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Maarten Altena

Altena studied double bass at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (he graduated in 1968). From 1980 on, he took composition lessons from Robert Heppener.

Since 1968, he played in various music ensembles both in classical music and jazz. Besides the Nederlands Ballet Orkest, these were the jazz groups of Marion Brown, Hans Dulfer and Theo Loevendie, later on those of Willem Breuker and Burton Greene. He played in the Orkest de Volharding and the Instant Composers Pool-Tentett of Misha Mengelberg. Since the mid-1970s, he improvised with Derek Bailey, Paul Lovens and in the Vario Project of Günter Christmann, later also with Peter Kowald and in the Northern European Melody and Improvisation Orchestra of Sven-Åke Johansson. He also gave solo concerts improvising and playing his own compositions. Together with Michel Waisvisz, he organized several concert series.

In 1978, Altena founded his own group, first as a quartet, which expanded during the 1980s and was then operated under the name of 'Maarten Altena Ensemble' (by now: MAE). Their performances were increasingly detached from jazz and more in the direction of complex works with improvisational parts. Altena focused more and more on composition, but also encouraged other composers to write for his ensemble. From 1997 on, he stopped playing in his own ensemble, and featured solely as 'musical choreograph'. Since 2005 he composes primarily for other groups.

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Album Review

Marion Brown: Why Not? Porto Novo! Revisited

Read "Why Not? Porto Novo! Revisited" reviewed by Chris May


Alto saxophonist Marion Brown was part of the band on John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1965), though you would not guess it from Why Not (ESP, 1968). Like fellow Ascension alumnus, tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders' contemporaneous Tauhid (Impulse, 1967), Brown's album inhabited an intensely melodic section of the 1960s' New Thing. As were Sanders' own-name releases from 1967 onwards, Brown's work was deeply lyrical and embraced South Asian, Maghrebi and West African instruments and constructs. As bandleaders, the two ...

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