Biography
Renowned keyboardist Misha Mengelberg directed the ICP Orchestra of the Netherlands with authority while also shaping the creative music movement that incorporated jazz influences across the country from the 1960s forward. He appeared most regularly beside percussionist Han Bennink, began fusing composed material with improvisation throughout that decade, and earned status among the foremost jazz pianists through his mature and singular approach. Although his lengthy activity started prior to his work on Eric Dolphy’s Last Date and extended across subsequent decades, Mengelberg registered chiefly with avant-garde jazz listeners and remained far less recognized by the wider jazz public.
Born in Kiev during 1935 to parents immersed in music—his mother a harpist and his father a noted pianist and conductor—Mengelberg moved with his family to Amsterdam once the political climate turned against his outspoken activist parents. He took up both chess, his preferred pastime, and the piano well before turning ten. His initial keyboard explorations involved improvisation followed by boogie-woogie, and his first substantial jazz exposures arrived in the late 1940s through Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, the latter then undervalued by many local players yet deemed by Mengelberg the most harmonically compelling jazz musician he had encountered.
Son of the exacting conductor Karel Mengelberg and nephew of Willem, Mengelberg briefly pursued architecture before enrolling at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague to concentrate on composition and classical studies. There he trained under several teachers including his father’s associate Kees van Baaren. Unable to execute rapid passages—a constraint he later stated persisted—he folded the limitation into his personal style, while his student works remained conceptual and experimental, failing to satisfy his professors. Attendance at a Darmstadt program introduced him to John Cage’s music, expanding his thinking toward a contemporary experimental compositional method that he never fully relinquished after shifting focus to jazz; his pieces retained an ironic character, as illustrated by the early-1970s work whose English title is “With the Very Polite Greetings of the Camel,” performed by sawing a chair into camel form with orchestral accompaniment.
Future associates Han Bennink and saxophonist Willem Breuker, later leader of the Kollektief, first encountered Mengelberg’s playing near the time he won the 1959 jazz competition at Loosdrecht. A few years afterward he met his lifelong partner Amy Chattelin in The Hague, where he also first heard saxophonist Piet Noordijk. The early 1960s brought a quartet featuring Bennink and Noordijk with rotating bassists including Gary Peacock, plus a trio that supported Johnny Griffin in 1963 and, the following May, accompanied Eric Dolphy on several engagements including the concert issued as Last Date.
His debut leader date, The Misja Mengelberg Quartet as Heard at the Newport Jazz Festival 1966, was captured during an initial visit to the United States. Around that period he received the Wessel Ilcken Prize and served as judge at a local competition where he first heard the young saxophonist Willem Breuker. Later in the decade Mengelberg joined Bennink and Breuker in launching the ICP label and collective, whose name derived from his phrase “instant composing.” ICP quickly functioned as an umbrella for varied ensembles throughout its first decade. Divergent views on live performance, the organization’s purpose, and other musical matters soon led to lineups containing either Breuker or Mengelberg but not both; Breuker favored prepared material and rehearsals while Mengelberg preferred instant composing, and the two differed on voting rights and approaches to music theater, which ICP explored in the late 1960s. Mengelberg also performed less frequently than either colleague. Consequently each led separate ICP concerts, with Bennink—who remained neutral—appearing in both though more often with Mengelberg.
Beginning in 1969 Mengelberg and Bennink formed a trio with visiting British saxophonist Evan Parker, followed by a quartet with reedist John Tchicai and guitarist Derek Bailey that toured briefly and recorded two albums from 1970 to 1971. Months earlier Parker and Bailey had been joined by saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, trombonist Paul Rutherford, and saxophonist Peter Bennink for the septet album Groupcomposing. During this span Mengelberg and Bennink also recorded an untitled duo for ICP. Together with Breuker they helped reform Dutch government support for jazz, securing regular grants administered in part by musicians through the organization BIM and establishing the performance space BIMHuis. Mengelberg became BIM president and, by 1972, artistic director of STEIM, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, founded with several others including pianist Louis Andriessen, a conservatory friend and son of composer Hendrik Andriessen. Musicians pooled equipment acquired through grants and, via STEIM, offered instruction to interested parties; Mengelberg taught a course on electronics in the early 1970s and remained director until the decade’s end. He later relinquished the BIM presidency as well, though he continued educational work by conducting a weekly open composition workshop at a conservatory.
