Tristan Honsinger's Berlin
The late cellist made an indelible mark upon the city's improvised music community
It’s been a little less than two weeks since cellist Tristan Honsinger passed away in Trieste, Italy, at age 73. There have been proper obituaries and plenty of wonderful stories and memories passed around online about this utterly strange and singular musician since then. I had the pleasure of hearing him often in Chicago, as well as in Berlin in the brief period after my arrival in the summer of 2019 and the onset of the pandemic. I caught a show with the excellent Hook, Line & Sinker at Sowieso in celebration of his 70th birthday, during which saxophonist Tobias Delius joked that every time the cellist marked another decade his friends seemed shocked that he was still at it. I didn’t know Honsinger personally, so I can’t really add anything on that front.
But since I moved to this city I have observed his clear influence here, where his highly theatrical style—marked by wry humor, Italianate song, and the wiry dance moves of a pleasure seeker unburdened by self-consciousness—exerted a strong pull on many younger musicians. From the beginning Honsinger followed his own path. He was a fantastic musician, but he traveled freely beyond free improv orthodoxy, making him a logical fixture in ICP, the brilliant ensemble formed in Amsterdam back in 1967 by fellow iconoclasts Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, and Willem Breuker. In most of the performances I saw by that chaotically joyful juggernaut, Honsinger was given a feature to showcase one of his tunes, often with his unstable croon delivering fantastical lyrics.
Hook, Line & Sinker—a quartet with reedist Delius, trumpeter Axel Dörner, and bassist Antonio Borghini, players a generation or two younger than cellist—was one of the first projects where I witnessed Honsinger’s aesthetic priorities at the helm, not only with the qualities mentioned in the paragraph above, but also through a kind of spontaneous choreography, with all four musicians moving around the stage in weird assemblages that continually altered the perception of the audience, while making them smile. It’s a tactic brilliantly employed by the great Die Hochstapler, the excellent quartet with Borghini, drummer Hannes Lingens, alto saxophonist Pierre Borrel, and trumpeter Louis Laurain, who frequently reposition themselves on stage to change emphasis in an organic, fluid fashion.
More significantly, the wild crew that was behind the sorely missed venue Au Topsi Pohl was almost like an adopted family to Honsinger, both in their support of his activities and in their full embrace of his artistic sensibilities. One of the first shows I saw after moving to Berlin four years ago was by the cellist’s Hopscotch project at the 2019 edition of A L’arme! Festival, a sprawling musical theater piece that was by turns hilarious, maddening, and strange—qualities that certainly applied to most things Honsinger was involved with. A recording of that project was released by the French imprint Umlaut Records through its Topsi series, and the various excesses and indulgences heard on Cloud Reading Society took me right back to the performance, where Dörner, Delius, drummer Steve Heather, bassists Borghini and Klaus Kürvers, vocalist Izumi Ose, violinist Franziska Hoffmann, and dancer Hiroki Mano bought in fully to Honsinger’s warped vision. I have limited patience for some of the hysterical vocalizing, but there’s no doubt that there’s not much else in the world like it. Check out “Father’s Song Suite,” below.
The Topsi crew, specifically bassist Joel Grip, also published the aptly titled Wander and Wonder, a book of far-flung texts Honsinger created over a few months in the spring of 2020, capturing his manic energy and imagination in all of its messy glory. The volume was illustrated by sympathetically playful abstractions by Grip and appended by an invaluable 15-page discography compiled by Kürvers. Even though the book can’t produce sound, it remains a fitting capstone to Honsinger’s career.
His final year was made much easier by a tight group of friends, none more supportive than Laura Sansan, one of the essential non-musicians who made Au Topsi Pohl so special, who went above and beyond to find him housing and help him manage day-to day. His legacy lives on in Berlin, including a long-running weekly gig at Petersburg Art Space by Klub Demboh, a collective Honsinger was once a crucial part of. Honsinger struggled after returning to the US during the pandemic, but he couldn’t resist the pull of Europe.
Nowhere Street will return to its regular weekly rotation, with more show recommendations on August 28. I will mention that the latest edition of my contemporary music column at Bandcamp Daily was published on August 7, and I have feature stories on the Pitch and Paal Nilssen-Love in the latest issues of the Wire and DownBeat, respectively.