Two Voices, Infinite Collisions
Bennink pushes the music to the brink with cyclonic energy and loony humor, while Melford holds the center.
Han Bennink is the reason this album breathes differently than a typical piano-drums duo. He doesn't accompany; he argues, prods, and occasionally sabotages. Bennink brings what JazzTimes critic Bill Shoemaker called his "patented combination of cyclonic energy and loony humor" — he's a drummer who treats the kit like a playground and a weapon at once, capable of swinging hard one moment and scattering things into abstraction the next. That's what makes Myra Melford's blues instinct and structural clarity so essential here. She's not fighting him; she's anchoring against him. Her affinity for blues tonality and her compositional skills give these duets a skeleton they might otherwise lack, and Bennink has the good sense to recognize when to lock in and when to demolish.
Recorded in Switzerland in 1994 and released on HatOLOGY, Eleven Ghosts avoids the typical free-jazz-duo clichés. Melford and Bennink aren't trading symmetrical phrases or proving their chops. Instead, you get genuine asymmetry — moments where the piano seems to be playing one song while the drums play another, and somehow they're both right. Bennink's humor isn't cutesy; it's strategic, a way of saying the music doesn't need to earn gravity through solemnity.
This is a record for listeners who find pleasure in tension and disagreement. It's not their debut together or a one-off collaboration, but rather a full conversation between two musicians who understand how to use space and silence as much as sound. Start here if you want to hear what a real partnership sounds like when both players are genuinely unafraid to be wrong.
Who's playing
Myra Melfordpiano
Han Benninkdrums
Where next?
More by Myra Melford
All 18 albums →
