The classic sound of Willem Breuker's big band, Kollektief, is precise, forceful and a little jokey — like Spike Jones. I'd been thinking about Breuker, who was in a hospital and dying of cancer, during the World Cup Mania that gripped his hometown of Amsterdam a few weeks ago.
Photo: Kollektief
The sound of swarming B-flat horns streamed out of most TVs in town, and solitary horn blasts echoed down the canals at any hour. It made me wish for the music Breuker surely would have written for vuvuzelas. Street music was one of his key inspirations — in particular, the sound of mechanized barrel organs that get wheeled through the city's open-air markets. Early on, he even wrote street music for them.
Breuker made a name for himself as a bad boy of Dutch music in the '60s, playing noisy versions of pop songs in talent contests. He soon teamed up with drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg as the Instant Composers Pool. Together and separately, they helped establish European improvised music, with jazz as a key ingredient, alongside marches and other homegrown melodies.
The main countries involved developed their own styles. The Germans played loud and fierce, the English quiet and cooperative, while the Dutch were the funny ones: the ones with a little ironic distance from their material, no matter how much they might respect it. Sometimes, in a Willem Breuker solo, he'd sound like a really good free-jazz saxophonist one moment, and the next he'd appear to mock free-jazz saxophonists for not knowing how to play at all.
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