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Inside/Outside Amsterdam
with Michael Moore
By Kevin Whitehead
The biannual Dutch Jazz Meeting held at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis is a
showcase for international presenters. Selected bands play 25-
minute sets they hope will lead to bookings in New York, Sarajevo
or Hong Kong. The first night of December 2008’s edition, U.S.-born alto
saxophonist, clarinetist and bass clarinetist Michael Moore gets his shot.
His newish quartet, heard on the CD Fragile, includes fellow expat and
drummer Michael Vatcher—a frequent bandmate since they were teens in
Northern California—and younger Dutch colleagues Harmen Fraanje on
piano and Clemens van der Feen on bass.
Like that CD, on Moore’s Ramboy label, the set begins with “Paint As
You Like,” a clarinet ballad with pretty changes. In the lower register,
Moore evokes the poise and lyricism of vintage Jimmy Giuffre, though
Moore’s style was already well along before he’d heard him. But where
Giuffre shied from high notes, Moore ascends to the upper reaches, without
sacrificing his luminously warm sound, as touching (and often melancholy)
as any modern jazz clarinetist gets.
“Round And Round” starts with an out-of-tempo intro for alto and
drums, then eases into jittery time-playing. Moore’s centered alto sound
and thoughtful melodic variations betray admiration for Lee Konitz, but a
raucous Earl Bostic tone peeps out, too. On alto especially, Moore obliterates
distinctions between inside and outside playing. His superior harmonic
ear lets him cut through chord changes in odd but tuneful ways. Still, in
the middle of a tender moment he may sputter like Evan Parker, despoiling
the mood. A pet mannerism: unleashing a blast of pure, audible air
through the alto, flushing away any taint of sentimentality.
Moore introduces the next one—“Families Be So Mean” (also on
Fragile)—in English. “Fortunately, not my family,” he says. Fraanje plays
some romantic introductory chords seasoned with bluesy ripples. When
Moore enters on bass clarinet, the tune’s revealed as a long-count blues
with altered chords, its lovely hook halfway between a birdcall and field
holler. His blues choruses are free of cliche or self-conscious mood-bucking;
he stays in the upper register, sweet but with a rasp in it. Next, Van
der Feen solos with a bow, roughs up his pure tone with bluesy bends.
Moore comes back in adding a hint of Sidney Bechet tremolo. He gets
more emphatic, then brings it down for a whispered out-chorus.
Now they’re warmed up, with a few minutes left on the clock. Moore
is a master of quirky micro and macro timing: He can throw himself into
or tug against swing’s powerful pull, and build a set’s momentum slowly.
But when you improvise, you sacrifice some control.
A stagehand comes over, signals him. Michael announces, in Dutch,
sounding surprised, “They tell me we’re out of time.”
At 55, Moore—no relation to the jazz bassist or filmmaker of the
same name—occupies a peculiar insider/outsider position on the
Amsterdam scene. He speaks excellent Dutch, lives (with his wife, the
singer Jodi Gilbert, and their 19-year old son Reuben) in an airy apartment
overlooking a picturesque canal in the city’s center. He has played
in some of the best ensembles in Holland—has spent half his life in the
band that epitomizes creative Dutch music in all its swinging, anarchic,
melodic inside/outside glory: Misha Mengelberg’s ICP Orchestra.
Even so, he used to taunt the A’dam scene’s boosters with the rhetorical
question, “Dutch jazz—what’s that?” He made the first record under
his own name, 1988’s excellent Home Game, when he was in the thick of
Dutch musical life. But his quintet was as New York as a potato knish:
pianist Fred Hersch—a friend since they were at the New England
Conservatory in the ’70s—and three collaborators from Michael’s brief,
pre-Amsterdam Manhattan days, trumpeter Herb Robertson, bassist Mark
Helias and drummer Gerry Hemingway. Subsequently Moore would join
a longrunning Hemingway quintet, and record in trios with him and
pianist Marilyn Crispell, with Hemingway and Hersch, and (in a Giuffrian
mood) with Hersch and Helias.
“When I made Home Game, I was feeling a bit torn,” Moore says, sitting
in his front room that looks out on the canal. He’s tall, affable, usually
soft-spoken, and thinks before he talks. “I really liked working for Misha
and Maarten Altena and Guus Janssen, and how they structured their
music. But there was this whole other world I also wanted to be a part of.
You couldn’t put a tune like ‘Providence’ in front of ICP’s Wolter
Wierbos or Ab Baars—they’re fantastic musicians, but don’t think harmonically
like that.”
“Providence,” from Home Game, is a 19-bar tune kicked off by a threenote,
falling sixth/rising second hook that gets twisted around and then
dropped into a lower key before the chord sequence climbs back home.
“But when I went to New York and played it in the quintet, I was amazed
how quickly they understood what I wanted without me telling them.”
Moore still carries a U.S. passport, and works in the States or with
Stateside musicians when he can. He’s featured on Dave Douglas’ fine
2004 quintet album Mountain Passages, and recorded and toured the U.S.
playing Bob Dylan tunes with Michael Vatcher and bassist Lindsey
Horner as the co-op Jewels And Binoculars.
Moore’s taste in composers is eclectic—Duke Ellington, Hoagy
Carmichael, Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Irving Berlin. But his interests
are global. From time to time he also plays Brazilian music or contemporary
Portuguese fado, will arrange a melody from Madagascar, or write
compositions inspired by Croatian folk music.
He loves trios: with ICP cellist Tristan Honsinger and Amsterdam keyboardist
Cor Fuhler; with Apple accordion player Will Holshouser and
drummer Han Bennink, Moore’s ally in ICP; and a trio that toured widely
in the 1990s, Clusone 3 with Bennink and cellist Ernst Reijseger.
Holocene (2007) was for still another trio, with New York cellist Erik
Friedlander and accordionist Guy Klucevsek. This one in particular catches
Moore’s bucolic, pastoral side, as on the diatonic earworm “Trouble
House.” Moore needs the stimulation of city life, but the painterly countryside
lies close by, and he likes biking out on the polders, among noisy
flocks of waterfowl, and little villages that stud the flat grassy landscape.
In 2008, Palmetto released a download-only Moore/Hersch duo
album This We Know—mostly their tunes, but also the Cuban ballad
“Green Eyes” and Thelonious Monk’s “Four In One.” It’s mostly lyrical,
with a few weird bits, like Moore’s flushed-air intro to “Langrage”: hot
sauce splashed on the good linen.
36 DOWNBEAT March 2010