Vortex, London
The kind of free-improvised jazz that used to drive people screaming for the exits has been celebrated in a big way around London's Dalston in recent days. Eager, mixed-generation crowds packed Cafe Oto last week for rambunctious sax and brass chorales and two-drumkit thunderings by the German sax legend Peter Br�tzmann. Two days later, at the neighbouring Vortex, came the theatrical 69-year-old Dutch percussionist Han Bennink, an old Br�tzmann sparring partner who has also worked with Sonny Rollins.
Bennink's alternately abstract and sly, standards-quoting music with his trio was straighter than Br�tzmann's, but still full of surprises. On his second night, he opened with the People Band percussionist and Mike Figgis collaborator Terry Day. Their spontaneous conversation began with fast swing on brushes, was toughened with gunshot rim-hits against Day's delicate gong sounds, then veered into vaudeville, with a soft samba groove accompanying Day's rubbing of his drumkit with a balloon before Bennink took to bouncing his sticks off the snare and (mostly) catching them in flight.
After the break, the young Danish pianist Simon Toldam and Belgian clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst opened with dark chords and quivering long sounds, while Bennink drummed a hurtling accompaniment on a metal pillar at the side of the stage. Badenhorst switched to hoarse tenor-sax outbursts while Toldam played at a crouch (as much under the piano lid as on the keys); a cosily waltzing swing took over as Bennink rapped his sticks on a front-row table, followed by a purring sax and some Thelonious Monk.
By Bennink's often volcanic standards, it was an amiably mild-mannered show, but it grinned with his usual lopsided charm.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/apr/25/han-bennink-review
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