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About ToonDist
by Kevin Whitehead
One reason the Dutch improvising scene has been vital and much-envied for three decades is that musicians have organized themselves, to create their own venues, win government support, and get their records distributed. That last impulse sparked Toondist, a consortium of independent labels, whose output demonstrates the amazing diversity and singularity of new music from the Netherlands. Take for example Fred van Duynhoven’s drum-set renditions of bird calls on P.J.J., or sound-poet Jaap Blonk’s superhuman repertoire of vocal sounds, documented in varied settings on Kontrans. Or Wolter Wierbos’s brash and brainy virtuoso trombone, heard solo (on DATA and ICP), and in Misha Mengelberg’s ICP Orchestra, one of Holland’s flagship ensembles, celebrated for its mix of plush melodies, rarefied improvising strategies, and collective rumbles.
Juxtaposition looms large in Dutch music—witness the myriad improvising strategies heard in close proximity on the Bimhuis label’s October Meeting CDs, or the vast range of improvising strategies available to tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius’s quartet with Han Bennink and Tristan Honsinger. The worlds of composing and improvising intersect in Holland, too, allowing for plausible hybrids. Consult the recorded works of pianist Guus Janssen, whose trio discs on GeestGronden (Zwik, Lighter) combine chamber-music subtleties with jazz-band thrust. Or Ig Henneman’s settings of modern Dutch poets (Indigo) or Emily Dickinson on Wig: her contemporary music is invigorated by interpreters who improvise, like ICP Orchestra saxophonist and clarinetist Ab Baars, whose own stark trio (on Wig or GeestGronden) combines structural clarity with blunt sonorities.
This heady atmosphere influences next-generation jazz composers like piano and cheap-synth wizard Cor Fuhler, and Michiel Braam, whose big band’s Goes Bonsai explores mutable forms that his musicians shape in performance, and who’s made one of the new century’s wittiest, dancingest piano/bass/drums records, Colors. The lyrical Italian clarinetist August Forti feels the pull of the theatrical humor that characterizes much Dutch music, with his quintet Gravitones (for T).
It’s difficult to generalize about music so broadly conceived, but the excitement of discovery is behind all of the above, and so much more from this cluster of labels. Featured along the way are such outstanding outlanders as Sunny Murray, Anthony Braxton, Herb Roberston, Mats Gustafsson, Lori Freedman, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Dresser, Frank Gratkowski, Oren Marshall, Michael Zerang, John Zorn . . . musicians drawn to the strength of Dutch musicians’ vision. Shouldn’t you know what they know?
--Kevin Whitehead
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