Homemade music: Houseboat party starting

Where do musicians play most often? On stage, in rehearsal halls, in recording studios? Unless they’re on some never-ending tour—which jazz musicians probably aren’t—more than anywhere else, they play at home. I’ve been in and out of musicians’ digs in Holland for years, and few players have any formal practice regimen I can discern. They play whenever they like, or whenever they can. A pianist rehearses a new piece in five minute bursts, between adjudicating sibling squabbles and supervising the orderly distribution of crayons. She’s minding the kids because her husband has ducked out back to his studio, where he warms up his horn. In another town, a drummer pushes back from the family dinner table, grab sticks and a practice pad, and for the next few hours, he’s quietly playing any time he’s seated, even in front of the TV.

A saxophonist is talking in his kitchen, and suddenly darts out of the room as if to fetch something. Then a door slams down the hall, and 30 seconds later he’s playing some old standard that came up in conversation. He brings the melody back under his fingers, courteously reacquaints himself with the changes, then improvises off the tune even as he addresses technical concerns: wide-interval leaps, say.

Like that drummer, he blurs the line between playing and practicing. They give added meaning to the term “the practice of improvisation”. But like our pianist they also blur the line between making music and just living your life. Home is where all those boundaries are most fluid. It’s also where musicians get some of their best ideas, and get creative. Consider Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes—private music so odd at times, 40 years later Columbia still hasn’t put most if it out. Lennie Tristano recorded much singular music at his home studios in New York. What did the neighbors think when he was putting together the multi-tracked “Descent into the Maelstrom” or speed-manipulated “Line Up”? His solo piano masterwork The New Tristano was also homemade.

I got to thinking about all that, listening to Deining (DolFijn), recorded on Wolter Wierbos’s houseboat on the Amstel, just downriver from Amsterdam’s Sarphatistraat. On four nights in July 2006, he had various friends in to make some semi-public house-concert music in the space where he usually plays alone.

Wierbos is a lifelong improviser; even as a kid he’d just play whatever he wanted instead of doing practice exercises. The trombonist never embraced the role of bandleader; so many talented leaders hired him to play such varied music, he didn’t need to showcase himself. Even when he assembles groups for annual dOeK festivals, sometimes he’ll just graft himself onto someone else’s band or concept.

All those choices are echoed on Deining. He plays improvised dialogues with bassist Wilbert de Joode, and duets with Franky Douglas where Wierbos riffs on the guitarist’s floating or twisty tunes. On two versions of “Peer’s Counting Song” by Wolter’s longtime boss Misha Mengelberg, trombone corkscrews or divebombs around Ab Baars’s clarinet or Mary Oliver’s viola. Those fellow ICPers carry the melody; Wierbos, as if hearing the tune for the first time, barely alights on it, except to dovetail briefly with Han Bennink’s sopranino sax. (It’s always a little shock to hear how well Bennink plays saxophone.)

There is some excellent improvising here, and its tone matches the setting: it’s informal but never sloppy or inattentive. Public/private/practice boundaries are fluid. On “Op de werf,” Han temporarily abandons traps to wheeze out “Silent Night” on harmonica, bringing out the instrument’s humblest, most homespun associations. (It also brings back the old free music conundrum: if you’re free to play anything, are you allowed to play a written tune?)

The lion’s share of this mostly duo program is given over to Wierbos and De Joode, and their impromptus are beautifully balanced and detailed, and rhythmically incisive. An ascending bass lick on the opener, recalling “Haitian Fight Song,” reminds you Wilbert’s plosive attack can stand comparison to Mingus’s. He also has a way of interrupting such power-riffs with a furious strum that knocks the beat sideways—without ever throwing off Wierbos.

As noted, Wolter’s house floats, and like all boats it responds to the rhythms of the waters. Slow undulating swells on this duo’s “Fuik” and Douglas’s dreamy “Visions” intimate the subtle influences of the slosh. But we risk making this casual music appear too site-specific. None of it would sound remotely out of place at a typical improvisers’ Tuesday gig at A’dam community center Zaal 100. Then again, a number of people live at that establishment. For them all these weekly gatherings are house concerts. And for musicians like these who’ve spent dozens if not hundreds of Tuesday nights there, the place is a proverbial second home.