The early 1970s also produced the definitive split of ICP, with musicians aligning with either Mengelberg or Breuker and ultimately forming the Willem Breuker Kollektief and the ICP Orchestra. The latter maintained a fluctuating roster for several years, during which only Mengelberg, Bennink, and American tuba player Larry Fishkind remained constant members. Rotating participants included Brötzmann, Tchicai, cellist Tristan Honsinger, and others before the personnel stabilized around Mengelberg, Bennink, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, reedist Michael Moore, bassist Ernst Glerum, cellist Ernst Reijseger, saxophonist Ab Baars, trumpeter Thomas Heberer, and, intermittently, Honsinger. With the expanded group the principle of instant composing evolved into conducted improvisation, Mengelberg directing from the piano. Recordings appeared infrequently yet encompass ICP—Tentet in Berlin (SAJ, 1978), Japan Japon (DIW, 1982), Jubilee Varia (Hatology, 1999), Oh, My Dog! (ICP, 2001), Aan & Uit (ICP, 2004), Weer Is Een Dag Voorbij (ICP, 2005), and Live at the BIMhuis (ICP, 2010). Mengelberg also paid tribute to Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols with the ensemble and issued leader recordings on leading avant-garde labels such as Hat, FMP, and Soul Note, among them Who’s Bridge (Avant, 1994), Two Days in Chicago (Hat, 1999), and Four in One (Songlines, 2001). During the 1998 Chicago sessions that produced the Hat album, Mengelberg and several Dutch musicians including Ab Baars joined prominent Chicago and American avant-garde figures such as AACM tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and MacArthur Fellow Ken Vandermark.
Across his career Mengelberg worked with numerous leading European avant-garde and American free-jazz musicians. He participated in the Dutch ensemble that performed with Cecil Taylor in 1967, around the same period he engaged in absurdist music theater; he played with foremost British, German, and other European artists; and he supplied compositions to Alexander von Schlippenbach’s ensembles including the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. Beyond his long association with Han Bennink he performed regularly with Wim T. Schippers from 1974 to 1982. He also sustained one of the most reliable creative jazz orchestras for several decades. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the ICP Orchestra toured steadily, delivering many anticipated and well-received concerts in North America. The 2000s, however, brought the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, gradually limiting his live and recorded activity. In 2014 the ICP Orchestra issued its first album without him, East of the Sun, featuring Guus Janssen on piano yet incorporating several Mengelberg compositions. Misha Mengelberg died in Amsterdam on March 3, 2017, at the age of 81.
Born in Kiev during 1935 to parents immersed in music—his mother a harpist and his father a noted pianist and conductor—Mengelberg moved with his family to Amsterdam once the political climate turned against his outspoken activist parents. He took up both chess, his preferred pastime, and the piano well before turning ten. His initial keyboard explorations involved improvisation followed by boogie-woogie, and his first substantial jazz exposures arrived in the late 1940s through Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, the latter then undervalued by many local players yet deemed by Mengelberg the most harmonically compelling jazz musician he had encountered.
Son of the exacting conductor Karel Mengelberg and nephew of Willem, Mengelberg briefly pursued architecture before enrolling at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague to concentrate on composition and classical studies. There he trained under several teachers including his father’s associate Kees van Baaren. Unable to execute rapid passages—a constraint he later stated persisted—he folded the limitation into his personal style, while his student works remained conceptual and experimental, failing to satisfy his professors. Attendance at a Darmstadt program introduced him to John Cage’s music, expanding his thinking toward a contemporary experimental compositional method that he never fully relinquished after shifting focus to jazz; his pieces retained an ironic character, as illustrated by the early-1970s work whose English title is “With the Very Polite Greetings of the Camel,” performed by sawing a chair into camel form with orchestral accompaniment.
Future associates Han Bennink and saxophonist Willem Breuker, later leader of the Kollektief, first encountered Mengelberg’s playing near the time he won the 1959 jazz competition at Loosdrecht. A few years afterward he met his lifelong partner Amy Chattelin in The Hague, where he also first heard saxophonist Piet Noordijk. The early 1960s brought a quartet featuring Bennink and Noordijk with rotating bassists including Gary Peacock, plus a trio that supported Johnny Griffin in 1963 and, the following May, accompanied Eric Dolphy on several engagements including the concert issued as Last Date.
