Gijs Hendriks Band - It Takes Time -1974- (LP, Private Pressing), Netherlands

 

Gijs Hendriks (Utrecht, 26 februari 1938 - Utrecht, 21 mei 2017) was a Dutch saxophonist and clarinetist who played an important role in the Dutch jazz scene from the 50's until his passing in 2017. During his vast career he played in dozens of different jazz outfits and also contributed to Dutch national radio broadcasts and theatre productions. In 1974 he recorded a groovy album with a supergroup of jazz musicians under the name Gijs Hendriks Band.

The Gijs Hendriks Band consisted of Gijs Hendriks (soprano-, alto-, tenorsax), Leo Goudriaan (trumpet and bass), Lex Cohen (drums), Willem Kühne (electric piano), Daoud Amin (percussionist from New York who also played with Burton Greene), Nippy Noya (percussionist from Indonesian-Japanese descent who also toured with psychedelic band Group 1850) and Nico Langenhuijsen (bass). Many of these musicians played their part in the Dutch jazz scene of the 70's. A scene that wasn't immune for the Dutch hippie revolution (which was kickstarted by the Provo movement during the sixties), the orange free state "anti-monarchy" mentality and the rise of psychedelic substances.

During this period - also in Holland - (like throughout the global "happening" music scenes) - psychedelic jazz and psychedelic rock were combined in free-form music styles, sometimes leaning more to the jazz world and sometimes leaning more to the rock side of the spectrum. Free-form jams could consist of groovy jazz music, fuzzed out guitar tripping, electronic experimentation or any type of combination of these elements. As I write this, the idea here is not to dive into a global encyclopedic overview of the entire world moving and spacing out at the same time, but to open a tiny window to look at these specific musical dynamics in The Netherlands at the time.

Examples of great bands from those days in Holland were a.o. Association P.C. (Dutch-German supergroup led by Pierre Courbois), Ahora Mazda (house band of the Amsterdam hippie venue Fantasio), Hans Dulfer And Ritmo Natural (famous Dutch Jazz saxophonist with a Surinamese rhythm section) and Banten (another Dutch supergroup including notable musicians from Indonesian descent, also on the NWW List). And ofcourse - there is so much more to mention...

The Gijs Hendriks Band is another one of those groups that spontaneously created a recording in the 70's which captured those special times. Nevertheless the album has stayed somewhat under the radar since then. Maybe because of its tendency towards more conventional jazz or maybe the self-released vinyl wasn't overly distributed at all. Whatever the case may be it's quite a nice recording of mostly own compositions where not only Dutch musicians play a role but where musicians like Nippy Noya and Daoud Amin also add musical influences from their cultural background giving this a nice and groovy edge.

Get it HERE

Dustbin Silence - Untitled -1985- (Square Wheel Cassettes), Netherlands

                                                  Dustbin Silence in Brussels, 1983

Dustbin Silence was a short-lived (1982-1985) jazz, noise and improvisation trio from Rotterdam that was formed by Han van Hulzen, ErikWard Geerlings and Henri van Zanten. Han van Hulzen was also part of the new wave group Corridor des Affaires during that time and Henri van Zanten is also known as a (sound) poet in his own right. 

Dustbin Silence, however, was connected to the Rotterdam based Jazzbunker scene that existed around the legendary Jazzbunker venue which functioned as a home for Dutch and international improvisation, jazz and rock in opposition. During the 80's Rotterdam had numerous special bands that created diverse styles out of a blend of new wave, jazz, home-taping and improvisation. Some of them were also performing at the Jazzbunker. Bands from Rotterdam from those times are a.o. Dull Schicksal, Nine Tobs, The Black Sheep, Kiem, Kontakt Mikrofoon Orkest, Niew Hip Stilen, Debiele Eenheid and many others.

On this cassette by Dustbin Silence we hear a recording from the Jazzbunker, but there are also pieces recorded elsewhere in The Netherlands. It gives a nice impression of the group's live recordings:  gloomy atmospheres combining free improvised sounds with punk poetry in Dutch and English. It reminds me of industrial performance art groups sounds of the 80's of which the live recordings resemble much more of a document of a scene than perfectly composed tracks. The Berlin band Sprung Aus Den Wolken sometimes created such a feel for example.

