Misha Mengelberg RIP

[njtw]

Misha Mengelberg, Dutch jazz pianist and composer and co-founder of ICP Records has died in a nursery home in Amsterdam according to dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.
 

Here's the article in Dutch: http://www.volkskrant.nl/muziek/jazzpianist-misha-mengelberg-81-groot-dwarsdenker-van-de-nederlandse-muziek-overleden~a4469680/

 

[alankin]

I know he has been ill for a while, but still very sad.

[corto maltese]

He was in fragile health, so probably the news doesn't come as a surprise. But still... it's a terrible blow.

I'll just say this: it was because of unique artistic voices like Misha Mengelberg that I was initially attracted to and will always love this music.

 

[John L]

Damn.  That is really bad news.  I hadn't been following news around him much lately and didn't realize that he was very sick.  He was a truly fine artist.  RIP

[HutchFan]

Sad news. 

R.I.P.

[soulpope]

Misha Mengelberg R.I.P ....

[clifford_thornton]

3 hours ago, corto maltese said:

He was in fragile health, so probably the news doesn't come as a surprise. But still... it's a terrible blow.

I'll just say this: it was because of unique artistic voices like Misha Mengelberg that I was initially attracted to and will always love this music.

 

my thoughts exactly.

Interviewed him in 04 or 05 and had a great time. Subsequently hung out with him a bit when ICP came through Austin -- really wonderful person and a musical genius. It was hard to find out that he was dealing with Alzheimer's, which is a truly terrible disease (the ICP twitter shared a heartbreaking image of him in hospital about a week ago). Glad he is at peace now and his musical inventiveness will surely live on.

[Steve Reynolds]

We all knew it was coming. A transformative figure. Genius.

Of all of them, Misha had as much of an impact on me personally as any of them outside of possibly Papa Joe, Fred & Evan.

thankfully I was at Le Poisson Rouge a few years back for his last or second to last U.S. Show with his beloved Instant Composer's Pool. The 70 minute set was magnificent - the best I have ever heard them. Misha was frail and drifting but those few notes he played - and the little solo on Jackie-Ing. Like no one else. He believed no one played Monk as well as his guys did and of course he was correct.

All condolences to his family, the New Dutch Swing community, the members of ICP and maybe most of all to his long-time cohort and fellow inventor/creatavistic genius crazy man, Han

 

RIP to a beautiful man - one of the true masters of an completely outside the box universe of music.

[rostasi]

 

[paul secor]

Thanks, Mr. Mengelberg, for the music you played with the ICP, with others, and on your own. You'll surely be missed.

And, in agreement with Clifford, Alzheimer's is a truly terrible disease.

[rostasi]

 

 

[paul secor]

42 minutes ago, rostasi said:

 

 

I've always enjoyed Eeko's accompaniment.

[optatio]

R.I.P.

In memory of him I hear now:

[alankin]

Now playing:

Misha Mengelberg / Steve Lacy / George Lewis / Ernst Reÿseger / Han Bennink – Dutch Masters [on Lewis's Complete Soul Note/Black Saint Recordings box] (Soul Note — CAM Jazz)
— Misha Mengelberg (piano), Steve Lacy (soprano sax), George Lewis (trombone), Ernst Reijseger (cello), Han Bennink (drums); two tunes each by Lacy, Mengelberg & Thelonious Monk

R.I.P.
 

[Jason Bivins]

Who's Bridge, baby. RIP, Mr. Mengelberg.

[Cyril]

2 hours ago, rostasi said:

 

 

 

Mengelberg didn't like Eric Dolphy. Han Bennink did and still does....

I was driving home and I heard by Han Bennink, Misha has died (on the radio).   Misha was in a very bad health. Although he wasn't a nice person, I was in shock....and I still am..  Don't know what to say....! I remember I posted a while ago a part of the docu "Misha enzovoort" made by  Cherry Duyns. Misha did a lot for the Dutch free jazz.   

 

R.I.P. Misha.

[clifford_thornton]

From personal experience I actually found Misha to be very kind and generous, not to mention quite funny... and his dislike of Dolphy was, I think, mostly taste-derived. He mentioned his favorite saxophonist with Monk (or MUNCH! -- as he pronounced it, like Edvard) was Lucky Thompson, if that gives you any indication of his proclivities. "Monk was the architect, but Herbie Nichols... he was the painter!"

Edited March 3, 2017 by clifford_thornton
typo

[sidewinder]

Sad news - he was a character, for sure. RIP.

Saw him a couple of times. First time was with the ICP, when they covered quite a bit of Monk and Herbie Nichols in the performance. The second time was a solo piano recital, where he came on stage carrying an Asda supermarket carrier bag.

