Group’s efforts at spontaneity don’t guarantee combustion

The story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” kept coming to mind Friday night during the performance by the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra at Club Tropical. The 10-piece Dutch musical collective led by pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink has gone through various incarnations over three decades in pursuit of the wide-open combination of freedom and spontaneity implied by the ensemble’s name.

But freedom, despite Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” line, is more than “just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Especially when it comes to improvisation. And the ICP players’ performance underscored that there’s a great deal left to lose by anyone who approaches improvisation as a license for the creation of what’s little more than musical chaos.

The ICP’s opening set began as a pair of pieces featuring small ensembles -- piano, tenor saxophone and cello, followed by trombone, clarinet and violin. Each juxtaposed the sort of pointillistic bursts and smears of sound often associated -- sometimes jokingly -- with contemporary concert music against dissonant, apparently composed, tonal clusters. A few showcase solos took off into unrelated, uninteresting musical space.

Several pieces (no titles were provided) took a more mainstream tack, starkly exposing the ensemble’s limited formal jazz skills. One, suggesting unfulfilled Thelonious Monk ambitions, cranked forward stiffly, its herky-jerky rhythms revealing no real sense of dynamic swing. Another piece began with a humorous drum-roll count-off before proceeding into a lead-footed jazz march. A third displayed attractive compositional qualities, phrases tossed back and forth among the players.

Much of what the ICP played dated stylistically to American avant-garde jazz of the ‘60s. But although Mengelberg and Bennink are participatory veterans of the decade, having played with many of the American players who were surfacing in Europe at the time, this ensemble lacks comparable imagination, musicality and articulateness.

Give the ICP points for effort -- jazz freedom, spontaneity and instant composition deserve continuing exploration -- and a much lower grade for accomplishment.