Mix [live]

by Dan Warburton"Mix Azure" and "Mix Canary" are both live recordings (curiously of exactly the same length) made in the Netherlands in 1994 by Dutch improvising pianist Misha Mengelberg, one of the three founding members (along with percussionist Han Bennink and reed virtuoso Willem Breuker) of the Instant Composers Pool and the benignly anarchic music director of its extraordinary big band, the ICP Orchestra. If it's pyrotechnics you're after, however, you'd be advised to steer clear of Mengelberg's solo piano recordings (though "Mix Azure" gently incorporates some of the contrapuntal devices beloved of Mengelberg's illustrious predecessor, Sweelinck, whose music Misha has also taught at conservatories in Holland): The pianist, like Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols (the two great jazz pianist/composers he most admires and frequently covers), has little time for virtuosity for its own sake, preferring instead to let the music follow its own path. If that leads to a dead end, so be it -- Mengelberg, whose roots in Fluxus and Dada go as deep as they do into jazz (he once recorded an album with his pet parrot), is perfectly happy to accept boredom and failure. Yet, for all its twists and turns, the music neither fails nor gets boring. To quote a memorable phrase from Art Lange's liner notes to another Mengelberg album, Two Days in Chicago, "you can hear him listening as he works." And what a pleasure it is.