The principles of the ICP Orchestra were influenced by Misha Mengelberg’s contact the artistic movement Fluxus, which was partially responsible for the introduction of the happening in contemporary art. Both Mengelberg and Bennink had been frequent collaborators since of beginning of the 1960’s – both had, in fact, played with legendary saxophonist Eric Dolphy –, so the idea of forming a band in which their aesthetical sensibilities – both with a propensity to improvisation, performance and to a kind of absurd and comic surrealism, both great connoisseurs of jazz – could be expressed collectively came naturally. Since then, the orchestra began exercising its approaches, supported upon strategies of improvisation within composition and of composition within improvisation. Besides the compositions of their own members, the ICO also explores repertoire projects, interpreting seminal jazz composers such as Monk and Duke Ellington, while always preserving the matrix of subversion of musical languages, as a hybrid shape between a jazz big band, a circus and a chamber orchestra.

Considering the sad fact of Mengelberg’s physical absence, it is Han Bennink, one of the most idiosyncratic and influent musicians of European jazz, the informal leader and vix motrix of ICP’s creative process, even though at this orchestra every musicians share the decisions that determine the shape of the sound, thereby conveying an important ethical and artistic message. The musicians who form the band are long-term members of the band and, among them, it is fair to mention cellist Tristan Honsinger, who is the only one, besides Bennink himself, who was part of the orchestra’s first official formation.

The aesthetical matrix of this project, the level of the musicians and the depth of the artistic commitment are the qualities that make the music of the ICP Orchestra, a great representative of the avant-garde European music of the twentieth century, sound fluid and dialogic, even if its vertigo always presupposes the introduction of an element of chaos in order, shattering the sound in multiple voices speaking and communicating through musical instruments in a never-ending and never-exhausting dialogue.