In any case here's another interesting cassette hailing from the Rotterdam improvisation scene of the 80's.

From the Collection Allard Pierson/NPI

Get it HERE

Lehr, Latzgo, Bauer, Hassay, Whitman Quintet - Donny's Hot For... -1983- (Cassette, Slang Tapes), US

Here we have an obscure cassette by an American free-jazz and improvisation quintet comprised of pianist Donald Lehr, saxophone players Gary Hassay and Todd Whitman, Tom Latzgo on horns and electric guitar and Tom Bauer on bass. Apparently the outfit came from Allentown, Pennsylvania: the same city where these live recordings were done in 1982 and 1983.

Donny's Hot For... consists of some nice spontaneous live recordings of improvised jazz sessions that took place within intimate settings in Allentown. Surely these musicians played more often with each other. Their free-improvisation sound contains theatrical elements and humor instead of a deep and serious avant-garde attitude.

For the rest I can't find much information on the different musicians included here, except for Gary Hassay, who seems to have collaborated quite often with the Japanese impro percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani during the 90's. The label of this tape Slang Tapes is a mystery to me, but seems to have been closely connected to the musicians as we can hear a jolly interview with them at the end of the first side of the tape showing their light-hearted approach to this release.

In the middle of all the post-punk, wave and home-taping cassettes I've been posting to the blog, here's a moment of unknown jazz improvisation from the US, surely finding its way to some interested listeners on that particular side of the musical spectrum.

Kindly donated by the Y Create archive

Get it HERE / Mirror



PS.
So what are we doing with Zippyshare? Is half of the world still not able to get the files? I started mirroring some links on Sharezynga, is that working? Is there a better free alternative? Feel free to say something about file-hosting or share ideas to help out.

13 - 11 - Temporization -1988- (Cassette, TN/N 001), Poland

13 - 11 were a one-off improvisational outfit from Warsaw that consisted of Monika Szczecińska (Percussion), Bolek Błaszczyk (Cello and Keyboards), Michał Rollinger (Saxophone), Sernik (Tape, Guitar) and Jarek Siwiński (Keyboards). The group was named after the date on which they played this live-opus in Warsaw on the 11th of November 1988 at the Riviera-Remont Klub. Simultaneously, the 11th of November is the Polish National Independence Day on which Poland gained autonomy from the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires in 1918. Whether that plays a role on this cassette is unclear.

When looking at the members of this group the name of Bolek Błaszczyk provides the most context for me. Błaszczyk is a cellist that played in several important Polish underground groups like Legendarne Ząbki. He also played together with the magical Rock In Opposition outfit Cukor, Bila Smert' (Цукор Бiла Смерть) from the Kiev underground scene (Ukraine). You can hear their collaboration on their beautiful album called Selo from 1993.

13 - 11 is a project that can be placed in the light of the Polish experimental underground of the 80's, the extensive Polish jazz and improvisation history and in the larger context of the Eastern European Rock In Opposition tradition. Even though the sound fidelity of this obscure tape is not very high the band displays a wonderful interplay of improvisational jazz, ambient electronics and cinematographic sound collage all subtly based on the city of Warsaw and the temporality of different places and their atmospheres. It's almost a soundtrack to a non-existing film at times. The music was recorded live as a continuous opus of which the compositions flow into each other. Because of that it was not easy to index this tape, so I left some tracks to transition into the following track. The music reminds me of their peer-band Kirkut-Koncept that also played in a similar style. Somehow the 90's project Kaddish by Towering Inferno also comes to mind, maybe because of its thematic approach.

A lo-fi sound quality cassette from behind the iron curtain again, but this truly is another masterpiece of the Polish underground of the 80's.

This tape was limited to 40 copies.

Highly recommended!

