Pianist, composer and agitator
Born: June 5 1935;
Died: March 3 2017
MISHA Mengelberg, who has died aged 81, was for 50 years a puckishly challenging presence on the European music and arts scene, following a path that led him through jazz, improvisation, “instant” composition and into more theatrical presentations of the sort associated with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 70s.
Though born in the Ukraine, Mengelberg was of Dutch parentage. His uncle was the distinguished conductor Willem Mengelberg, who helped shape the performance history of Mahler and Strauss with the Concertgebuow Orchestra. His father Karel was also a conductor and composer.
Misha was born in Kiev on June 5 1935, but the family returned to the Netherlands a few years later and the boy began piano lessons before he could write. “A very proper training,” he said, with the shrug of a man who has just squandered a large fortune at the tables. And yet an element of classical propriety remained with Mengelberg, even when he explored the farthest reaches of improvisation. He briefly considered a career in architecture – “it’s not so different from music” – but began to study at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague in 1958, as the country began to recover from war.
In 1964, along with drummer and future associate Han Bennink, Mengelberg played piano on what was commercially presented as the final recording (it wasn’t) by American saxophonist, clarinettist and flutist Eric Dolphy, who was self-exiled in Europe, dying in Berlin later that year.
Mengelberg liked to embellish his role on Last Date, sometimes to absurd lengths, prefiguring his growing interest in the anarchic and genre-challenging activities of the Fluxus movement (whose better known adherents include Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys). But it was hearing the philosopher and composer John Cage at Darmstadt (the spiritual home of the European avant-garde) that made the greater impression on Mengelberg, and led him to explore a new world of silence, noise and chance events.
Having visited the US as a relatively orthodox jazz man, in 1967 Mengelberg co-founded the Instant Composers Pool, a loose aggregation of Dutch improvisers (though Mengelberg tended to avoid that word) that included Bennink and the multi-instrumentalist Willem Breuker, whose later, circus-like performances with his Kollektief were influenced by Mengelberg, though the two did not always see eye to eye.
As well as recording copiously, under his own name and that of ICP, Mengelberg developed a body of composition for others, and became interested in staging music-theatre performances of a radical sort. His piano playing retained vestiges of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, though he sometimes protested that there was hardly an improvising piano player in the world about whom one could not say the same.
By turns witty and withdrawn, generous and acerbic, Mengelberg often seemed to be hiding behind a persona, revealing very little of himself and that only in contradictory parts. He remained, though, an important catalyst in European music, and a challenging collaborator who could debunk vague theory or slack practice with either a word or a wryly turned piano phrase. Misha Mengelberg died in Amsterdam on March 3 2017.
BRIAN MORTON
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