“Cecil Taylor habitually led his choirs of melodists, having invented the language and all, but a few players could audibly deflect his course. Derek Bailey was one: in their 1988 Berlin duo Pleistozaen Mit Wasser, Cecil is accommodatingly restrained. Tristan Honsinger was another deflector. In Taylor’s quintet at the Village Vanguard, March 1995, Tris would skronk out some four-note cello chord, and Cecil would repeat it right back to him. Or the cellist’d wedge open some new variation on a Taylor melodic kernel Cecil himself would dig into. Tristan had that kind of forceful personality. Like Taylor he might burst into eerie, distressed, often but not always wordless vocals.

We’d met in 1979, when my friend Patrick O’Brien and I drove up from Baltimore to retrieve Lol Coxhill from New York’s JFK, prior to a solo concert at Johns Hopkins. His London flight arrived Sunday night. The soprano saxophonist was poured off the plane with an equally lubricated friend he’d run into en route, a skinny American clutching a cello case, 30ish with an intense manner, who told me, We have to go somewhere to play RIGHT NOW.

–Um, we’re just here to drive Lol to Baltimore.

No matter. Off we went to Lower Manhattan, to Soho where they rang the bell at the shuttered Kitchen, and were directed to the Ear Inn a few blocks west, where the bartender listened to their plea, and shut off the jukebox so they could improvise an intense and slithery duet at their table (they’d ordered drinks), the cellist keening along in what struck me as a disquieting way. After about 15 minutes the barkeep turned the jukebox back on to end their performance. Writing about this two decades later, I said I’d never seen a more intense need to play. Nor have I since.

Somewhere in there:

–“Lol tells me you’ve made a bunch of records, Tristan. What are some?”

Shrugs, annoyed at the question. “I really can’t remember.” I thought his answer was disingenuous at the time. Later, not so much.

He was similarly forthcoming a month later when he hit Baltimore in an improvising trio with clarinetist Perry Robinson – I never heard of them working together elsewhere – and bassist Hal Onserud, who’d been playing with Tristan on the street in Amsterdam in 1974 when they’d had their instruments confiscated: an unpromising debut in a city Tris would live in off and on for decades. That episode also spoke to his need to play right now.

Born in Vermont in 1949, he attended conservatories in Boston and Baltimore, had a few teachers who offered contradictory advice. “I moved to Montreal in ‘69, and started, slowly, to improvise.” He played with the group Le Jazz Libre de Quebec, but they liked to argue politics more than play (he’d say later) and he’d wind up playing second sets solo. A Dutch musician tipped him off there was a scene for this kind of music in Amsterdam. He went over in 1974, but when the cops busted him his first time busking, he was so pissed he went to France to cool off for six months. “Then I went back to Amsterdam and it kind of took off for me.”

Those recordings he couldn’t remember by 1979 were already mounting up. He’s on five of Derek Bailey’s first seven Company LPs (he’d met Derek in Paris; they’d record in duo), a split FMP solo album with Dutch bassist Maarten Altena (supposed to be duo, but they couldn’t get together), the lone album from Altena’s string-heavy pool K’PLOENG, a couple with Misha Mengelberg’s embryonic ICP Tentet/Orchestra, and Globe Unity’s Improvisations on JAPO. (Years later I told Tristan I liked how later Globe Unity’s spontaneous sets divided neatly into episodes so that everyone got a solo. “I hated that.”) There’s a 26-minute septet improvisation from 1977 on Company 5 that’s as kinetic, recreational and free-wheeling as a basketball scrimmage – the cellist very much in the thick of it with globetrotters Derek, Wadada, Altena, Braxton, Lacy, and Evan P.

It wasn’t hard to hear Honsinger’s kinship with the Dutch – the love of counterpoint and humor, disregard for generic boundaries, fierce belief in improvisation as ethical practice, and love of a good tune – but he found all those qualities within, a self-starter. Amsterdam did have a few folks he could relate to, including dancers and theater folk as well as musicians. He bonded with fellow expats: tenors Tobias Delius (in whose long running quartet he played), Daniele D’Agaro (for awhile they furiously worked on an opera whose plot they couldn’t nail down), and Sean Bergin, his physical opposite – Sean a looming Sasquatch to Tris’s wooden-dowel Ichabod Crane. They could improvise a set of dialogue as well as music, inhabiting spontaneous characters; Tristan’s were often strong-willed older women. He and Sean recorded in duo, starting in the 1970s, and played in each other’s bands. They shared a gargantuan appetite for intoxicants. I saw a lot of Tristan and his circle while living in Amsterdam in the later 1990s. Red-eyed and hungover was a familiar look. Also unraveling sweaters, nicotine-stained nervous fingers, and an ever-diminishing roster of teeth. He was (usually) fun to be around, an instigator who loved creative misunderstandings. Once we were talking with Misha, who misunderstood a point one of us made and starting running with it in a wrong direction. I tried to clarify, but Tristan hushed me. “It’s better this way.” Let those conversational billiard balls carom.

