In Italian and other languages, differently
from French and English, the terms to indicate a musician ‘playing’ are
different from that of an activity implying a game. Same with acting. This, in
a way, is a distortion. Misha Mengelberg is a musician that, as Cecil Talyor
would have put it, “can play”. But Mengelberg is a serious musician or one of
those who love to come back to childhood as each one of us should?
During a concert in Italy, at the beginning of
the new millennium, Mengelberg was, at a certain moment, singing like a child,
almost out of tune – or indifferent to tune. You can find an interview about
that performance at
the following link – even if unluckily for you the interview it’s in
Italian, but it’s only because I don’t want to be perceived as disrespectful.
Fact is that, Misha Mengelberg believed in
music as John Cage believed in it. Music has a childish quality in itself, that
is the sound of freedom. If Lou Reed said once that listening to music is like
to be in your mother’s womb, with the drums mimicking your mother’s heartbeat,
for centuries in the western world the rules of music were almost at the point
of destroying the mother and the children, suffocating them with rules.
Do you remember Chopin’s Nocturnes? I own a
beautiful double CD with Maurizio Pollini playing that incredible music. But
for Chopin’s contemporaries, that music was really only shit. Because it was
music for piano, and the piano was the instrument where women were performing
music at home. So, how some culturally evolved men were supposed to loose their
time with things more suited for women?
Things are different nowadays, but even if
concerts for piano solo are held in my city in prestigious theatres, there is a
sacred quality with (classical) music that makes people like John Cage and
Misha Mengelberg wanting to play with it, to disrupt that facade, that mask,
and go deeper to the heart of both the musician and the listener.
More prosaically, as I wrote four years ago one
week after Misha Mengelberg died aged 81, our pianist was born in Ukranie in
1935, son of the Dutch conductor Karel Mengelberg. His family moved to the
Netherlands in the late 1930s and the young Mengelberg started taking piano
lessons at the age of five. Subsequently he studied architecture briefly before
entering the Royal Conservatory at the Hague.
Influenced by Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington
and the above mentioned John Cage, Mengelberg in 1964 participated to a session
of music with, among the others, drummer Han Bennink – who will become one of
his lifetime collaborators – and multireedist Eric Dolphy, for the record of
the latter titled “Last Date”. It’s like the perfect joining link between the
US and Europe, as far as improvised music.
As many of his peers and colleagues, Mengelberg
recorded a huge variety of live performances. The one we refer in this review
is a solo performance at piano coming from a cassette labeled as “17-18-4-88
berlijn solo”, but in fact it has been established that the record comes from a
solo performance in 1987. The music is different from the assertions of the US
free jazz and avant garde music from the 1960s and 1970s, you can smell
something coming from Fluxus or european avant art and theatre. At the
beginning.
The record is divided in four parts, two
parts per set for a couple of sets, to be accurate, from 15 to 23 minutes each.
At the beginning we can hear the piano has been prepared as Cage would do, but
the music, spanning from the lower to the medium registries, becomes after a
brief introduction a little excited just to come back to what it seems to be an
attempt to create assertions who are interrupted, hammered, deconstructed.
Finally the hummed monologue becomes like
pearls whose fall resonates on the floor, then the perpared part of the piano
comes in the foreground, with the strings hummed and dragged, then again we
hear a small melody reminiscing some baroque music, just before an attempt to
deconstruct the melody itself, just like Marc Ribot does sometimes with his
guitar – it would be interesting to track how the two banks of the ocean have
influenced each other and how.
At about minute 8 Mengelberg tries to mix some
assertive chords with more subtle excursions on the keyboard, then for quite a
while silence fill the room just before a come back to this mix of melody and
humming, giving us that feeling possibly Roland Barthes was referring to in his
La Chambre Claire when talking about the “punctus”. We go on with many
permutations until the end of the first part of the section, not without some
nice occasions to hear Mengelberg pressing, pushing and crushing, so to speak,
his keys.
Second part of the first section opens with a
series of violent strumming on the lower registry of the piano, like we’re
accustomed to listen to in Diamanda Galàs playing in her beautiful but haunting
Defixiones, but instead of adding a raucous and grasping voice, at a certain
point we hear another deconstructed melody – in fact it seems like a mix
between a blues and a classical tune, which is no surprise since as a
muisicologist pointed out in a recent number of the magazine Musica Jazz,
Thelonious Monk himself was keen on taking inspiration from classical music for
the blues pieces he wrote.
Obviously Mengelberg music isn’t devoid of more
intimate, reflexive moments, but if the influence of Monk in these moments is
clear and goes well beyond the quotation, which is present anyway, straight to
the feeling of that music, one wonders, at a certain point, if it’s true that
there are differences between the Western and the Eastern banks of the
Atlantic, since the elements put to cook together seem to be almost the same.
We’re at almost half of the second part and a
deconstructed ragtime appears, magnificently interspersed with a strumming on
the medium and upper registries. As far as it seems, the music of Mengelberg
from the beginning of this album hits us because of the ability of his creator
to put together different styles and different emotional temperatures giving us
the feeling that something almost new is coming from that clash.
After a brief applause, the last ten minutes of
this section are dedicated again to the music of Monk, but it’s a Monk that we
still know revisited by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, and so it’s a Monk who
lives of different interpretations, as his music would have gone well far
beyond his creator’s death. Strumming on prepared chords occupy a consistent
part of this section of the record, just before coming back to a deconstructed
melody.
If the first set was equally divided into
‘decostructing Baroque’ and ‘deconstructing Monk’, the second set sees
Mengelberg engaging in an attempt to put his hands on the living matter of
classical music interspersed with more modern experimentations, using a similar
‘method’ to the one described above – that’s why we don’t describe it almost
second-by-second as we did before.
My advice today is to listen carefully to these
sets, available through
Bandcamp, because if it is true that on a first level the European Avant
Garde music from the 1970s on is more keen on playing with the sound matter and
how it has been hystorically defined, while the US Avant Garde is more keen on
creating new shapes and forms – think about Braxton and Mitchell, at a deeper
level you will find in fact similar concept in both – aren’t Mal Waldron and
Steve Lacy from the US?
And if there are different temperatures and
general architectural concepts to differentiate the two currents, on a deeper
level the bricks are the same, even if layered differently. I won’t loose time
in affirming that, being mostly African-American the music coming from the US,
it is more keen on illustrating how to survive in an hostile environment
finding out the inner strenght to survive, while the European musicians find
themselves more at ease with playing with culture and ideal constructions
putting them out of context in order to see what they can become.
Because, in fact, in both cases the nucleus is
an attempt to say something different from the mass thinking, the thinking of
Power, in order to establish a new, spiritual order, that of freedom. And if
Don Cherry encouraged Peter Brotzmann to go ahead with his music, we cannot let
records like this unlistened, because their story is, mostly, our own story. A
history of freedom, an attempt to a better life for each one, the search for
new forms of music and life.
