Misha Mengelberg
Misha Mengelberg ( born June 5, 1935 in Kiev, Ukraine) is a Dutch pianist, composer and bandleader.
Biography
Mengelberg is the son of composer and conductor Karel Mengelberg and great-nephew of Willem Mengelberg. His mother was an orchestral harpist. It was during a stay of his father as a film composer and - dirigent born in Kiev. But in 1938 the family returned already returned back to Amsterdam. He began to study architecture and then studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague 1958-1964 music, including composition and music theory with Kees van Baren. During his studies he gained a reputation as a jazz pianist and won the 1959 Jazz Competition in Loosdrecht. Influential was an encounter with John Cage during the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music.
In 1961 he founded a quartet with alto saxophonist Piet Noordijk, bassist Rob sustained one (later replaced by Jacques Schols ) and drummer Han Bennink with which they accompany, inter alia, Johnny Griffin and 1964 Eric Dolphy on his last recording. 1966 receives the Mengelberg Wessel Ilcken price. In 1964, the Quartet at the Newport Jazz Festival (as at that time the only European group). When Mengelberg and Bennink turn freer jazz forms, they split up in 1967 by Schols and Noordijk and play instead with Maarten Altena and Willem Breuker in the quartet, the nucleus of which was founded in the same year Instant Composers Pool (ICP).
In 1969, he wrote the opera Reconstructie with the composer Louis Andriessen, Jan van Vlijmen, Peter Schat, Reinhard de Leeuw and the librettist Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus. The group founded in 1969 the studio for electro instrumental music ( STEIM ) in Amsterdam, which still exists today.
Led by Mengelberg Instant Composers Pool Orchestra (ICP Orchestra ) connects among other stylistic elements of European music with those of free jazz. Misha Mengelberg is considered one of the most significant contemporary composers in the Netherlands and combines elements of Fluxus and jazz with those from the new music, new music improvisation and classical music. He has appeared as an improvising pianist with internationally known jazz musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Sunny Murray, Peter Brötzmann, Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, said he frequently the repertoire of equally " cranky " pianist Thelonious Monk (1986 for the ICP Orchestra) and Herbie Nichols ( 1983 used for the ICP Orchestra). In 1992, he took with the ICP Orchestra in front of the music of Duke Ellington. He has written numerous records and CDs published (often on the musician 's own label ICP, which he founded with Bennink and Breuker already in the 1960s ).
1972 to 1981 he was chairman of the Dutch professional association for improvising music. From 1982 he was a lecturer at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.