Intro

Michiel Braam heeft aangekondigd na 2013 te stoppen met Bik Bent Braam. In 2012 en 2013 zal een nieuw en tevens laatste programma gespeeld worden. Dit programma heeft de naam 'Exit'. In januari en februari 2012 zal een tour plaatsvinden met het nieuwe programma.

Om de muzikanten uit te dagen zal het programma 'Exit' bestaan uit twee delen. In de eerste set van elk concert zal uitsluitend gebruik gemaakt worden van stukken die een begin hebben, maar geen einde. De muzikanten zullen zelf op zoek moeten naar de uitgang.
Voor de tweede set worden uitsluitend einden geschreven, de vraag hoe daar te komen ligt open. Het enige dat vaststaat is dat die weg door improvisatie gevonden moet worden. Dit resulteert in een muzikale zoektocht. Ook heeft Michiel besloten om de tonen CEG niet in zijn composities te betrekken. Deze beperking dwingt hem naar nieuwe wegen te zoeken.

De musici van Bik Bent Braam hebben tijdens de optredens alle vrijheid om zelf te bepalen wat ze spelen en hoe dat gaat klinken. Dat deze aanpak nooit klinkt als volslagen chaos komt door het perfecte, als 'magisch' omschreven samenspel van de musici, en door de pakkende composities van Michiel Braam.

'Exit', het afscheidsprogramma van Bik Bent Braam, gaat in première tijdens een tour in januari en februari 2012.

Bio

Bik Bent Braam staat garant voor avontuurlijke muziek met veel aanstekelijk speelplezier.
Vrijheid staat voorop bij de band. Vrijheid voor alle musici, die op elk moment kunnen bepalen wat ze spelen en hoe dat gaat klinken – stijl, tempo en volgorde van de stukken liggen niet van tevoren vast.
Dat deze anarchistische aanpak nooit klinkt als volslagen chaos komt door het perfecte, als 'magisch' omschreven samenspel van de musici, en door de pakkende composities van Michiel Braam. Voor elk van zijn muzikanten heeft hij een stukje muziek geschreven dat het beste in ze naar boven haalt. In de composities zijn referenties aan allerlei stijlen uit de jazzgeschiedenis te horen. Wilde improvisaties worden zo afgewisseld met lyrische ballads of vrolijke bigband swing.

Bezetting:
Michiel Braam (piano), Jörg Brinkmann (cello), Michael Vatcher (slagwerk), Peter van Bergen (tenorsaxofoon, klarinetten), Frans Vermeerssen (tenor- en baritonsaxofoon), Frank Gratkowski (altsaxofoon, klarinetten), Jan Willem van der Ham (altsaxofoon, fagot), Bart van der Putten (altsaxofoon, klarinet), Peter Haex (tenortuba), Carl Ludwig Hübsch (tuba), Eric Boeren (cornet), Angelo Verploegen (trompet), Wolter Wierbos (trombone).

Bik Bent Braam wordt financieel ondersteund door het Fonds Podiumkunsten NL.

Reviews

CD Extremen in Downbeat
For Dutch pianist Michiel Braam (…) jazz is part of a broader musical platform that allows (him) to expound upon extramusical concerns. (the) record is a success at articulating its appointed vision.
Braam's biggish band Bik Bent Braam uses a combination of skeletal composition and structured improvisation to posit a thrillingly optimistic vision of democracy in action. His tunes and set lists are merely suggestions: each member of the band can, by signalling one from a set of prearranged cues, call a new piece or recommend a different approach at any time. Since the other members might or might not take the signaller up on their suggestion, you never know how a song might turn out.
The instability of Bik Bent Braam's approach is potentially messy and this, along with their readiness to draw on anything from Cotton Club antics to freely improvised chatter, leads to surprises and some uneasy listening. But they embrace unpredictability with a spirit of infectious fun, and leaven their chaos with a heaping measure of discipline, which insulates the music from impulsive acts of sabotage. With players like trombonist Wolter Wierbos and saxophonist Frank Gratkowski on board, you can be sure there'll be some bracing solos; what's impressive is the way that ensemble's commitment to collective coherence makes a potential trainwreck like “Michaelx' – with its jump cuts from subterranean reed tangles to mad swinging to near-rock rollick – seem elegant.

