Making history

Rudy Koopmans died years before this writer landed behind the dikes, but when I lived in A’dam in the ’90s his name came up a lot. He seemed to’ve been on good terms with everybody, on a scene where personal relationships could be fractious. In death, he became one of my primary tutors on Dutch improvised music, whose views helped shape my own.

How that happened: The first trove of documentation I read when I started researching the history of the scene was Donemus’s occasional (and sadly discontinued) periodical Key Notes, because it was in English. Mostly devoted to composition, it frequently displayed a healthy regard for new improvised music. The journal commissioned new pieces (disclosure: I wrote a couple), but part of its content was translations of articles from the Dutch dailies and music magazines. The aim was to create broader awareness of lowland developments abroad (more across the Channel than the ocean, to judge by its tea-time English). You could read about Schat’s tone clock, Asko or Andriesssen’s latest, or Altena or Termos, decoded. In its early years in the ’70s, Key Notes gave Koopmans good play, giving this student of Dutch music basic orientation on a range of subjects: Misha’s conservatory days, ICP’s music theater, de Volhardings’s collectivist struggles, newcomer Guus Janssen, Hoketus. Koopmans’ writings in KN and elsewhere had a profound impact on New Dutch Swing (and, I’d hazard, on the Buzelin/Hubregtse bio of Breuker).

But Koopmans was no mere cheerleader; he had insights into motive that helped him hear where the music or its ideology came from. He distinguished the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s or Sun Ra’s ritual pageantry from Breuker’s theatricality: Willem’s was Brechtian, about ‘alienation techniques’. (Ah—he’d read his Mike de Ruyter.) Exactly. And now, so say all of us.

To a great extent, the first reporters at the scene shape the narrative for everyone who shows up later. That’s the case with the Dutch-impro story, at least as told so far. So: Rudy: Duizend miljoen dankjes en bedanktjes. [Should sound like Kapitein Haddock, don’t parse it for grammar.]

He was also hands-on assistance to the music, notably when helping Breuker’s brat pack take over the SJIN in 1970, wresting it from supporters of Hilversum’s Hobby Orchestra. That helped kick-start the movement that’d call the world’s attention to ‘Dutch jazz’—but it also tipped the money (and the story) solidly toward Amsterdam.

Rudy was, I gather, a real Mokum guy, but don’t blame him for the grachtengordel being my own book’s bull’s-eye: I never had illusions about grappling with a whole country’s music (its title aside). Still, Amsterdammers can be like New Yorkers. Their scene is so rich, gives folks so much to listen to (or write about), worthy players elsewhere get less attention than they deserve. And since the big papers were lined up on Wibautstraat…

Consider, for example, this head-scratcher: Pierre Courbois didn’t win the Boy Edgar Prize until 2008—although he was the first Dutch free player many outside Holland ever heard. I’d first encountered him on LPs by English soprano player Lol Coxhill—like the oddball Toverbal Sweet from Maassluis ’71: Soft Machiney free-fusoid trio with Jasper van ’t Hof riffing like a minimalist on organ. Courbois’s 1968 Free Music Quintet album on ESP has likewise worn well. It has a sort of madcap energy that parallels some early Art Ensemble—and has future WBK cutup Boy Raaymakers on trumpet. Early on I also heard some of the drummer’s many sides, starting in the mid-’60s, with multi-instrumentalist Gunter Hampel, whose long neglect across the eastern border mirrors his own.

Courbois didn’t/doesn’t fit easily into the Koopmanian Amsterdam narrative, which ripples out from the original ICP trio. But Pierre had his own smart take on modern tacks. With the Free Music Quintet in 1968, his rolling tom thunder and loose/firm pulsation suggest a personalized amalgam of Milford Graves and Sunny Murray (though for all I know he was thinking of Buddy Rich).

Rudy Koopmans, I hear, would later tell the tale of a 1968 Boy Edgar juror walking out in a huff when Han Bennink got the prize instead of Courbois. I’m also informed that recent appreciations praise Pierre as the one and only master of the brushes. He’s good with the flyswatters, no question. But is someone suggesting that Bennink, Johnny Engels and Martin van Duynhoven aren’t?

Picking favorite players isn’t like selecting your party’s presidential candidate; no need to choose just one. The trap set has room for many heroes. Jazz folk who can’t find five drummers in their own land who wield the brushes in a way that meets their approval may need to get out more.

My point is this: Pierre Courbois: yes. Long overdue.