Herman Open Ear

First reaction to hearing Benjamin Herman won the Boy Edgar: good pick. I didn’t get to know him while living in Amsterdam in the 90s - we’d met, and he seems like a nice fella - but I liked his attitude. He was getting around back then. On a Sunday evening late in 1997 he’d be at the Bimhuis, playing big band bop with Henk Meutgeert’s New Concert Band; Monday he’d be at Café Meander, leading a few of the same musicians in his own New Cool Collective Big Band, playing for dancing. The cheerful, bluesy stamp of Eddie Harris’s Chicago funk was all over the charts and the saxophone section. The music wasn’t brilliant exactly too many percussionists milling around to too little effect but it made me feel good to hear anyone do an astute salute to EH in NL, and to see a jazz musician so enjoy getting young folks up and gyrating.

Ten months later Herman was in Groningen playing a set of Misha Mengelberg tunes with a pianoless trio at the Jazzmarathon. Makes sense: Misha also honors the pleasure principle, in his playing and composing both. You could certainly hear the effect his tunes had on Herman, who’d been playing casuals with the master for a few years already, and dug the way his tunes (like Monk’s) shift an improviser’s perspective. (Years later Herman would record an all-Jaki Byard disc: same neighborhood.)

On the concert cd Benjamin Herman Plays Misha Mengelberg you can hear him zero in on the velocity-inducing repeating rhythms at the heart of Mengelberg’s jazz pieces, staccato tattoos ready-made for Herman’s biting alto attack. To my ears, he has the spirit of a 1950s alto player, by which I mean he’s found his own space in the shadow of Charlie Parker; the swing and squawk in his lithe, airborne tone has traces of a Kansas City accent going back to Pres and Buster Smith. You wanna fly as an alto player, that’s the way to go.

The spring after that Groningen gig – by now it’s 1999 – he flew to New York for an organ group date with Larry Goldings, Jesse van Ruller and BH’s personal idol Idris Muhammad on drums. And had them record the theme to Hawaii Five-O.

That’s what I like about Ben (do people still call him that?) Herman: the willingness to confound categories, mix with all sorts of folks and scenes, and get into the spirit of any material. He’s no snob, likes retro trash culture: cheap sci-fi, chick-and-sportscar album covers, pin-up girls. But he’s not too retro. If anything he personifies that new breed of post-jazzwars, conservatory-trained musicians, who’ve gotten way beyond their teachers’ ancient feuds, pursuing any music that appeals. But Herman often shows a better sense than some contemporaries do of how to make convincing music across the map. His taste serves him well on that score.

Take, for contrast, the Edison-winning Heterogeneity and recent sequel The Itch. The former has Misha guesting here and there, mostly on Herman’s chipper, catchy tunes which (like his Monk quotes) make the pianist feel and sound right at home. The shifting line-up between and within pieces makes for an effectively varied program; heterogeneity is built in. For The Itch, he teams ICP’s Ernst Glerum and Han Bennink with – I didn’t see this coming – guitarist Anton Goudsmit, in peak, raunchy form: it’s a quartet of rhythm players. Makes me think of Charlie Parker again: that 1944 Tiny Grimes jump-band session that gave us Romance without Finance. Of the Herman records I’ve heard, The Itch gets deepest in the groove. And dig his pliable timbre: on the Chicago shuffle Do the Beach his deep-blue bent notes sound like Junior Wells’s harmonica. The values are old, the treatment fresh. The other day I was trying to remember who he reminded me of, this likable leader of an unruly big band, able to work with Hilversum cats and improvised music kingpins, guy with an open mind and open ears, a uniter not a divider who gets results. So obvious: Boy Edgar.