Duo Baars - Henneman

World-class creative improvisers and key members of the Dutch creative jazz and improvised music community, multi-reedist Ab Baars and violist Ig Henneman have toured and recorded as a duo for well over a decade. Aside from their duo, husband and wife Baars and Henneman have been leaders and collaborators in a wide variety of other projects over the years, and both are mainstays of the independent Wig label, based in Amsterdam. Baars has led his own Ab Baars Trio (with bassist Wilbert de Joode and drummer Martin van Duynhoven) since 1990 and has also played with the groundbreaking ICP Orchestra since the mid-'80s; he is also noted as a solo performer on his chosen instruments, tenor saxophone, clarinet, and shakuhachi. Henneman is an acclaimed violist, composer, and improviser who has led a number of ensembles since the early '90s, including a quintet, tentet, and string quartet. In addition, she is a member of the trio version of Queen Mab, initially founded as a duo by two Canadians, pianist Marilyn Lerner and clarinetist Lori Freedman. Formed on the occasion of Henneman's 65th birthday and 25th anniversary as a composer/bandleader, the Ig Henneman Sextet (also featuring Baars, de Joode, Lerner, Freedman, and trumpeter Axel Dörner) arrived on the international creative improvising scene in December 2010.

Although they had performed together in various settings with other musicians since the late '80s, an invitation for the pair to play at Rome's Festival Controindicazioni in 1999 would first establish Baars and Henneman as an ongoing concertizing and recording duo. They began touring worldwide, bringing their unique meld of free improvisation and composed music to venues across Europe and North America (as well as Japan and Brazil), and released a debut album of duets, Stof (consisting primarily of improvisations), on their Wig imprint in 2006. In 2009, Wig released Sliptong, strictly speaking not a duo outing but rather an album by Baars, Henneman, and ICP leader/pianist Misha Mengelberg recorded at Amsterdam's Bimhuis in December of the previous year. In the fall of 2012, Duo Baars-Henneman embarked on a 15-date fall tour of the United States that took them across the country from Seattle's Earshot Jazz Festival to Brooklyn's ShapeShifter Lab. The pair developed a "suite of freely improvised and minimally composed pieces" for the occasion, and upon returning to The Netherlands, recorded the suite in late November 2012 at the Bimhuis. The results appeared on the duo's sophomore album, Autumn Songs, released by Wig in February 2013.