Perch Hen Brock & Rain is a free-improv super-group featuring two prolific couples – the Dutch reeds master Ab Baars and violist Ig Henneman, and the German-American sax player Ingrid Laubrock and American drummer Tom Rainey, both couples are key members in the local Dutch scene and the New York Scene. This quartet was quartet gathered for a first extensive European tour in November 2014, which led to its first album, Live @ The Jazz Happening Tampere (Relative Pitch, 2016), and later the Dutch Summer JazzCycleTour in 2018. Elegiacal, the sophomore album of Perch Hen Brock & Rain, was recorded during that tour at Zaal 100 in Amsterdam. Baars also did the cover art.
These four idiosyncratic and highly experienced composers and improvisers are, obviously, conscious of their own weight and power and know how to weave a communal conversation comprised of silent and restrained elements with alternating, powerful and dense articulations. Elegiacal offers a collection of eight oddly enchanting improvisations as Tom Rainey calls them.
The quartet dynamics are balanced between imaginative timbral searches and engaging free music that refuses to subscribe to familiar genres or stylistic conventions. «Old West Blues» shows how Perch Hen Brock & Rain turns upside down a familiar blues form and plays with it in an immediate and intuitive conversation, but this piece is open to the most radical and subversive ideas. Baars and Laubrock engage in a poetic, playful talk in «Kites» and «Walking art», beautifully expanded by Henneman and gently ornamented by Rainey.
The following, shorter pieces highlight the always fascinating sonic imagination of these gifted improvisers, individually and as a collective, and the profound, spontaneous interplay that turns these improvised pieces into instant and brilliant compositions. The quartet develops its poetic ideas in a deep listening manner but with no attachment, trusting its wealth of experiences. This performance is concluded with the meditative-ritualist, most impressive title piece.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ab Baars (ts, cl, shakuhachi), Ig Henneman (viola); Ingrid Laubrock (ts, ss), Tom Rainey (dr)
