On 9 August 2023 the trio VEHICLE/PASSENGER set up at Splendor, the house in a former bathhouse in central Amsterdam that some fifty musicians founded and run as a collective, and played a set. That set, six pieces long, is Live in Amsterdam. It is built from spoken word, saxophone, double bass, drums and two modular synthesizers, and it moves between dramatic, hip-hop-styled pieces and open improvisation without committing to either. A title like “The Ballad of a Never-ending Elevator Accident” tells you the group has a sense of humour about its own intensity.
The trio first came together about six years ago with a performance in Amsterdam, so this record is a return rather than a debut. Marc Alberto, who splits himself between Amsterdam and Curaçao, is the voice: a poet who also plays saxophone and a modular rig, and whose texts sit nearer to rap than to the jazz-and-poetry lineage of the sixties, cadenced and political. Three of the poems are dated 2021 to 2023, so the words came in with the band, while the sound around them was, by the band’s own account, improvised on the night. Florian Herzog, a Cologne-based bassist and a member of Lesley Mok’s ensemble The Living Collection, plays double bass and the second synthesizer. Mok, a New York percussionist and sound artist, is why the record is getting a second look now.
The Living Collection released its debut on American Dreams Records in May 2023 and took the International Debut Album prize at the 2024 Deutscher Jazzpreis; the same year brought Mok the ASCAP Fred Ho Award, and this July a solo electronic record, transient, on the same label. Commissions for the JACK Quartet and stage time with Myra Melford and Mary Halvorson complete the picture of a composer who thinks in texture rather than tunes. Live in Amsterdam is the other half: a drummer keeping a poet honest.
What keeps the trio out of the spoken-word-plus-band trap is the electronics. Because Alberto and Herzog each carry a modular synth as well as an acoustic instrument, the group can drop to a whisper of static or swell toward something like a small orchestra without adding a player, and the nine-minute “Crescent Sun” seems to me to live in that slow expansion. The band calls its work a queer perspective on body, society and improvisation; the eponymous poem says “neither guide nor navigator / a carrier of time”.
Recorded by Petra Randewijk, mixed by Alberto and mastered by Nico van Monfort, the set came out on vinyl on 12 October 2024 through Vrijetijdsbesteding, a not-for-profit label in Arnhem founded as a small statement against independent music as a revenue model. The sleeves, with drawings by Hugo Mendes, are hand screen printed so that no two copies share a colour. The trio plays Cologne, Amsterdam and Berlin again this October.
