Backstory constitutes an important component of reissues. Scuttlebutt on how a record came about can often be as edifying as its music itself. This relationship is especially robust in the case of John Corbett’s Unheard Music Series. His liner notes to titles like Spaceship Lullaby and Waves of Albert Ayler are source for some of the most instructive and entertaining anecdotes in contemporary creative music folklore. The same holds true to his recounted history of this recent repressing of a rare-as-ambergris 1970 session by Dutchman Kees Hazevoet. Corbett even goes one better by filling in front story too, chronicling the multi-instrumentalist’s exploits well into the 70s.
Long story short, Hazevoet enlisted Louis Moholo in his quintet when an inopportune bit of band in fighting led to the expulsion of his regular drummer. On this date he juggles between piano, clarinet and trumpet. Kris Wanders holds solely to alto while Arjen Gorter handles bass duties. The music feels decidedly of its era. Three tracks totaling a standard LP running time of under forty minutes work from loose compositional frameworks incorporating plenty of wooly improvisation.
Gorter opens “Moving Lady” with methodical pizzicato, joined less than a minute later by clarinet, trumpet and waterfall cymbals and snare in a keening statement of an emblematically dramatic theme. Hazevoet’s clarinet breaks ranks, chirruping across the murky rhythmic currents sketched by his comrades. Wanders’ alto, sounding off with a barrage of flinty recalcitrant notes that would make Herr Brötzmann smirk knowingly, assumes horn duties as the leader bangs out scattershot clusters from his ivories. These coalesce into a two-fisted solo, flanked by smudgy bass and jittery drum punctuations that shows a fair share of chops. Wanders resumes and there is a stretch where Hazevoet sounds like he’s playing clarinet and piano simultaneously, the latter with a powder keg burst of renal sputters.
“What Happens” works as transitional interlude finding the three men moving largely in their own insular directions. Someone (Moholo?) picks up an uncredited .vibraslap, creating echo-rich interjectory waves in conjunction with the piano’s jumpy arpeggios prior to an abrupt plummet into silence. According the instrument’s manufacturer it “appears in more recordings, soundtracks, and advertisements than any sound effect ever made.” These distinctive sonorities are almost certain to ring memory bells having been present on numerous Disco and Latin albums from the 70s. Though probably not in the same abstractionist guise employed here.
The set concludes with a twenty-minute title track. Added space affords even more breathing room for all four men as they jockey through a loose assemblage of militarized motifs, but the result feels less cohesive than the set’s shorter concise opener. The famous streak of Dutch humor is also largely absent from the band’s interplay, though the consequent seriousness is hardly off-putting. As an entertaining artifact this disc shares strong stylistic kinship to existing entries in the UMS catalog and pays off on the promise of its one word title. Whether it registers as a classic on par with contemporaneous work by European peers like Brötzmann and Schlippenbach is another matter and is likely the region of dithyrambic debate.
~ Derek Taylor
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