Bill Meyer – Downbeat – January 2009

CD Extremen in Paris Transatlantic.doc
Pianist Michiel Braam runs a big band with an unmistakable Dutch accent, as its mock-phonetic bandname suggests. The music's a galloping mix of swing and Monk and neoclassicism and complete insanity, liberally seasoned with a spry sense of humour, yet somehow it sounds completely unlike the venerable (and similarly-inclined) ICP and Breuker ensembles. Like Misha Mengelberg, Braam is constitutionally averse to "leading" the band in any usual sense of the word, but he's too sunny a character to go in for Misha's stubborn perversity. Instead, he's developed a genial musical philosophy – "system", if you like, though that sounds starchy – which he calls "bonsai". Tunes are assigned to each member of the 13-piece band (to call whenever they like – even in the middle of another piece!) and there's also a large menu of miscellaneous cues to pick from. In this way, everyone gets to be a conductor and instant composer/arranger. There are parallels to Braxton's collages and Zorn's game pieces, but BBB doesn't sound like them either: best to think of bonsai as the logical conclusion of Shelly Manne's dictum that a jazz musician is someone who "never plays the same thing once".
Extremen catches the bik bent in typically rumbustious and unpredictable form, in a concert at Amsterdam's Bimhuis. Pieces like "Michaelx" and "Erix" make conventional swing sound like you've never heard it before, reinventing it from chorus to chorus, and Braam's compositional ingenuity is evident in pieces like "Frankx", in which, as he remarks in the liners, "something like 10 different metres are played simultaneously." The players seem to take the CD's title to heart with some genuinely ferocious playing: saxophonist-clarinettist Frank Gratkowski is in particularly fiery form – listen to him tear dementedly through the south-of-the-border fantasia "Franxs" in the company of trumpeter Angelo Verploegen – and Wilbert De Joode is as always a dab hand at drawing forth elegent grotesques from his bass, taking a completely off-the-wall solo on "Wilx" that sets it alternately squealing and feebly muttering. My favourite moment, though, is saxophonist Bart van der Putten's feature,"Puttex": on the surface, the piece is a conventionally lush, emotive ballad, but the band turns it inside out, until the atmosphere becomes oppressively thick and dangerous. And though Braam might be diffident about the limelight ("apart from the fact that I make the announcements you can hardly tell I am the band leader at all"), his stamp is all over the music, not least his ability to suggest the champagne sparkle of 1930s pianists like Teddy Wilson even when he's on a rampage at the keyboard. It's a pity that Braam has never done an Anthony Braxton and put out a box set of Bik Bent Braam's performances: it'd be fascinating to hear how this most mercurial of bands refashions the material over a series of concerts.
–Nate Dorward

Concert Molde Jazz Festival
Another memorable set came from one of Holland's finest ensembles, Bik Bent Braam's big band, which presented a set that deservedly had the audience on their feet demanding more. Their range, by contemporary standards, is remarkable, signifying on every era of jazz without condescension or incongruity. Traditional big band fare of antiphonal riffs dissolved into sandstorms of amplified huffs and puffs through their instruments, then, as if guided by some unseen hand, a powerful blues episode rose up and climaxed in a spectacular cascade of splintered motifs. Through it all, the inscrutable figure of Braam sat at the piano, immaculately groomed and a study in nonchalance. His most extravagant gesture during the whole performance was to sip a mouthful of water from a plastic bottle. With moments of Willem Breuker-inspired humour it was wonderful theatre. The late Spike Milligan, a devoted jazz fan and arch humorist, would have loved it.

Stuart Nicholson (The Jazz.Com Blog, August 10, 2009)