Kindly donated by the Y Create Archive

Get it HERE

Seafood - Bait -1998- (CD, Link Beat), Netherlands

What we have here is a great obscure 90's release from Holland. Seafood was a short-lived group that consisted of four jazz and improvisation musicians based in The Netherlands: Canadian musician Alan Laurillard (saxophone, voice and sampler) and Dutch musicians JB Bollen (violin, voice, sampler, synthesizer), Michiel Scheen (voice, synthesizer) and Chander Sardjoe (percussion). All of them were heavily involved in the Dutch jazz and improvisation scene and have been releasing numerous albums throughout the years. Chander Sardjoe also collaborated with the Belgian ethno-avant-jazz trio Aka Moon around the same time when Seafood was active.

Seafood's Bait came out in 1998 in limited quantities on CD with a fishhook with coloured feathers attached to its cover and a small plastic fish in the jewel case. The group described their music in the booklet: 

Seafood is a new music group that creates a synthesis between culture and subculture, between improvisation and academism, between small brains and underbelly. Result: House-Techno-Hardcore-New Music-Jazz-Impro-Drum and Bass-Fusion.

Definitely an accurate description. This is a musical adventure that blends in so much musical talent and styles from worlds far beyond that I slowly realize that this could be one of the greatest albums from The Netherlands from the 90's in general.

Each track on the album is composed by one of the four musicians of the group. Seafood inventively tie together humoristic improvisation, future jazz, sample-mania and different electronic dance music styles into something of mind-boggling alien creation of almost Boredoms proportions. It's also reminiscent of Uwe Schmidt's (Atom TM) Lisa Carbon project of the 90's where latin jazz and rhythms were blended with electronic instruments and dance music. Obviously there are more examples of that 90's musical realm that often got labelled Future Jazz or Nu-Jazz back in those days, but this came to mind.

Moreover, Seafood is what I imagine to be the future sound of what great Dutch bands like Niew Hip Stilen or Kiem had been playing a decade earlier. This is some far out stuff! Another very little known album from Holland that deserves more attention!

Get it HERE

Details At Eleven - Same -1986- (LP, Dossier), US

Details At Eleven was a New York based experimental avant-garde outfit that consisted of Lin Culbertson, David Humphrey, Ken Heer and Katie O'Looney. They fit in greatly with the New York style improvisation groups of the time creating complex drum rhythm and saxophone fueled experimental theme's even with synthesizer additions. The sound is also quite close to the work of multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp who also is being thanked on the record cover.

Details At Eleven was released through the German Dossier records, which is a great record label that somehow always stayed somewhat under the radar, because of the strange groups it managed to gather, from impro-jazz new wave to industrial. Details At Eleven also contains some new wave influences, specially during the vocal parts of Lin Culbertson. She is a visual artist, graphic designer and multi-instrumentalist who played with a lot of musicians from the impro-experimental scene like Zeena Parkins, Thurston Moore and many more.

Details At Eleven deserves some more attention in my opinion as it really sounds weird and fresh. Similar to Niew Hip Stilen from Holland, New York's Semantics (with Elliott Sharp) or the Berlin band Stan Red Fox that I posted on the blog before.

Get it HERE

Leo Cuypers - Same -1972- (LP, BASF/BIM), Netherlands

Leo Cuypers (Maastricht, 1947) is one of Holland's most inventive and important pianists in the improvisation and Jazz world. He started out as a drummer but soon moved to the piano. As a pianist he developed a unique jazzy playing style by which he improvised many songs just by feeling, mostly in a rhythmic way based on moods and imagined titles. He was frequently playing with Dutch impro Saxophonist Willem Breuker (founder of the Instant Composers Pool and Willem Breuker Kollektief).

Leo Cuypers is probably most famous for his Zeeland Suite from 1977 also with Willem Breuker and others. Throughout the decades of the last century he did many scores and other soundtracks with Willem Breuker. Cuypers was the only person Breuker would trust with his opinion when showing new scores. Their work together keeps a unique place in the Dutch jazz and impro history. On the verge of the nineties Cuypers stopped collaborating with Willem Breuker. By then he had built a decades-long reputation as an impro pianist in a 'jazz world' of women, booze and other nightly endeavours. You can see a short documentary in Dutch with Leo Cuypers here. I love when he basically concludes that he didn't learn shit(!) during his time at the conservatory. This first album he made came out on BASF in The Netherlands, just like the Theo Loevendie Consort (of which Leo Cuypers was a member) as well as the Indonesia inspired experimental Jazz prog band Banten. Also he played on the most psychedelic album by Dutch cult singer Ramses Shaffy from Amsterdam, called Sunset Sunkiss.