Edited March 3, 2017 by sidewinder

[Cyril]

Clifford_Thornton, too bad you can't read the first article (in the Dutch newspaper). Misha didn't understand Dolphy. He made jokes about him. I've heard it all from Han (Bennink) and some more.....That doesn't mean I had no respect for Misha. Oh no, far from that !!!   And yes, he wasn't nice to the Dutch public. That's my own experience. But, don't forget, Misha was one of the greatest Dutch experimental composers and piano players.  Right?

  

 

 

 

Edited March 3, 2017 by Cyril

[Homefromtheforest]

I was fortunate to see him many times in the 90s and early 00s in both the ICP band and smaller ad hoc groups.  I loved his piano playing!

[clifford_thornton]

me too.

Dolphy was a major figure in the development of modern jazz, but that doesn't mean that musician x, y or z has to like what he does. Last Date is an excellent record, yet it's also clear that Misha occupied a different zone with respect to saxophonists/reed players. As obstinate as he was, Misha seemed to prefer regular playing partners/groups and Dolphy, as structured as his improvisations and tunes were, might've seen this more as a blowing session opportunity. I got the feeling that Misha felt underestimated in this environment, so he threw a monkeywrench into the proceedings with "Hypochristmutreefuzz." I don't mind a healthy dose of absurdism/making fun/etc in my music and art so the games he played with the Dutch public (many out of the neo-Dada/Fluxus environment) -- even if some might've resulted in thumbed noses -- aren't things that I would find offensive.  Mostly, it resulted in music that I find endlessly rewarding.

[jlhoots]

Misha Mengelberg Qt. : Four In One (Dave Douglas, Brad Jones, Han Bennink)

R.I.P.

[ep1str0phy]

1 hour ago, clifford_thornton said:

me too.

Dolphy was a major figure in the development of modern jazz, but that doesn't mean that musician x, y or z has to like what he does. Last Date is an excellent record, yet it's also clear that Misha occupied a different zone with respect to saxophonists/reed players. As obstinate as he was, Misha seemed to prefer regular playing partners/groups and Dolphy, as structured as his improvisations and tunes were, might've seen this more as a blowing session opportunity. I got the feeling that Misha felt underestimated in this environment, so he threw a monkeywrench into the proceedings with "Hypochristmutreefuzz." I don't mind a healthy dose of absurdism/making fun/etc in my music and art so the games he played with the Dutch public (many out of the neo-Dada/Fluxus environment) -- even if some might've resulted in thumbed noses -- aren't things that I would find offensive.  Mostly, it resulted in music that I find endlessly rewarding.

First off, RIP Misha. I have a deep love for the Dutch innovators even if I came to much of that music through other channels (particularly South African and German music with which the ICP folks shared so much interstitial material). The latter day orchestra was largely responsible for acclimating my family to the notion that their son would be playing music for a living, my mother accompanying me to (first) a handful of colorful performances at the Guelph festival and (second) a pretty daring night at Yoshi's in Oakland.

I'm not sure if you could call either Misha's absurdist impulses or his penchant for sideways revivalism "populist" in any way, but I do think that these tendencies went and still go a long way toward normalizing the sometimes extremist practices of EFI. I used to play with a bass player who (in turn) used to play with Bennink, and said bass player scoffed when I used the word "virtuoso" to describe Bennink. I see where my bass player friend was coming from, but at the same time I do think that the ICP's inclination toward swing era grotesquerie and surreal showmanship does have a bit of virtuosity to it (in much the same way that Rahsaan Roland Kirk did).

Again, the superimposition of hard abstraction over overt idiomatic performance does huge work reframing Dutch free improvisation and experimentalism in a way that just isn't present in, say, the contemporary English or even German music--and, in Misha's case, it does a tremendous job of making both the more "inside" and more roving moments seem weirdly (and I use that word carefully) earnest. Who's Bridge is successful in a way that a lot of other idiomatic records waxed by free improv masters are not. 

As for the Dolphy connection--the hookup with the Dutch guys went only so far as the shared surrealist tendencies and the extreme stretching of swing and bebop vernacular. I think the big difference is that Dolphy never really sounds comical (or, rather, that Dolphy seems extraordinarily devoid of irony), whereas the Dutch guys always sound like they have a degree of self-awareness. I do think that Dolphy's level of self-seriousness is the reason that he could record something like Out to Lunch and make it sound truly, incontrovertibly valid, but it's also the thing that fosters this tremendous divide on Last Date. When they play "Epistrophy," Dolphy is playing the distorted image of a continuum that he had some active participation in; the Dutch guys are more "talking about" that continuum, and they never really intersect so much as subsume their respective personalities into some weird compromise (e.g., "You Don't Know What Love Is"). Compare with Mingus's European recordings and the tonal distinction is remarkable--Dolphy is actually something close to humorous in Mingus's music, and I think it's because both Dolphy and Mingus are able to engage with a degree of anger and caustic wit that probably had something to do with, well, being a Black American of a certain era.

[Steve Reynolds]

12 hours ago, rostasi said:

 

It really is incredible how great this is

[Hardbopjazz]

RIP.