We have collaborated with long term Cafe OTO friend Han Bennink to design the first ever OTO t-shirt just in time for xmas. We'll ship these Monday 16th onwards, and have them in hand for the OTO fair on the 15th December if you'd rather try it on in the loos first. These are made on good quaity fair trade Stanley/Stella tees - more info under the design detail.
Celebrating his 82nd birthday this year, the Dutch drummer and multi-instrumentalist has had a colossal impact and influence in the fields of free jazz and improvised music - not just as a percussionist but also as an organiser, designer and visual artist. Bennink trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterda and was strongly influenced by the anti-art of Dada. Out of what he calls 'a kind of involvement with things', Bennink reuses seemingly worthless objects from his immediate environment, such as broken drum skins and sticks. They are given a second life in his sculptures and installations. For his drawings and collages, Bennink draws on his personal memories and intuition. Birds and airplanes often return in these, symbols of the same freedom that he personifies during his performances. His artwork graces the covers of several corner stone recordings released on FMP, ICP, Incus, hat ART, psi and more.
"It simply has to be beautiful and preferably appeal to an emotion as well. In [Bennink's] case that emotion doesn't have to be very dramatic or deeply hidden. You could rather call his art, his visual art anyway, light-footed, the way poems by Rutget Copland and Hans Verhagen can be." - Hans Sizoo, Jazzwereld nr 16.
Photo by Corral
