Bass player Henk Haverhoek put up pictures of his gigs with classic jazz men on his website. Check it out: snapshots of Dutch jazz history.

(From left clockwise: Johnny Griffin and Henk Haverhoek; guitarist Rene Thomas, Eric Ineke and Henk Haverhoek; portrait of Henk Haverhoek)

American jazz musicians have traveled and lived in Europe since the thirties. The migration was at its peak in the sixties and musicians concentrated predominantly in Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam: visitors without rhythm sections, which made them dependent on local musicians. Not everyone was up to it, but talented journeymen or pros succeeded in combining a deep passion for the music of their American heroes with versatility and studiousness, maturing greatly from playing with these iron-willed jazz individuals.

Among them was bassist Henk Haverhoek, who has been active both in the Dutch jazz scene and internationally, as well as a studio/theatre/radio show musician and teacher since the mid-sixties. In 1968, Haverhoek joined pianist Rein de Graaff and saxophonist Dick Vennik’s hard bop/modal jazz quartet, which recorded and performed prolifically and succesfully in the late sixties and seventies. Haverhoek and the quartet supported, among others, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Rouse, Clifford Jordan, Freddie Hubbard, Junior Cook, Woody Shaw and Lee Konitz. Haverhoek also played with Ben Webster, Duke Jordan, Mal Waldron, Horace Parlan, Thad Jones, Slide Hampton and Joe Henderson. Could’ve done worse.