In the early 1980s he moved to Italy for a few years, put together a bilingual band to showcase his tuneful vocal or instrumental ditties on a couple of albums. This, That and the Other included Sean, singer Tiziana Simona, Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass, and Michael Vatcher or Steve Noble on drums. (Picnic has been reissued by Corbett vs Dempsey; This, That and the Other was on the disreputable ITM label). His songs are both tuneful and oblique; the cadences of the lyric may not match those of the melody which might dart around with the abrupt turns of a Tristan Honsinger cello solo. Also in TT&O was another key ally since 1981, the unclassifiable free/funk trumpeter Toshinori Kondo; their co-led What Are You Talking About? with Peter Kowald and Sabu Toyozumi recorded in Tokyo in 1983 should be more widely known.

Tristan’s intonation was always idiosyncratic, and his horsehair-shedding bowing emphatic. It was that need to play: one thing you always heard when he improvised was the commitment, hanging on for dear life. Solo concerts were important to him: Dutch writer J Bernlef recalled one he’d attended at the old Bimhuis circa 1975, as the sole audience member. Tristan didn’t hold back. Amsterdam bassist Raoul van der Weide, who’d heard him early, wrote after Tristan died, “Ezra Pound somewhere stated that ‘Good poetry is news that stays news.’ I heard Tristan lots of times, expressing his multi-faceted personal esthetics, solo and in ensembles – and every time his performance felt authentic, new, and credible. That makes him unique in my view.”

No wonder leaders had to have him. Reedist Michael Moore put him in a trio where his shaggy cello was often paired with Cor Fuhler’s raggedy keyboard-fingered violin, well-matched. Composer Ig Henneman who takes a dim view of boys’ funny business drafted him into her first string quartet in the mid-1990s. She wanted that mojo, that provocation. He also had his own scrappy quintet – four strings plus Louis Moholo-Moholo – which recorded Map of Moods in 1994.

Honsinger had been out of the ICP Orchestra for a decade and a half when Misha invited him back late in 1996. After years playing together cellist Ernst Reijseger and bassist Ernst Glerum had a pristine hookup that highlighted ICP’s chamber-music prettiness. Adding Tristan threw in a big monkey wrench – the two cellos played off the same page but somehow never phrased together, the new arrival lurching ahead or behind or stress-testing a common pitch. (Oddly enough, they blend seamlessly in Sean Bergin’s M.O.B. on its masterwork Kids Mysteries.) It wasn’t until after Reijseger withdrew and violinist/violist Mary Oliver (who’d played with Tris a bunch) came in that ICP’s string section found its balance again, with Mary as mediator. But by then, as Misha became less active, Honsinger was coming to the fore as the band’s new provocateur: the antic Fred Astaire of pantomime conductors, leading ICP’s instant compositions; the composer of round-peg/square-hole songs like the title tune to the 2001 recording Oh, My Dog! with its build-up via sea-shanty cello grinding, dog yapping, mumbled guttural Italian, and a momentary collision between cello and bass, before the final minute where Tristan yowls out the lyric and anthemic melody:

I took a walk into the woods

And all of a sudden, I heard a noise out there

It was a deer

Kafka, where are you going?

You’re always too late, oh my dog….

That diaristic action is set in Bologna, where he (like the dog Kafka) was living at the time. Tris was never one to sit still, musically or geographically. After his first stint in Italy he briefly tried living in England. After he finally left Amsterdam more or less for good, he followed Toby Delius to Berlin, where Toby would keep an eye on him.

If anything, he criss-crossed the northern hemisphere more during Covid times, when he was dying of cancer and looked frailer than ever. First he was back in the States, sheltering with family. At one point he was in a clinic in Norway; then he was headed to a facility in the US he talked himself out of before he got there, heading to Manhattan instead. (He made at least one late appearance there, at the Downtown Music Gallery with Vatcher and John Hébert, reading from his book Wander & Wonder reviewed in these pages in Issue 79, though somehow I’d failed to mention it includes Klaus Kürvel’s invaluable 15-page Honsinger discography.) He also made it back to Berlin and Tokyo, somehow. “A phoenix from the ashes,” ICP manager Susanna von Canon called him. Adding, “I hope to get a book of his music together, so that it is not scattered in the wind.”

One of his last visits to Baltimore, his string trio with Montreal’s Josh Zubot and Nicolas Caiola played a downtown loft/communal living space. Someone was cooking dinner in a far corner. At a certain moment Tristan transformed himself into a fishmonger and a picky elderly customer, in dialogue. She sought fresh fish. Lady, it’s all fresh! (The performance is on the trio’s In the Sea from Relative Pitch.) He liked to cook, and was fond of that port city’s large indoor Lexington Market. You could get a beer there early in the day.