallery. One of my favorite songs on the CD is Morribreuk (a tribute to Ennio Morricone). You can read more about him here:
I listened to Morribreuk many times but missed an important aspect of the song.
When I returned to the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1991, I heard, or I should say, I saw the Kollektief perform Morribruek live. When the song started, the trumpet players were playing in the back of the audience - I could not see them, I just heard them. As the song went on, they continued to play as they slowly walked up the aisles to the stage, where you could finally hear them loud and clear. I hadn’t picked up on that from listening to the CD before. But when I listened again later, sure enough, you can hear the same effect - the faint trumpets first come in at the 1-minute mark:
When I think about it now, as an American who lived and worked with the Dutch, their music matches their sensibility. Put a different way, I “see” that wonderful and unique sense of humor in their music.
Phil Freeman is writing a book about Cecil Taylor called In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. In his June 12, 2023, Burning Ambulance piece he wrote:
Anyway, one of the biggest events in Taylor’s professional career happened 35 years ago this month — his residency in Berlin (then West Berlin) from June 16 to July 16, 1988, part of the city’s year-long celebration of itself as Europe’s Capital of Culture. He led a workshop ensemble, teaching them his compositional and arranging methodology; played duos with a series of drummers from around the world; assembled a European big band; and more. All the music was recorded for the gigantic boxed set In Berlin ’88, long out of print in physical form but available digitally from Destination: Out. (It’s expensive, but worth it. The giant book that accompanied the box is available separately.)
On a couple of tracks, Cecil’s band included cellist Tristan Honsinger. In 1989 FMP released a CD of that performance called The Hearth:
In 1995, Honsinger played with Taylor again at the Village Vanguard as part of a Cecil’s quintet. They had never played together live before that night. In his book New Dutch Swing, Kevin Whitehead wrote about the performance, “Tristan sits in the crook of the piano and keeps his wary red eyes on the boss. He ignores the obvious come-ins: motifs planted for him to pick up like dollar bills on the sidewalk. When the piano reaches escape velocity, Honsinger pulls back with a legato line, heavy vibrato, cello’s middle register. And sometimes Tristan’s right foot thumps on the wooden platform, loud as anything else on stage. He isn’t just home - he’s home.”
Honsinger and Taylor were kindred spirits. The first time they met, they realized they both had seen the great Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova in 1959 when the Bolshoi Ballet made their first-ever tour of America and Canada.
Taylor would have been 30 years old. Honsinger would have been only 10, however, at the time his mother had hopes of creating a chamber orchestra with Tristan and his brother and sister. Honsinger grew up in a musical family, so she likely did take him down to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to see the great Ulanova dance as Giselle.
Honsinger and Taylor had something else in common. They were both showmen. Taylor famously said something like it’s never just playing the piano. Honsinger was cut from the same cloth. Deeply influenced by Buster Keaton and the Fluxus movement, for him, it was always much more than just playing the cello. He said, “I think there is a certain amount of drama involved in any good music-making. I suppose that’s what I like about the American music, that it had a lot of drama in it, and theater. Armstrong, Fats Waller, the first people who were involved in developing let’s say jazz, had great theatrical qualities.”
Throughout his career, Honsinger was always in search of improvisational and theatrical music and that was not happening in the States in the late 1970s. So, he found it in Europe.
Also in New Dutch Swing, Honsinger told Whitehead, “I grew up in New England, took up cello at age nine in Springfield, Massachusetts.… My first teacher was a Dutch Jew. Almost all my teachers were European immigrants.” I’m not sure any of that matters, but in retrospect, perhaps it did to him and explains his attraction to European sensibility, particularly Dutch sensibility.
Honsinger continues, “Later I went to the New England Conservatory. It was quite a good school, but I didn't feel very welcome, so I went to Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore from '68 to '69. By then I'd had it, really, with the whole classical music world. I changed teachers so many times, I suppose I was confused by their contradictory advice.”
He’d had quite a closed musical experience up to that time, which is why he became confused about the way you make music. So in 1969 he moved to Montreal and started, slowly, to improvise. In a 1993 interview with Richard Scott, Honsinger makes an important point:
In quite a closeted way I would just improvise by myself, and I would make-believe that I was making music, that I was composing. But when I started to find my own way of making music I wanted to show everybody; to show them that this is the way you make music! And people started to say, Well do you know Eric Dolphy? Have you heard Cecil Taylor? Or Albert Ayler? Evan Parker? Derek Bailey? Han Bennink? So I was exposed to all of these things and they reinforced what I was involved in. It was a kind of revelation that this was a legitimate way to enjoy yourself.
