Han Bennink - drums

Born 17 April 1942 in Zaandam, Holland; drums, clarinets, soprano saxophone, miscellaneous.

Han Bennink's father was a percussionist in a symphony orchestra who also played clarinet and tenor saxophone; when Bennink was a teenager he used to accompany his father on the drums and then played in his dance bands. He became enthused with jazz listening to records and watching visiting US musicians in Europe and then went to America in 1960 playing on a boat of the Holland-America line, just to spend time in New York and take in as much as possible: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Sonny Clark, Steve Lacy. This love of jazz led Bennink to play with many visiting US musicians (e.g. Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Eric Dolphy) but he proved particularly important in the formative years of European free improvisation in Holland. It was not long before the pioneers in England, Holland and Germany came together and many of the early records feature varied combinations of these key players, Bennink generally in the thick of it all. His position is well indicated by Steve Beresford when, in his notes for his CD Fish of the week, he says 'Fish and bicycles are the third and fourth things that come to mind when I think of Holland. (The first and second are pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink)'.

Bennink is well known for an unconventional approach to his kit - feet on the drums, playing his mouth, setting fire to the high hat - but also for using anything that comes to hand as a sound- or rhythm-generating source, for example a pizza box in his duo with Eugene Chadbourne. He told Corbett (1994): 'I don't need any more enormous drum kit or bells or gongs or whatever sort of shit. I find something here and there behind the stage. Canadian stages are very clean, so there's nothing to find, but yesterday I found some strings, a cardboard box, and a piece of wood. They are more interesting to me sound-wise than many other things because sounds are everywhere and it depends on what context you put them in. When I play on something, it's still playing with two sticks, so I just let the audience hear the difference between how the drum kit sounds or a garbage can, piece of junk, or whatever. That's the idea.'
His longest association is inside and outside the ICP Orchestra with Misha Mengelberg - 40 years in 2007 - but he also spent 12 years from around 1968 playing with Peter Brötzmann, initially in the trio with Fred Van Hove and finally as a duo which refuses to die, continuing into the new millenium: a three-day tour in Germany in February 2004 (Köln; Bielfeld; Wuppertal) gave rise to the appropriately (and modestly, and not unironically) entitled Still quite popular after all those years from the Köln gig. His long-running group, the Clusone Trio, with Michael Moore and Ernst Reijseger, which at times included a variety of special guests, finished around 1998. His serio-comic - on both sides - long-term association with Derek Bailey is also reasonably well documented, from their appearances on Peter Brötzmann's Nipples group and their duo on ICP 004 through the first Incus release The topography of the lungs, Bennink's participation in early Company recordings - e.g. Company 3 - and continuing to 1999's recorded across the North Sea discs (Derek Bailey: 'This is not "free improvisation", it's "post-improvisation"') - Post improvisation 1: when we're smiling and Post improvisation 2: air mail special - resulting in live gigs in Amsterdam. Bennink's extensive discography - just short of 200 items at May 2005 - indicates only a fraction of the musicians he has played with, including most of the first generation of European free players, several of the second generation, for example, Steve Beresford, US and European jazz and jazz-based musicians, and the punk band The Ex.

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