There's a story that gets to the heart of this record. Years ago, Keefe Jackson spent an evening with South African-Dutch legend Sean Bergin - the only time the two ever met. At some point Bergin told him: "Keefe, you remind me very much of my friend Ab Baars." Jackson replied that he'd heard this many times, that he'd even stopped wearing a certain hat to avoid the comparison. Bergin paused, then said: "These things happen." And so a band got its name - from a throwaway line that turned out to contain a whole philosophy of creative music-making: the accidental, the inevitable, the way certain affinities surface whether you invite them or not.
These Things Happen are a transatlantic quartet bridging Chicago and Amsterdam - two cities whose improvised music communities have long shared a deep, often unspoken kinship. Jackson (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet) and Hoogland (piano) write the original material, joined by Jason Roebke on double bass (replacing Joshua Abrams from the group's earlier incarnation) and Mikel Patrick Avery on drums. A Gentle Reminder is their second release, following a 2016 recording issued by Astral Spirits in 2022, and it continues the band's distinctive project: threading original compositions through the music of Misha Mengelberg and Thelonious Monk, treating the repertoire not as repertoire but as living conversation between traditions.
The results are lean, self-aware, and slyly humorous. Side A opens with Jackson's 20 Years Past 12 O'Clock - a piece operating on multiple time scales, possibly about memory, possibly about environmental crisis, possibly about both at once - before moving through Hoogland's Upperclass Underground (dedicated to Ab Baars, naturally), Monk's Green Chimneys (which Hoogland describes as having "started out as a punk song on the setlist" before taking "a thin-threaded turn" on the night), and two more originals that keep the balance between compositional rigor and the pleasure of things going slightly, productively sideways.
Side B is where the Amsterdam-Chicago axis comes into sharpest focus. Hoogland's arrangement of Mengelberg's Een Beetje Zenuwachtig ("a little nervous") transposes the original from minor to major - a deliberate inversion inspired by the legendary (and controversial) occasion when Mengelberg played Monk's Round Midnight in major during a Chicago visit. As Hoogland puts it: "I thought of returning the favor." It's a nerdy inside joke, but one that generates real musical urgency - the kind of conceptual move that gives a cover its reason for being. The Monk reading that follows, Well You Needn't, pushes further still, arriving at what Hoogland calls their "max so far" - an approach that might seem overstimulating at first listen but reveals a surprisingly classical architecture: opening, development, piano solo at the conventional moment in the form, then recap. The album closes with Hoogland's Over het Zijn en het Hoera ("on being and hurray"), its title drawn from an absurdist story by Dutch writer and artist Armando, featuring a long silence that was entirely live - held together by a packed room at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
This is music that knows its history inside out and wears it lightly. The generosity of spirit here - between players, between cities, between Monk and Mengelberg, between composition and the moment - is the real subject. Recommended for anyone who follows Corbett vs. Dempsey's consistently excellent output, and for listeners who understand that the best improvised music is always, at some level, about the depth of listening.
Keefe Jackson - tenor saxophone, bass clarinet / Oscar Jan Hoogland - piano / Jason Roebke - double bass / Mikel Patrick Avery - drums. Recorded September 24, 2022 at Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Chicago, and at WNUR Studio, Northwestern University. Mixed by Ron Ruiten. Mastered by Mickey Young.
