Two of the musicians most prominently associated so far with the Going Dutch project feature on the newly released double album documenting the October Meeting 2016 held in the Bimhuis in Amsterdam.
The October Meeting was one of several events to which a large group of Jazz Promotion Network members have been invited courtesy of Dutch Performing Arts as a precursor to their inviting Dutch musicians to tour the UK and Ireland as part of Going Dutch.
The third of a series initiated by Huub van Riel, who stepped down from his role as the venue’s artistic director after forty years, the October Meeting 2016 followed improvised music gatherings in 1987 and 1991 that, as journalist and presenter Peter Margasak says in his liner notes for the new release, “sent tremors around the creative music world.”
Among the musicians appearing in those first two meetings were improvising music icons Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. Van Riel’s final gathering brought together a new generation including Serbian-born, Amsterdam-based pianist Kaja Draksler and french horn player Morris Kliphuis.
Kliphuis, whose band Kapok toured for Going Dutch in November 2017 , appears in a septet that includes Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and the English pianist Alexander Hawkins. Draksler, whose Going Dutch appearances have concentrated on her solo recitals, is heard in a quartet with Danish saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, Argentinian saxophonist Ada Rave and the aforementioned Susana Santos Silva and later in a septet including bassist Peter Eldh and drummers Onno Govaert and Christian Lillinger.
Many of the musicians hadn’t met previously and speaking of her experience at the gathering, which featured twenty-two musicians in all, Ada Rave said: “The idea to put together many musicians to work together to make three concerts in just a few days was transforming and super positive for everybody.”
Several more of the musicians featured on the album have already appeared in the UK and Ireland – as, for instance, in Jazz North East’s day-long mini-version of the October meeting in Newcastle in January 2017 – and more are anticipated as Going Dutch unfolds over the next year to eighteen months.
The album is released on Bimhuis Records.