From the original 1972 liner notes:

"Maastricht was a beautiful city to live in. People from the Conservatory, the Academy of Arts, painters, sculptors - they all made it a nice scene. But then the hippies from the western part of Holland moved in and things changed so much that many of the artists left." This is pianist Leo Cuypers Talking. Born in Heemstede (near Haarlem) on December 1, 1947 (his parents originally came from Amsterdam) he moved to Maastricht with his family when he was about nine. And he always wanted to study at the Maatricht Conservatory. But after three years he quit; in fact he was chased away after four months of absence. "I was frightened, you know. What was going on there at the time (1962-1965) had nothing to do with making music. One was trained to play one's part in a symphony orchestra - not to play too much out of tune - not to play too well - just to do the job. And nobody was really interested in that kind of music. After lessons the kids ran to their favourite drinking place to listen to pop music, that's what they loved. And besides that, I played jazz, I wanted to become an arranger. I played drums, piano was at first only an obligatory second instrument. I started on drums when I was six. We had a piano at home, but I liked the drums better. It was only when I had learned to play enough piano that I discarded the drums. One day my set was stolen. Or rather, I hoped someone would steal it. Which they did. So I just had to go on with piano. Anyway, at the Maastricht Conservatory the scene finally changed too. Two years after I was chased away I made a guest appearance there."

As for many musicians in this country, the competition that's been held every year since 1958 at the lakeside resort of Loosdrecht meant a big change for Leo Cuypers as well. He entered the 1969 competition, playing solo. It was the percussion element, an echo from his playing the drums. As Maastricht is way down south in holland and the music scene - or anyway the jazz scene - is in the west, by being at Loosdrecht and winning this competition he was heard. Drummer Pierre Courbois liked his playing and when working at the festival of contemporary jazz in Baden-Baden, Germany, he advised Joachim Ernst Berendt to let Leo Cuypers replace Joachim Kühn, who had had a car accident. It was there that Leo Cuypers met composer and reedman Willem Breuker, founder member of the Instant Composers Pool, and it was through Breuker that Leo got his first gig in Amsterdam. Where a little later Theo Loevendie heard him and asked him to play with his consort. So, today, with Misha Mengelberg and Kees Hazevoet, Leo Cuypers is one of the three most foremost pianists in the contemporary music scene. He lives in Amsterdam. - 1972

Get it HERE

Wha-Ha-Ha - 女でよかった -1981- (7 Inch EP, Better Days), Japan

This is a pretty rare single only release by the crazed out Japanese experimental RIO synth jazz outfit Wha-Ha-Ha. They consisted a.o. of saxophonist Akira Sakata and singer Mishio Ogawa. Sakata recorded many strange albums and contributed to many artists like Kiyohiko Senba and His Haniwa All Stars and also participated in Gilbert Artman's Urban Sax project, the great French avant-garde multimedia saxophone orchestra.

Wha-Ha-Ha released two amazing albums in the early eighties as well as an EP.  Their material was also released in Europe on Recommended Records as a compilation. It's a weird combination of jazz, Rock In Opposition, Japanese melodies, pop songs, unexpected transitions and synthesizer sounds. They remind me a lot of Japanese RIO band After Dinner, also due to the female vocals. I recommend you to check out all the other Wha-Ha-Ha material.

The first song on this single was reissued as a bonus track on a CD in 2003, but the second song hasn't been re-released as far I know. Both of the songs do not appear on the albums.

