The Winds of October

Ask me what’s the best festival I’ve ever attended, the answer now would be the same as I’d’ve given in November 1991: the then just-concluded 10-day October Meeting held at the Bimhuis and STEIM and Cristofori in Amsterdam and satellite venues around the country.

There were only two such meetings, the first in 1987, though as Wim Janssen once pointed out, they’d made such an impact, later on some people thought there’d been more. The beauty part that made such a dent: to a great extent the musicians called the shots.

The basic idea was, the Bimhuis’s Huub van Riel and NOS’s Piet Hein van de Poel commissioned a few big projects from diverse composers: Horace Tapscott, Gerry Hemingway, Richard Teitelbaum, (and in ’87) Guus Janssen, Cecil Taylor and John Zorn. Then, they’d negotiate with the composers to assemble a pool of improvisers—dozens strong, including Dutch, American, English (like Evan Parker), French (Louis Sclavis), Russian (Vladimir Tolkachev), South African (Claude Deppa) musos—to play one or more of those big pieces that would anchor an evening’s program. Then as long as everyone was there, they’d mix the players up in (mostly) small improvising groups—like Derek Bailey’s Company weeks except (as Steve Beresford observed) Derek tried to keep separate people who wanted to play together. The October Meetings were all about musicians finding each other.

Indeed, the ’91 Meeting I wrote about for Down Beat (and de Volkskrant) quickly became an improvisers convention by the Oude Schans. (The electronic composers huddled over at STEIM.) At the Bimhuis that long week, the cafe was open during the day, with a lunch buffet, and musicians came by even when they didn’t have rehearsals scheduled. Every day there was a house full of people able and eager to discuss improvised music. Old friends caught up, and new alliances got made: I’ve enjoyed our talk, let’s play together tonight. And they would. And sometimes the music was very, very good. (Disclosure: much later, I co-produced two low-profile CDs of music from the ’91 meeting for the Bimhuis.)

One key reason it went so well: the improvised sets were of no fixed length. If you and your new compadres said all you had to say in 10 minutes, you didn’t have to grind out another 30. Someone else was always ready to go on.

Van Riel and van de Poel produced the official daily schedule, which usually appeared some time in the afternoon, duly eliciting amazement: Steve Lacy and Greetje Bijma tonight! But they accommodated requests, too, even—or especially—spur-of-the-moment ones. One night that was light on trumpets, Herb Robertson convened a sort of improvising drum-and-bugle corps on stage, 20 minutes after he’d had the idea. Everybody wanted to play with everyone else—except Paul Bley, who did his best to avoid being on stage at the same time as his nominal partners. He’d cut a deal that he could release any of his stuff recorded at the festival, and perversely used it as an opportunity to record solo.

That Meeting had a ripple effect on a quartet of North American visitors Four years later, I moved to Amsterdam, thirsty for more of the improvising scene to which the festival was an extended introduction. Violist Mary Oliver, all but a stranger to improvised music when George Lewis brought her along to play on his big piece Changing with the Times, got bit by the bug, and also immigrated in 1995, to play with Ig Henneman and eventually ICP. Ken Pickering, who programs the Vancouver jazz festival, started scheduling mixed European-North American improvising ensembles drawn from various bands converging at the fest. Later John Corbett (along with Ken Vandermark) started booking an annual festival at Chicago’s Empty Bottle; every night they’d have a “surprise set” typically pairing visitors and locals.

Both of those initiatives also led to a lot of good music, yet each missed an essential aspect of the October Meeting experience: that without having to produce it themselves, the musicians had (at least some) control. For example: Sean Bergin had declined a conventional set; instead he staged his own mini-meetings on the little bandstand in the bar during breaks in the main programming, when ad hoc quartets and quintets played his Kids Mysteries repertoire. It was as if the music never wanted to stop. Ten days of this! Listeners came and kept coming back.

But there were no sequels. The Bimhuis tried to float another, but the concept proved to be a mysteriously hard sell. One funding body passed, saying the proposed third Meeting seemed incompletely planned out. Which was exactly the point. Now really: Doesn’t this sound like something worth doing again?