His debut leader date, The Misja Mengelberg Quartet as Heard at the Newport Jazz Festival 1966, was captured during an initial visit to the United States. Around that period he received the Wessel Ilcken Prize and served as judge at a local competition where he first heard the young saxophonist Willem Breuker. Later in the decade Mengelberg joined Bennink and Breuker in launching the ICP label and collective, whose name derived from his phrase “instant composing.” ICP quickly functioned as an umbrella for varied ensembles throughout its first decade. Divergent views on live performance, the organization’s purpose, and other musical matters soon led to lineups containing either Breuker or Mengelberg but not both; Breuker favored prepared material and rehearsals while Mengelberg preferred instant composing, and the two differed on voting rights and approaches to music theater, which ICP explored in the late 1960s. Mengelberg also performed less frequently than either colleague. Consequently each led separate ICP concerts, with Bennink—who remained neutral—appearing in both though more often with Mengelberg.
Beginning in 1969 Mengelberg and Bennink formed a trio with visiting British saxophonist Evan Parker, followed by a quartet with reedist John Tchicai and guitarist Derek Bailey that toured briefly and recorded two albums from 1970 to 1971. Months earlier Parker and Bailey had been joined by saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, trombonist Paul Rutherford, and saxophonist Peter Bennink for the septet album Groupcomposing. During this span Mengelberg and Bennink also recorded an untitled duo for ICP. Together with Breuker they helped reform Dutch government support for jazz, securing regular grants administered in part by musicians through the organization BIM and establishing the performance space BIMHuis. Mengelberg became BIM president and, by 1972, artistic director of STEIM, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, founded with several others including pianist Louis Andriessen, a conservatory friend and son of composer Hendrik Andriessen. Musicians pooled equipment acquired through grants and, via STEIM, offered instruction to interested parties; Mengelberg taught a course on electronics in the early 1970s and remained director until the decade’s end. He later relinquished the BIM presidency as well, though he continued educational work by conducting a weekly open composition workshop at a conservatory.
The early 1970s also produced the definitive split of ICP, with musicians aligning with either Mengelberg or Breuker and ultimately forming the Willem Breuker Kollektief and the ICP Orchestra. The latter maintained a fluctuating roster for several years, during which only Mengelberg, Bennink, and American tuba player Larry Fishkind remained constant members. Rotating participants included Brötzmann, Tchicai, cellist Tristan Honsinger, and others before the personnel stabilized around Mengelberg, Bennink, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, reedist Michael Moore, bassist Ernst Glerum, cellist Ernst Reijseger, saxophonist Ab Baars, trumpeter Thomas Heberer, and, intermittently, Honsinger. With the expanded group the principle of instant composing evolved into conducted improvisation, Mengelberg directing from the piano. Recordings appeared infrequently yet encompass ICP—Tentet in Berlin (SAJ, 1978), Japan Japon (DIW, 1982), Jubilee Varia (Hatology, 1999), Oh, My Dog! (ICP, 2001), Aan & Uit (ICP, 2004), Weer Is Een Dag Voorbij (ICP, 2005), and Live at the BIMhuis (ICP, 2010). Mengelberg also paid tribute to Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols with the ensemble and issued leader recordings on leading avant-garde labels such as Hat, FMP, and Soul Note, among them Who’s Bridge (Avant, 1994), Two Days in Chicago (Hat, 1999), and Four in One (Songlines, 2001). During the 1998 Chicago sessions that produced the Hat album, Mengelberg and several Dutch musicians including Ab Baars joined prominent Chicago and American avant-garde figures such as AACM tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and MacArthur Fellow Ken Vandermark.
Across his career Mengelberg worked with numerous leading European avant-garde and American free-jazz musicians. He participated in the Dutch ensemble that performed with Cecil Taylor in 1967, around the same period he engaged in absurdist music theater; he played with foremost British, German, and other European artists; and he supplied compositions to Alexander von Schlippenbach’s ensembles including the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. Beyond his long association with Han Bennink he performed regularly with Wim T. Schippers from 1974 to 1982. He also sustained one of the most reliable creative jazz orchestras for several decades. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the ICP Orchestra toured steadily, delivering many anticipated and well-received concerts in North America. The 2000s, however, brought the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, gradually limiting his live and recorded activity. In 2014 the ICP Orchestra issued its first album without him, East of the Sun, featuring Guus Janssen on piano yet incorporating several Mengelberg compositions. Misha Mengelberg died in Amsterdam on March 3, 2017, at the age of 81.
Albums
