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”.
I remember him particularly at the Bath festival’s elegant 18th-century Guildhall building on a jazz weekend in the 2000s. The inelegant maestro played his solo show as a mysteriously muttering, feet-flapping, theatrically entrancing mix of order and bedlam, oscillating between rich cello harmonies and raspingly abstract sounds – veering into faithful mimicry of the raucous conversations of the seabirds on the roof, before diverting into demented pacing of the aisles, pretending to hoover the floor with the cello. But Honsinger, who has died aged 73, was a very long way from being a novelty act.
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.
In Amsterdam, too, he met the dancer and performance artist Katie Duck, with whom he formed a turbulent but deep-rooted creative and personal bond that would last for the rest of his life. He later followed her to Italy, where she had regular work, and in a remote Florence farmhouse in the 80s the pair developed their own agenda of “total theatre” (adventurous improvised fusions of music, dance, and spoken word) and raised a daughter, Ilaria.
Honsinger spread his wings to Germany’s formidable free-jazz scene, discovering the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra – and in the 80s, one of his most significant performing relationships, with the African-American piano colossus Cecil Taylor. Taylor, like Honsinger, was an artist of obsessively unflinching resolve coupled with a virtuosic spontaneity that drew on jazz and blues roots.
A trio encounter in Berlin with Honsinger and the virtuoso saxophonist Evan Parker on 30 June 1988 during Taylor’s much-acclaimed month-long sojourn in the city (recorded and released by the FMP record label as The Hearth) came to be regarded in avant-jazz circles as an epic example of instant ensemble composition in action, with Honsinger’s soaring bowed chordwork and Parker’s subtle modal lines both releasing the pianist’s headlong virtuosity and inviting his creativity to bloom within their constraints.
In the 90s and into the 21st century, Honsinger worked in Italy with former members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, a genre-busting experimental composers’ ensemble, led his own groups with Moore and Bergin, played alongside Bennink in the saxophonist Tobias Delius’s quartet, 4Tet, and founded his own ensemble, This, That and the Other.
He also engaged with Germany’s emerging electronics and performance-art movement Ecktzeit (“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.
Honsinger was born in Burlington, Vermont, the eldest of six children of Mildred, a pharmacist, and Jackson, a teacher. Mildred dreamed of her eldest children forming a string quartet, though only Tristan, who took up cello at the age of nine, enthusiastically embraced the discipline. On the family’s move to Springfield, Massachusetts, he attended schools including Classical High.
His parents listened to Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter as well as classical music, so the young musician’s listening was already wide when he arrived at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and subsequently the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
Collisions with conservatoire rules culminated in Honsinger’s cello teacher at Peabody telling him: “You can’t play like Pablo Casals, you have to play like me.”
This, and the US government’s conscription of young men for service in Vietnam, caused him to leave in 1969 for Canada, where he busked on the streets of Montreal, discovered the music of Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman, and by chance came across the 1970 Evan Parker/Derek Bailey/Han Bennink album The Topography of the Lungs, a revelation of the expressiveness of free improvisation that stunned him. Four years later, Honsinger travelled to Amsterdam.
Over more than four decades after that migration, he played 20 gigs a year or more with the ICP until his final months and he also explored improv/avant-rock music occasionally as well as enjoying workshops and teaching.
In 2000, Honsinger recorded perhaps his most characteristic album, the unaccompanied A Camel’s Kiss – a tumultuous mix of wordless vocals, cello improv, glimpses of jazz, JS Bach, Kurt Weill, and Gypsy music.
Into the 21st century he also relished the quartet music he described as “like four languages going on”, with Delius, the German trumpeter/electronicist Axel Dörner, and the Italian bassist Antonio Borghini.
In 2019, Honsinger’s physical and mental health deteriorated. Diagnosed with liver cancer, he relocated close to family members in upstate New York for treatment.
He resumed touring as his condition improved and the Covid-19 pandemic passed. He wrote a book, Wander and Wonder (2021), a collection of handwritten stories, aphorisms, poems and dialogues, and an extensive discography.
Like his kaleidoscopic performances over the years, the book confirmed why Honsinger would cheerfully declare Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton to be his primary creative influences, rather than any musicians.
When asked by the US jazz magazine Cadence in 2016 about the relationship between humour and art, Honsinger tellingly replied that he did not like the word ‘‘art” but preferred the word “humour”, “because it’s not only artful, it’s basically how we can relate to each other”.
A new ICP tour reawakened Honsinger’s long-term mental health issues, which he had self-medicated since his 30s with drugs and alcohol, and he again returned to the US for treatment.
Friends, family, and a crowdfunded appeal to fans for financial help enabled Honsinger to pay for his medication and a flat in Trieste, and drew him back to the road. But a performing trip to Europe and Japan earlier this summer was to be his last.
Honsinger is survived by Katie, Ilaria and a granddaughter, Laura, and by his sisters, Jennie and Louise, and brother, Jon.
• Tristan Charles Honsinger, cellist, born 23 October 1949; died 5 August 2023