Get it HERE

Pierre Courbois, Edgar M. Böhlke, Oskar Gottlieb Blarr - Free Music & Orgel -1969- (LP, Schwann AMS Studio), Germany/Holland

This record is linked to many other posts on the blog. Free Music & Orgel was a freeform endeavour to combine Christian church music with avant-garde, free-jazz and 'beat' music. The main composer behind it was the Dutch Pierre Courbois (to be found on the blog). Together with German organist Oskar Gottlieb Blarr, German narrator Edgar M. Böhlke, Dutch trumpetist Boy Raaymakers, Dutch sax player Peter van de Locht and Ferdi Rikkers on double bass a spontaneous project was recorded on October 13th and 14th, 1968 at Melanchthon-Kirche Düsseldorf and at Grote Kerk Arnhem.

This album showcases how the church tried to find new ways of connecting to the youth that was more and more being submerged in hippieness in the late sixties. An important figure in this German wave of the Christian krautrock-beat-mass genre was Nicaraguan priest-poet Ernesto Cardenal. His poems were also used on this album. Cardenal related things like the cosmic unity of the universe to Christ to use the hippie discourse for a Christian message, although politics are also important in this case.

The Christian Schwann label was quite adventurous with its releases. It also published the first two legendary Kluster albums. Somehow redemption was thought to be found in the experience of the free and abstract. But also in the popular culture, like Cardenals poem tells on this album: praise the lord of the milky ways and space between the milky ways with violins, with flutes and saxophone, praise him with blues and jazz, praise him with record players etc.

Musically I find this an amazing album where a sound reminiscent of Italian library music in the vein of Il Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza meets jazz, poetry and dark psychedelic sounds. It also comes close to the Risonanze series which I published before. It is almost a Christian take on the Dutch hyperrare cult psychedelic beat poetry album Woorden. I actually find the balance between the church organ and the church bells with the other instruments really impressive. Much more could be said about this album because it has so many implications and so many different musicians, but I'll keep the rest to you.

Highly Recommended!

Get it HERE

Guus Janssen - Tast Toe -1981- (LP, Claxon), Netherlands

A year ago I posted an album by Dutch improvisation pianist Guus Janssen on the blog and here is a second one: Janssen is a frequent member of the Instant Composers Pool and the key figure in Dutch piano improvisation. He always breaks down different genres into an unclassifiable mixture. He plays jazz, classical music, circus-melodies, pop, but never really ends up in either one of these genres.

Tast Toe, meaning something like help yourself (it also refers to hitting the keys of a piano in a weird linguistic way) is another album in which Janssen rapidly creates his accessible impro tunes while dissecting free-jazz into carnival melodies while entering chamber music realms while simultaneously staying on all borders. I guess it's only to be noticed when giving this a more proper listen, because at first glance it's a bit of conventional piano play. Nevertheless this is another interesting piece of the Amsterdam based Claxon records puzzle. Claxon was one of the best Dutch labels for improvisation music active at the end of the seventies and the eighties. All these pieces were recorded live in Amsterdam in 1981.

Get it HERE

Various Artists - Une Autre Façon d'écouter la Musique -1986- (Tape, Igloo), Belgium

This is a promotional compilation tape of the Belgian label Igloo. Igloo was founded in 1978 by
Daniel Sotiaux and initially focused on contemporary composed, strange electronic and avant-garde music until the mid-eighties when it changed its profile to contemporary jazz music.

This cassette from 1986 is also pretty much jazz oriented and showcases a variety of bands and releases on the Igloo label. I'm quite sure almost all of these albums are to be found already, but let's say we can still use this compilation as a guide through the releases on Igloo of the mid-eighties. I wasn't too familiar with the label to be honest. Although some tracks on this compilation are pretty corny, it still shows the impro and jazz scene that was active in Belgium and Brussels in the Eighties. Igloo as a label is comparable to other Belgian labels like Disques du Crépuscule or Crammed Discs that always moved in-between impro, jazz, classical and RIO stuff.

This compilation shows the more safe side of a Belgian scene that had more adventurous bands like Aksak Maboul or Univers Zero operating in the same period. But there are some highlights on this compilation like Julverne and Real Live Orchestra. The coolest part of the compilation is that there are impro-jazz interludes with a girl telling us in English with a French accent which song we've just heard. It gives it a nice Bruxelles eighties chicness which is cool.

Get it HERE