Bonsai-obsessed Braam Takes Jazz On A Wild Ride
You’ve got to love a country where marijuana is tolerated but cellphones are strictly controlled. Such seems to be the case in the Netherlands—or so it seemed last week when I interviewed bandleader Michiel Braam. I reached him in his car, on his way home from the Arnhem Conservatory, where he’s head of the jazz department. But we’d barely had time to introduce ourselves before he told me that he was going to have to cut our chat short.
“There’s police driving behind me, and I’m without my headset,” he explained. “The problem is we can’t drive here while telephoning, so can you call me in five minutes? The fines are pretty high.”
Fortunately for music lovers, Braam has less respect for the laws of jazz. His 13-member Bik Bent Braam, which plays a free Gastown Jazz show on Sunday (June 26) before headlining at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Tuesday (June 28), is an anarchistic gang of some of Holland’s finest improvisers, yet their leader has found a way to channel their abandon into music that sounds surprisingly focused.
Braam’s strategy, as he explained once we reconnected, is to start by writing an assortment of brief, modular pieces, which can then be assembled at the whim of the musicians. “We don’t make set lists, so everybody can start a piece at his own tempo and the rest can either follow or do something completely different,” he said. “On [the 2004 CD] Growing Pains, for instance, there are some pieces played simultaneously: the saxophones play something totally different from the brass. So everybody can start pieces, end pieces, change pieces—whatever they want—and try to get other people to join them.”
Braam calls his mini-compositions “bonsai”, after the Japanese art of living sculpture. Like bonsai trees, his tunes are short and twisted yet surprisingly lovely. At times, Bik Bent Braam sounds like the Count Basie Orchestra after a long and raucous party; even at its wildest, it retains some of the joyous polyphony of early jazz. Anchored by Braam’s own piano, which displays a strong Thelonious Monk influence, the band’s music is kaleidoscopic, adventurous, and, most of all, highly entertaining.
“We try to make it very rich,” Braam said. “We try to make what we give to the listener to be as rich as possible so he can make his own choices. In fact, the listener is bonsai-ing with the material too. He can think, ‘Now I think it’s going this way,’ and then, of course, we’ll try to direct it another way in hopes that he’ll be surprised.”
“There’s police driving behind me, and I’m without my headset,” he explained. “The problem is we can’t drive here while telephoning, so can you call me in five minutes? The fines are pretty high.”
Fortunately for music lovers, Braam has less respect for the laws of jazz. His 13-member Bik Bent Braam, which plays a free Gastown Jazz show on Sunday (June 26) before headlining at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Tuesday (June 28), is an anarchistic gang of some of Holland’s finest improvisers, yet their leader has found a way to channel their abandon into music that sounds surprisingly focused.
Braam’s strategy, as he explained once we reconnected, is to start by writing an assortment of brief, modular pieces, which can then be assembled at the whim of the musicians. “We don’t make set lists, so everybody can start a piece at his own tempo and the rest can either follow or do something completely different,” he said. “On [the 2004 CD] Growing Pains, for instance, there are some pieces played simultaneously: the saxophones play something totally different from the brass. So everybody can start pieces, end pieces, change pieces—whatever they want—and try to get other people to join them.”
Braam calls his mini-compositions “bonsai”, after the Japanese art of living sculpture. Like bonsai trees, his tunes are short and twisted yet surprisingly lovely. At times, Bik Bent Braam sounds like the Count Basie Orchestra after a long and raucous party; even at its wildest, it retains some of the joyous polyphony of early jazz. Anchored by Braam’s own piano, which displays a strong Thelonious Monk influence, the band’s music is kaleidoscopic, adventurous, and, most of all, highly entertaining.
“We try to make it very rich,” Braam said. “We try to make what we give to the listener to be as rich as possible so he can make his own choices. In fact, the listener is bonsai-ing with the material too. He can think, ‘Now I think it’s going this way,’ and then, of course, we’ll try to direct it another way in hopes that he’ll be surprised.”
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posted by Davor Novakovic @ Friday, June 24, 2005
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