Jazz Articles about Han Bennink

About Han Bennink

Album Review

Irene Schweizer - Rudiger Carl - Johnny Dyani - Han Bennink: Irène's Hot Four

Read "Irène's Hot Four" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
August 19, 2025

Irène's Hot Four represents a significant posthumous release from the legendary Swiss jazz pianist Irène Schweizer, who passed away in 2024. This release captures a rare 1981 concert in Zurich featuring Schweizer alongside her companions Rüdiger Carl, Johnny Dyani, and Han Bennink. It is a quartet that existed for only around a year and a half, playing just a handful of performances. The album fills an important gap in Schweizer's discography, documenting this ephemeral but vital collaboration between four master ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith: The Emerald Duets

Read "The Emerald Duets" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
July 11, 2022

The pioneering British photographer/author Val Wilmer said of Wadada Leo Smith, “he no longer relates to the restrictions of scales and chords. To him, music is about two things only: sound and rhythm." Her assessment, from the essential book As Serious As Your Life (Allison & Busby Ltd, 1977), was published in 1977. But in the survey of creative music history, her title could have been a sole perspective on Smith. After being a regular contributor to John ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith: The Emerald Duets

Read "The Emerald Duets" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
July 10, 2022

Wadada Leo Smith's music is often celestial, but the man himself is of this Earth—of America, in particular, the progeny of people brought to the Western Hemisphere involuntarily. People who have historically been treated as less than human, for the “sin" of having dark skin. This goes on. The true sin, the flames of racism, are stoked by a former and possibly future (God help us all) president—a cruel, sociopathic, immoral, dishonest racist. Wadada Leo Smith is America. ...

Album Review

Marion Brown: Why Not? Porto Novo! Revisited

Read "Why Not? Porto Novo! Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
June 3, 2021

Alto saxophonist Marion Brown was part of the band on John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1965), though you would not guess it from Why Not (ESP, 1968). Like fellow Ascension alumnus, tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders' contemporaneous Tauhid (Impulse, 1967), Brown's album inhabited an intensely melodic section of the 1960s' New Thing. As were Sanders' own-name releases from 1967 onwards, Brown's work was deeply lyrical and embraced South Asian, Maghrebi and West African instruments and constructs. As bandleaders, the two ...

Album Review

Sonny Rollins: Rollins in Holland

Read "Rollins in Holland" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
December 30, 2020

From the very first decibel of this unrealistically good, previously unreleased recording, Sonny Rollins bears no bones to inform listeners he is suffering no fools. It is a big, Buescher, bellwether sound, the one that gave Rollins the sound and spirit he needed to tell of a man taking it all on without apology. It is also meant to say that, without argument, unrealistically good here is totally understood as a decisively human characteristic and not necessarily one Rollins aspired ...

Album Review

Omri Ziegele Tomorrow Trio: All Those Yesterdays

Read "All Those Yesterdays" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
July 9, 2020

It's been more than twenty years since the world lost saxophonist Thomas Chapin. If you were to conduct a search like Tibetan Buddhists looking for the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the signs and symbols you would sift through are of course recordings. All Those Yesterdays may be all the proof one needs to adjudge Omri Ziegele the incarnation of Thomas Chapin. His music has the same joy and zestfulness, and it has been hiding in plain sight for ...

Radio & Podcasts

The Quartet Live at BIMHUIS Amsterdam

by BIMHUIS
November 19, 2018

Dutch Jazz master Benjamin Herman, Peter Beets, Ruud Jacobs and Han Bennink have been playing together for five years and swinging from day one, when they hit the stage on New Year's Eve 2013. Since then, every one of their performances has offered something fresh and surprising. A highlight of their collaboration was a series of performances in 2016 dedicated to the music of Misha Mengelberg, in 2016, which were captured on an album on ICP Records. 'Herman ...