6th Biennial Dutch Jazz Meeting 2008

by badbares on December 27, 2008

An innovative event, already twelve years in the making: invited guests from all over the world mingled with the movers and shakers of the Dutch jazz scene for three consecutive nights at the BIMhuis in Amsterdam.

Oren Ambarchi @ Bimhuis
Creative Commons License photo credit: wot nxt

This was world-meets-Dutch Jazz, short attention span-style.  Young up-and-comers, and some stalwarts, were slotted 25 minutes to put on their best show for distinguished guests, festival promoters, venue owners, journalists, and event coordinators.  Some of the older players seemed to have difficulty adjusting to this format, but for those doing the shopping this was ample time to get a feel for each of the eighteen featured bands.

The international visitors were all put up in the same hotel, and were schlepped by bus to and from the BIMhuis and to various day trips cooked up by Paul Gompes and Susanna von Canon, the exceptionally friendly hosts of the event.  For my own purposes, the trips to the Dutch Jazz Archive and to Amsterdam’s resplendent music Conservatory and Concertgebouw were reason enough to visit Amsterdam. Getting to know some of jazz’s international businesspeople was icing on the cake.

The music was uneven; some groups sounded like they had just stepped out of the conservatory, others, like the normally engaging STriCat, simply had an off night. Wolfert Brederode’s quartet sounded like an ECM band should, while trumpeter Rik Mol and singer Wouter Hamel played unimpeachable commercial jazz, if you’re into that sort of thing.

On the other hand, Michael Moore’s “Fragile” on Thursday night was spellbinding, as was Jeroen van Vliet’s trio on Saturday.  Composer/pianist Martin Fondse’s “Starvinsky Orkestar” showed signs of promise.  The arrangements and instrumentation (four strings, four horns, plus rhtyhm section) held my interest despite weak soloing from some of the sidemen. And Friday’s “fringe” meeting for experimentalists supplied some of the most interesting music of the whole meeting.  So interesting, in fact, that some wondered openly why this group was cordoned off from the main event.

Like the music itself, the visit overall was a strangely swinging affair.  Whatever you may have thought about the jazz musicians onstage, the ones behind the scenes were true characters.  We all had a ball getting to know one another, though we could have used a hotel that keeps the bar open late, especially in such cold, rainy weather. The topic of Dutch jazz is fine social lubricant but more heart-warming Grolsch couldn’t have hurt, either.

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Review: New Dutch Swing, by Kevin Whitehead

by badbares on December 21, 2008

If jazz criticism has a Hemingway, it may well be University of Kansas English professor and veteran American jazz journalist, Kevin Whitehead. Those of us who came to his work via NPR’s Fresh Air, Downbeat, or the Village Voice are already familiar with his gripping writing style, which entices with jazz-shaped prose, modernist understatement, poetic economy and insight.  A less obvious connection, however, is his experience as a foreign correspondent in Europe.

New Dutch Swing, product of Whitehead’s four years of work in the Netherlands, brims with Hemingwayesque reportage.  This is an optimistic, no-nonsense American book, embracing all that seems vital in Dutch jazz while consigning the rest to silence.  As the author explains in the introduction: “If the tone of the book does seem overwhelmingly positive–well I wouldn’t waste your time dwelling on dull music of which Holland like everyplace has plenty.”

For all his fascination with Dutch culture (and there is plenty to be fascinated and perplexed by), don’t think that Whitehead checks his critical instincts at the European door. Taking in a few concerts with Mr. Whitehead at Amsterdam’s BIMhuis during the 2008 Dutch Jazz Meeting was a lesson in visceral listening,  a faculty which my years of objective social-scientific observation have dulled considerably.  Whitehead fully inhabits own perspective and wears it confidently, as one who not only knows what he likes, but knows that he knows what he likes.

We don’t see eye-to-eye on everything.  I chalk some of this up to experience.  During the closing concert, I found piano phenom Michiel Borstlap and band so rocking I had to dial down my analytical brain and move to the back of the room to allow my body to get its groove on.  Whitehead left in the middle of the first tune.  When pushed afterward he reminded me that he’d seen Miles at the Fillmore.

I know his inspiration for the book was not Hemingway but someone far more esoteric and hip (your secret is safe with me, Kevin).  Still, I prefer to think Hemingway because too few American jazz writers make the jump across pond and return to tell the tale with such engaging perspective.  A seminal work in the study of transatlantic jazz, New Dutch Swing asks us to listen, not just to the deep cultural dramas encoded in musical activity, but to the nitty-gritty that reaches the gut directly through the ears.

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35 Honorary Americans

December 1, 2008
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So you have your European jazz street cred, you have your American jazz street cred, and then you have your rare transatlantic musicians who can lay claim to both.  I thought it might be interesting to come up with a list of European jazz musicians who have become household names for Americans.  Whether or not [...]

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Top 50 European Jazz Albums

November 30, 2008
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I am asked periodically by acquaintances who know little about jazz to recommend a list of top albums to get them started.  Now that  I am involved in writing a dissertation/book based on research in Europe, I get the same questions about European jazz, this time from fellow music scholars: what does it sound like? [...]

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Crosscurrents at Harvard

November 3, 2008
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I spent the weekend in Cambridge at the Crosscurrents conference co-sponsored by Harvard University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

Its aim was to enrich a developing discourse of transatlantic music exchange (and foster a little of its own) by bringing together scholars from different disciplines, persuasions and nationalities, first in Boston (focusing on the years 1900-1950) and later [...]

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