Misha Mengelberg

Acclaimed pianist Misha Mengelberg is the respected leader of the Dutch ensemble ICP Orchestra, yet is equally known for his integral role in the development of the jazz-influenced creative music that sprang up in the Netherlands starting around the 1960s. Most often found in lineups with drummer Han Bennink, Mengelberg has been mixing composition and improvisation since the '60s and, due to his developed and distinctive style, has come to be regarded as one of the top pianists in jazz. Despite a long and full career that began before his performance on Eric Dolphy's Last Date, and continued for decades beyond, Misha Mengelberg remains a household name only among avant-garde jazz fans, amazingly much less known among jazz fans in general. Mengelberg was born in 1935 in Kiev to musical parents -- his mother was a harpist, his father a well-known pianist and conductor -- but his family immigrated to Amsterdam when the political climate around them became hostile toward his outspoken, activist parents. Mengelberg began playing both chess, his favorite game, and the piano, well before the age of ten. His first years on the piano found him improvising, then learning boogie-woogie. He heard his earliest major jazz influences in the late '40s: Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, who was not highly regarded by many of the musicians in Mengelberg's community at the time, but whom Mengelberg considered to be the most harmonically interesting jazz musician he had yet heard. Misha Mengelberg, son of notoriously stringent conductor Karel Mengelberg (nephew of Willem), gave up studying architecture after a brief time to attend the Royal Conservatory (in the Hague) and focus his efforts on music, namely composition and classical music. At the conservatory, he studied under, among...