Parken

Album Review

Any recording or concert date involving the great Dutch drummer Han Bennink means you're guaranteed a wild ride through jazz and pure, free improvisation. While his projects have for the most part involved his friends from the Instant Composers Pool, this offering has Bennink with different bandmates - the pianist Simon Toldam and clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst. Where the music is much the same, the approach is a bit different due to the open-ended mindset of Toldam, and Badenhorst's pithy, lithe, at-times spastic woodwind. They're very different than Misha Mengelberg and Michael Moore — Bennink's regular confrères — but offer new challenges to the frantic, unabashed, comical style of the drummer. The program, as per usual, is split between the music of Duke Ellington, and the imaginative modern creative music Bennink craves. They play together beautifully on the modal, soft-toned, classic Ellington composition "Fluerette Africaine," expertly done, especially by Badenhorst. Where Ellington's romantic "Lady of the Lavender Mist" is a pristine as can be in its sublime blues base, "Isfahan" is taken out in a spastic manner via Bennink's stilted drumming, with Toldam creating filler and space before becoming more cohesive, then freer as it progresses. The typical loud mayhem of Bennink is extant to the fullest on the two-minute workout "Myckewelk," a collective improv accented by the drummer's vocal hems and haws; "Reedster" features clattering percussion, sighing clarinet, and tribal motifs, while "After the March" is strictly devil-may-care rumbling, then quiet but firm building of forceful dynamics and birds flapping their fluttering wings. The near-ten-minute "Music for Camping" is, well, campy at times, with the emboldened bass clarinet and manic drumming, the skittering piano of Toldam moving to a 4/4 swing, then a minimal stance with insistent drumming from Bennink as contrast in a serious and playful dialect. Perhaps the most focused improvisational piece is "Flemische March," as an apreggiated piano with busy rhythms and slightly squawky clarinet informs a distended, distorted military beat. The finale track, "Parken," features a cameo appearance by vocalist Qarin Wikstrom, a dour and deep mysterious epilogue. Always entertaining, on the edge and humorous, Bennink's trio creates not so much a new sound as a broader range of expressionism for the drummer to take off and zoom through both familiar and challenging new territory. This is a recording that should easily please all of Bennink's followers, and comes highly recommended. ~ Michael G. Nastos, Rovi