Dutch, Boston-based reed player, composer, and educator Jorrit Dijkstra (who is a Professor at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member of the New England Conservatory in Boston, and co-runs the Driff Records label) formed the quintet BLINK in the summer of 2004 as a conceptual unit. BLINK’s name nods to Steve Lacy’s album Blinks (Hat Hut, 1984), and Dijkstra interpreted Lacy’s music with his The Whammies and with other musicians.
BLINK, which features Dijkstra focusing on the alto sax, electric bass player Nate McBride, drummer-percussionist Eric Rosenthal (both McBride and Rosenthal played in Dijkstra’s PorchBone trio), guitarist Eric Hofbauer (on the left channel), and guitarist Gabe Boyarin (on the right channel), opts for collective improvisations and responses over individual solos. Furthermore, Dijkstra’s composition were inspired by group behavioral patterns such as insect swarms and bird flocks, with their organic swells in dynamics and density; McBrise and Boyarin’s bass and guitar were tuned to a quarter tone sharp, giving BLINK a distinctive, off-balance feel one inspired by classic African High Life bands, Indonesian Gamelan ensembles, and Delta Blues guitar players; and BLINK uses microtonality as a way to «dirty up» its sound, triggering unexpected frequencies to improvise with and throwing off listeners’ sense of balance.
BLINK’s self-titled album was recorded at Dimension Sound, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, in December 2024, and offers Dijkstra’s seven compositions. It is clear from the first piece, «Rub», that BLINK’s aesthetics are demanding, with its sets of intervals looped in organic, multi-rhythmic layerings. BLINK operates as a sound lab researching Dijkstra’s complex compositional ideas.
«Yet» offers a fragile, touching melody heading to a collision with a stubborn, minimalist pulse. «Hop» and «Shape» flirt with Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time harmolidics, but twist the funky feel with its unique tuning and microtonality, which injects a subversive, Dadaist spirit. The dreamy «Stretch» suggests a disorienting course and was composed when Dijkstra imagined strumming guitar chords and drums as balls attached to rubber bands, bouncing at independent tempos. «Pulse» sends BLINK to West-African call-and-response motifs of African blues guitar and balafon music, triggering, in their turn, improvisational variations. The last piece, the hypnotic «Trans», was originally composed as a dense 15-minute composition for Dutch reed player David Kweksilber’s 24-piece Big Band, demonstrating that even cerebral, experimental music can be sensual and engaging.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jorrit Dijkstra (alto saxophone), Nate McBride (electric bass), Eric Rosenthal (drums, percussion), Eric Hofbauer (guitar), Gabe Boyarin (guitar)
https://jorritdijkstra.bandcamp.com/album/blink-2
