VA - Instant Composers Pool (52 CD Box) (2012)

A Monumental 52 CD + 2DVD+ photo-book box (Every box is numbered and unique because Han Bennink himself painted each copy by hand! ) to celebrate 45 years of Instant Composers Pool - and worldwide delivery is included! Shipping the next week
"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 trumpetplayer 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.

About the history of ICP:
In 1958, guitarist Jim Hall, in liner notes to a Jimmy Giuffre album, used the termnstant 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 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 Brozmann, 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.

This weekend Amsterdam's mighty ICP Orchestra rolls through town for a series of performance as a full ensemble and in small groups. The group was founded by pianist Misha Mengelberg (who's sitting out this tour) and drummer Han Bennink in 1974, and it's existed ever since with a goodly amount of turnover (past members have included John Tchicai, Peter Brötzmann, Alan Silva, Enrico Rava, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Steve Lacy, and George Lewis, among numerous others), though the current lineup has remained more or less the same for a decade and a half. Yet before this particular ensemble started, Mengelberg and Bennink had a very long history together dating back to 1961: in 1967 they formed Instant Composers Pool with reedist Willem Breuker as a musical cooperative. Among its efforts was launching a record label to chronicle some of its activity.

Last year ICP turned 45, and to mark the anniversary the label released a staggering box set containing the label's entire 50-item catalog on CD; the set also includes two CDs of previously unissued material and two DVDs of live performances. There's a gorgeous 120-page 12 x 12 book packed with photos by Pieter Boersma that documents much of ICP's history, along with a blueprint of Mengelberg's Fluxus-like "camel-chair" piece, and the cover of each set is customized by Bennink. The collection ain't cheap—€539 post paid from the Netherlands, which equals about $700—but it's a truly remarkable object packed with thrilling music, much of it incredibly hard to fine otherwise. Getting a genuine grip on this material could take several years of your life, and it would be time well spent. In fact, I've barely made a dent thus far. On the downside, there appears to be some sloppiness in the digital transfers—parts of ICP 025 (Extension Red, White & Blue)—which features ICP Orchestra playing the music of Herbie Nichols and was originally released only on cassette—sound like hell. Below you can check out a couple of pieces from some of the rarest items: "Rumboon" is a Mengelberg composition from the first ICP tentet album Tetterett, while "The New Duck" is the opening track from a 1974 Steve Lacy album with Bennink and synthesizer experimenter Michel Waisvisz called Lumps.