It was in Montreal in 1969 that Honsinger met Dutch percussionist Peter van Ginkel. After listening to his copy of Topography of the Lungs, Honsinger realized he could play that music and uprooted to Europe.
In 1974, he moved to Amsterdam. He recalled, “They arrested me the first time I played my cello in the street... confiscated our instruments”. As a result, he moved to Paris and traveled around France, but eventually, he followed his compass back to Amsterdam.
He ran into Derek Bailey, whom he had met in Paris. He recalled, “At that time it was pretty hardcore improvised music, as I remember. Not too much composition except Misha (Mengelberg); I became a part of his tentet, which brought a new aspect to my idea of improvised music. But Derek was always: ‘No music, just play.’” Bailey invited him to London and on February 7, 1976, they recorded Duo, released on Bailey’s Incus record label:
After the recording, he returned to Amsterdam where he met the great Dutch bassist Arjen Gorter, who introduced him to a lot of the European improvisers - one, in particular, was fellow cellist Ernst Reijseger - more on him later…. Gorter invited him to a place called BIMhuis, where he described the music they played as just “Dutch music.”
Honsinger subsequently joined BIM, the Dutch professional association for improvising musicians founded in 1971 to represent the interests of jazz and improvised music. Soon he started to get gigs with ICP members. As it turned out, he had finally found his tribe and recorded on two landmark ICP recordings. The first was Tetterettet, recorded and released in 1977:
Go to the 10:24 mark to listen to Tetterettet XII for some classic Honsinger cello:
The second was I.C.P. Tentet in Berlin, recorded live during the Workshop Freie Musik at Akademie der Künste in Berlin on April 11, 1977. It was released on the SAJ series of the German FMP label in 1979:
During this same time, Honsinger recorded with Bailey’s band Company. I like their Company 5 album, recorded at Company Week, which took place in May 1977 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall in London. Company Week was a kind of international conference on improvisational music. The album was released on Bailey’s Incus label in 1978:
In 1978, Honsinger left the Netherlands and traveled to Italy to start his band This, That And The Other, a group of free jazz geniuses that included Japanese avant-garde jazz and jazz fusion trumpeter Toshinori Kondo.
In 1983, Honsinger traveled to Japan with the band to record What Are You Talking About? at Chestnut Studio in the Suzuka Mountains. Six tracks were scored by Honsinger and three by Kondo. The album was a collaborative release between the IMA label run by Toshinori Kondo and the DIW label. It has a kind of Art Ensemble of Chicago feel to it.
From that album, here is Kondo’s song Fried Rice Field In The Summer Night:
South African Sean Bergin was also in the band. They later met up again and collaborated on an outstanding album Picnic, released on the Dutch DATA label. In 1985, Honsiger and Bergin collaborated on a great Dutch album, Kids Mysteries, recorded at the BIMhuis in November 1987.
I find Sean Bergin And M.O.B’s Kids Mysteries, along with Breuker’s 1988 Bob’s Gallery (note also included Serenade For A Wealthy Widow with tap dancing by Peter Kuit, Jr.) and a couple of others the crown jewels of “Dutch music”. What I find most fascinating about this album is that it features two cellists: Honsinger and Ernst Reijseger. This was the first time they played together on an album.
From Kids Mysteries, here is a track with the two masters on cello, Tea And Scones:
Honsinger and Reijseger played together again on the 1997 ICP Orchestra’s Jubilee Varia. From that album, here is Jubilee Varia Suite 2.
Here’s one more for the road. Ernst Reijseger is a force to be reckoned with and a towering figure. On Tell Me Everything, he plays a tribute to Honsinger by performing Honsinger’s song Tristan’s Tune. This was recorded and released in 2008 by Winter & Winter, an independent record label based in Munich founded in 1995 by Stefan Winter:
Incredible.
What I like most about Tristan Honsinger, apart from his music-making, is that he was a showman in the true spirit of this journey’s marquee artists Fred Astaire and Sun Ra. In Honsinger’s case, he liked to mix jazz techniques with Dadaist spoken word and theatrical improvisation. He was dedicated to his art; however, he did not wait for it to come to him, he went out and found it. And when he did, he wasn’t just home - he was home - wherever he was. We’ll miss you Tristan.
Next week, we’re back on that Big River called Jazz. We’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of female pioneers of jazz trumpet, in particular, Ingrid Jensen.
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