FILM PREMIERE: TIME AND SPACE WITH TRISTAN (Hiroki Mano – 80′ – 2024) GUESTS

FILM PREMIERE: TIME AND SPACE WITH TRISTAN

a documentary about the life of Tristan Honsinger, a major figure in the European experimental music scene.

Screening and meeting with the author + a musical celebration of tristan’s life by ICP (NL, impro/jazz) members.
TIME AND SPACE WITH TRISTAN

director and editor: Hiroki Mano – 80′ – 2024, Musubu prod. – music by Tristan Honsinger and his musical families.
Hiroki Mano is a guest at the OCCII with this audiovisual work that attempts to make a portrait of Tristan Honsinger during his Berlin years. Mano was Tristan’s collaborator and assistant, even in the period when the American artist’s health began to fail. The premiere of the film at the OCCII is a tribute to the career of Honsinger, who left us a year ago in Trieste. On October 23 2024 it would have been Tristan’s 75th birthday…
Tristan Honsinger (23 October 1949 – 5 August 2023)

American cellist and performance artist who was a major figure in the European experimental music scene.

The cellist and performance artist Tristan Honsinger – bony, frenetic, bemusedly Stan Laurel-like – travelled the world’s jazz and improvisation roads for more than four decades, leaving vivid memories of his virtuosity and inventiveness wherever he went. Maybe along the way, he even inadvertently helped tighten the rules whereby writers could justify hauling out the word “inimitable”.

Trained as a classical cellist in his native New England, he had left the US for Canada as a disillusioned 19-year-old in 1969, and relocated to the Netherlands in 1974. Already intrigued by jazz and improvisation, in Amsterdam he joined the orchestra founded by Instant Composers Pool (ICP) record label, and met a circle of players who would become crucial influences and partners for him – Dutch new-jazz pioneers including the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the drummer Han Bennink, and the saxophonists Michael Moore and Sean Bergin.

In the later 1970s, he also formed a close bond with the English improv-guitarist Derek Bailey, with whom he made his recording debut on the album Duo in 1976.

He also engaged with Germany’s emerging electronics and performance-art movement Echtzeit (“real-time”), and briefly moved to Berlin to investigate it. Wherever excitingly unfamiliar music was happening was home to Honsinger, who lived in four European countries over five decades in pursuit of it.
poster designer: Joel Grip