Dance of the Penguin

Fourteen years after Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s first Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, this overstuffed and regularly updated paperback is the standard reference work on jazz in print; the seventh edition of 2004 runs to 1725 pages. Like anyone who regularly consults it I find much to grumble about, though I’m sympathetic to the myriad problems created by assembling such a massive volume item-by-item; I don’t really mind that they’ve never done a global fix to reconcile recordings made at the BIM Huis, BIM-Huis and Bimhuis. No such guide will ever be perfect.

Recently I combed through the latest edition to see how Dutch artists fare. The authors, who are English and a mite overly chatty at times, acknowledge that even this block of a book can’t include everything.

So who makes the cut? Some young bebop-oriented players and face-of-Holland improvisers – if not enough of either – plus a few ringers. The Dutch Swing College Band makes its Penguin debut: ‘a unit with its own take on the bridge between the classic traditional style and a more swing-styled mainstream.’ Exactly. Soesja Citroen gets the kind of praise that’s got to pay off in bookings: her Sings Thelonious Monk is ‘hugely exciting… worthy of the widest notice.’

There are also blurb-ready raves for Michiel Borstlap’s Sextet Live! (‘a remarkable concert… terrific band… remarkably fresh’) and for Jesse van Ruller (‘flowing, efficient jazz guitar… wit and intelligence… something very special’), and Yuri Honing is hailed as Holland’s second most-famous saxophonist, after Candy Dulfer. (His Seven gets a top 4 stars.) But Angelo Verploegen, Eric Vloeimans, Tobias Delius, Chris Abelen, Sean Bergin, Denise Jannah, Rein de Graaff, Cees Slinger? Nix.

There are good words for Eric van der Westen’s octet, which, being Dutch and mid-sized, gets pointlessly compared to the Breuker Kollektief. For Cook and Morton, Willem Breuker remains the Dutch touchstone – their page-and-a-half discussion is detailed enough to note the passing of Peter Barkema – and few critics read his music so astutely, hearing it as constructed out of stuff found in the blast craters of postwar culture: ‘jazz, special effects, classical forms, jingles and church tunes,’ Kurt Weill and you-had-to-be-there theatricality. Spot-on. But then, consistent and well-documented artists like Willem may stand the best chance in such a piecemeal format.

Likely because Misha Mengelberg’s documentation is more haphazard, they don’t get him at all, sketching him as a legit composer ‘in the Louis Andriessen mould,’ mightily battling serialism, whose pieces for the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra ‘are very much in the line of a post-war Dutch style in which jazz is almost as dominant an element as serial procedures’ – go on, read it again, it won’t help. Still: ICP’s Monk and Herbie Nichols program ‘makes light of the difficulties in both composers’ work,’ elegantly put, and Oh, My Dog! gets 4 stars. (Guus Janssen gets credit as a pianist – Zwik, ‘tremendous’ but they don’t seem to notice he’s a composer at all.)

And Han Bennink? He’s ‘the extraordinary man’: with ICP, ‘in complete control, even as he tinkers at the edge of chaos,’ while with Eric Boeren he’s “his usual over-powerful self,’ setting tempos a little too fast. ICP’s Ab Baars, identified as ‘a sideman with Maarten Altena,’ is chided for solos which ‘reach a spurious climax of increasingly harsh repetitions.’ I don’t buy the assessment, but recognize what they describe. They don’t put it so, but Ab’s music comes off the very stereotype of Dutch extremism: ‘dry and stone-faced… drear and mirthless… even more radical… pretty hard going.’ And then a last-minute reprieve: Party at the Bimhuis ‘well worth attending.’

They do however get Michael Moore. With Alex Maguire, he’s ‘quizzically lyrical… popping question marks and inverted commas on top of even the simplest melodies,’ and Clusone 3 was ‘full of dash, mockery, and a kind of hard-bitten melancholy,’ which are Moore-an virtues for sure.

And Clusone’s Ernst Reijseger ‘knows when to enjoy an idea, and when to dispense with it.’ Me too.