Gnomade by The Flatlands Collective

He admired the Fred Lonberg-Holm’s kaleidoscopic musicianship and knew Tim Mulvenna as one of the most versatile drummers in Chicago. After projects in Paris, Vancouver, Edinburgh and Boston, The Flatlands Collective is another example of Dijkstra’s interest in uniting musicians from different cities in the world who share similar improvisation ideas. Dijkstra says: ”I believe that the landscape in which you grow up has an effect on how your music sounds. This is what’s so interesting about jazz: musicians in New York, Barcelona, Moscow, Shanghai or Addis Ababa play this music, but there is always a distinctive local interpretation.” And he adds: “I called this group The Flatlands Collective after the landscape heritage I share as a Dutchman with the Chicago players.”

Dijkstra provides most of the compositions, in which he strives towards a balance between composed material, clear guidelines for musicians to improvise, and openness for the most adventurous kinds of improvisations. The group has organically developed a way of improvising that incorporates free jazz, game pieces, graphic score readings, texture-based minimalism, and melodic layerings. The Flatlands Collective also enables Dijkstra to experiment with the Lyricon (a vintage analog wind synthesizer from the 1970s) in an acoustic ensemble setting, adding an electronic touch to the rich variety of ideas, structures, and textures. The Flatlands Collective has released their debut CD Gnomade in December 2006 on Skycap records.

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Excerpt from a concert review by Review in the Chicago Tribune December 9, 2005 by Howard Reich

Dutch saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra created the Flatlands Collective not long after he moved to the U.S. in 2002 and began collaborating with Chicago musicians. But if the Midwest's topography inspired the name of the band, it had scant effect on the nature of Dijkstra's music, which was anything but flat.

Richly textured, subtly nuanced and built on multiple layers of melody, the music of the Collective merged the free-thinking nature of the Chicago avant-garde with elements of contemporary European classical composition. Much of this music suggested an intensely cerebral exercise, with carefully engineered stop-start rhythms, delicate dabs of electronically produced sound and a nearly complete avoidance of a straightforward beat.

When the band ventured into the occasional swing passage, one was startled to hear it, since practically everything else about this ensemble steered clear of the jazz mainstream.

If at first the music sounded so diffuse and muted as to lack coherence, before long the repertoire became more lucid and structured (or did our ears simply become adjusted to its aesthetic?). The other-worldly hums and drones that Dijkstra produced on lyricon, which might be described as a kind of digital clarinet wired to a computer, were answered by pungent bursts of dissonance from the rest of the band in a piece titled "Slitch."


And in the last work of the set, "Dipje," the band produced the exquisite blends of instrumental color one might sooner expect from a classical chamber ensemble.
In the end, the Flatlands Collective linked the intellectual firepower of the Dutch free-jazz scene with the instrumental virtuosity of some of Chicago's most accomplished creative improvisers, including trombonist Jeb Bishop and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm.


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