INSTANT COMPOSERS POOL
45 Years
Complete Boxed Set
Netherlands import limited hand-numbered edition 52 Compact Discs (52 CDs) + 2 DVD box set. ICP Records 1275-1. Stereo. CASE & INSERTS: NM-. DISCS: NM not sealed but never played (this is the way it was shipped from ICP Records).
*** LIMITED EDITION HAND-NUMBERED and PAINTED by HAN BENNINK: No. 219 of 1000. ***
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
Comes with thick book, fold-out insert with credits and poster.
Hand-numbered and painted by Han Bennink 2012.
"Improvisation is like daily life... like crossing a street" - says Han
Bennink. The ensemble of the Instant Composers Pool, or ICP,
improvises for 45 years now on the highest level. "These guys can swing
like madmen and then all of a sudden play the most sensitive ballads"
according to trumpet player Dave Douglas.This is really an
improvisational monster with ten heads! Furthermore co-founders Misha
Mengelberg and Han Bennink are the true "Giants of European jazz"! ICP
is historical, unique and there is nothing else like it in jazz.
The
music that is released during all these years has now been collected
and is planned to be released as a special edition box. It will contain
52 cd's, 2 dvd's (including bonus material that has never been
released before), a blueprint of the famed ‘camel-chair’, and a
photo-book of the rich ICP-history as shot by Pieter Boersma. Every
box is numbered and unique because Han Bennink himself will be painting
each copy by hand!
About the history of ICP:
In 1958,
guitarist Jim Hall, in liner notes to a Jimmy Giuffre album, used the
term “instant composition” to describe improvising. A few years later,
Misha Mengelberg, knowing nothing of this, re-coined the term, and it
stuck. A quiet manifesto, those two English words countered notions that
improvising was either a lesser order of music-making than composing,
or an art without a memory, existing only in the moment, unmindful of
form. Misha's formulation posited improvisation as formal composition's
equal (if not its superior, being faster).
Yes but: Misha says he
was thinking of “instant coffee,” stuff any serious java drinker
recognized as a sham substitute. He deflates his lofty idea even as he
raises it. In the mid-1960s Mengelberg became involved with the Fluxus
art movement, which he found inviting because it stood for nothing, had
no ideals to defend. What bound together Fluxus's conceptualists, shock
artists, early minimalists, musical comics et cetera was a need for a
performance format that could accommodate them all. (Hence that symbol
of '60s kookiness, the multimedia Happening.) Eventually he formed a
band with that kind of flexibility: the modern ICP Orchestra.
ICP
co-founders Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink have played together
since 1961; before long they’d played on Eric Dolphy’s 1964 Last Date
and in a successful Dutch quartet, until they brought in the anarchistic
young reed player Willem Breuker, whose disruptive presence tore the
group apart. That was OK; Han and Misha liked musical confrontations.
Mengelberg had studied composition at the Hague conservatory (alongside
his friend Louis Andriessen); in his ’60s game piece “Hello Windyboys,”
two wind quintets variously engage in call and response, communicate in
musical code, interrupt or block each other, or seduce their rivals into
cooperating. They did formally what ICP’s musicians now do informally.
Bennink,
Breuker and Mengelberg founded the ICP co-op in 1967. In 1974 the
saxophonist left to form the Willem Breuker Kollektief, longtime
flagship of Dutch improvised music. Mengelberg (and Bennink) founded the
raggedy ICP Tentet (including German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and
sometimes cellist Tristan Honsinger). That band matured into something
very like the present-day ICP Orchestra in the 1980s, with the addition
of younger players, some of whom have been there ever since: trombonist
Wolter Wierbos, saxophonists/clarinetists Michael Moore and Ab Baars,
and bassist Ernst Glerum.
Featuring MISHA MENGELBERG, HAN BENNINK, PETER BROTZMANN, AB BAARS, WILLEM BREUKER, TRISTAN HINSINGER, WOLTER WIERBOS, MICHAEL MOORE, ERNST GLERUM, PETER BENNINK, JOHN TCHICAI, DUDU PUKWANA, ARJEN GORTER, MARY OLIVER, PAUL TERMOS, TOBIAS DELIUS, DEREK BAILEY, STEVE LACY, and many others.
*** (please see pictures for complete album listing) ***
*** ANY MULTIPLE ITEMS PAID FOR SEPARATELY (INSTEAD OF GROUPED TOGETHER AND PAID FOR ON ONE INVOICE FOR COMBINED SHIPPING DISCOUNT) WILL BE SHIPPED IN SEPARATE PACKAGES. NO EXCEPTIONS!