Reachin’ Out To Rob

April 4, 2017May 1, 2017 - Francois Leave a comment

ROB AGERBEEK/HANK MOBLEY – Just recently, the Dutch Jazz Archive released To One So Sweet Stay That Way: Hank Mobley In Holland. (See review here.) A great document that fills the musical gaps of Mobley’s ten-day stay in The Netherlands in 1967. A big part of the CD is dedicated to Mobley’s gig at Rotterdam’s club B14 with the Rob Agerbeek Trio. More than enough reason to get in touch with veteran hard bop, boogie-woogie and swing pianist Rob Agerbeek and ask about his recollections with the revered tenor saxophonist.

FM: How did that gig came about?
RA: I got a call from a small-time impresario, Wim Johan Kuijper, who asked me: ‘Do you want to play with Hank Mobley? ‘ I said, ‘that’s a silly question! Of course!’

FM: It must’ve been quite something to meet Hank Mobley before the show.
RA: I expected a big, impressive cat, you know. But he was just a young guy. It was a beautiful day, late Winter, early Spring. I was there with my wife. He strolled into the place, threw his horn case into the corner. He asked me, ‘where you from?’ I said: ‘The Hague.’ ‘No’, he said, ‘I mean, where you from?’ Then I got it. I explained that I was born in Dutch Indonesia. ‘Aha,’ said Hank, ‘that’s the place with the king who plays clarinet.’ Almost. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s Thailand.’

I was thinking, Jesus Christ, I better set my best foot forward on stage! But it turned out pretty well.

FM: It was a one-off trio, right?
RA: Yes. I hadn’t played with bass player Hans van Rossem. But I was familiar with drummer Cees See.

FM: Was the setlist discussed or did Mobley counted off the tunes on the spot?
RA: Basically, he called a tune and asked if that was ok. Very nice.

FM: The sound quality, quite logically, isn’t fantastic. But you can hear you’re a bed of roses for him, despite the fact that he sounds a bit fatigued as well. You were already a very accomplished player and, naturally, familiar with standards like Autumn Leaves and Like Someone In Love. Mobley’s Three-Way Split was a lesser-known affair. Oddly enough, it’s the swinginest tune!
RA: I knew that tune from the album with Andrew Hill on piano. (No Room For Squares, FM) Yes, Hank liked my playing, afterwards he invited me for a gig to Paris. Sometime later we played at the American School in Paris with Art Taylor, trumpeter Dizzy Reece and bass player Jimmy Woode. Mobley had a session in Paris and wanted me in on it. But Francis Wolff had already booked another pianist, Vince Benedetti. Mobley was rather peeved about being overruled. It turned out to be the album The Flip.

FM: At least now your cooperation with Mobley in Holland is preserved for posterity.
RA: O yeah, it’s a wonderful job by the Dutch Jazz Archive. I’m very honored. I also really like those tunes with the Hobby Orkest.

FM: Mobley in a big band setting, really surprising. The context suits Mobley very well, he’s in great form. It would’ve been really nice if Mobley would’ve done a big band album in his lifetime.
RA: Yes, absolutely. Well, early in his career Mobley did play in Dizzy Gillespie’s band, of course.

Find To One So Sweet Stay That Way: Hank Mobley In Holland here.

Knight Rider

April 3, 2017May 1, 2017 - Francois Leave a comment

Photography: Map Boon

ERIC INEKE – A lack of taste and decency from the officials may have prevented the Ajax stadium being christened Johan Cruijff Stadium a year after the passing of Holland’s soccer genius, they sure know how to treat their jazz luminaries. On his 70th birthday on Saturday, April 1, which was celebrated with a concert at The Bimhuis, drummer Eric Ineke, who during a fulfilling career of almost fifty years cooperated with legends like Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin and Dizzy Gillespie, was knighted as Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau for his outstanding contributions to the Dutch jazz realm by the deputy mayor Simone Kukenheim. An otherwise less formal evening, hosted by Cees Schrama and Frank Jochemsen, was divided into a series of concise sets by Dutch powerhouse line-ups including Tineke Postma, Rein de Graaff, Marius and Peter Beets, driven by Ineke’s trademark propulsive style in the tradition of Elvin Jones and Philly Joe Jones. Ineke’s regular hard bop quintet Eric Ineke’s JazzXpress performed twice and during the second set was supplemented with alto saxophonist Tineke Postma. De Graaff and Ineke, buddies-in-soul since the late sixties, played freely around the beat in standards like How Deep Is The Ocean, tight-knit as usual. Ineke also responded enthusiastically to Postma, answering her adventurous structural improvisations with like-minded, horn-like phrases on snare and tom. Horns-a-plenty: tenor saxophonists Sjoerd Dijkhuizen and Simon Rigter provided mature and tasteful tenor tales. The young trumpeter Gidon Nunes Vaz is a rapidly developing musician with a beautiful tone and a style best likened to forebears as Kenny Dorham. Pianist Peter Beets, just back in town from a concert of Paul McCartney compositions with Roger Kellaway in New York, clearly relishes fiery, Oscar Peterson-type takes on tunes as Con Alma. The trio with Peter Beets also accompanied promising singer and organizer of the show, Jurjen Donkers. While the first set of the JazzXpress focused fluently on Dexter Gordon tunes as Fried Bananas and The Panther, the second set harked back to the glory days of mid-sixties, avant-leaning hard bop that was being made on the Blue Note and Impulse labels. It was an absolute gas, Jarmo Hoogendijk’s Waltz For Woody and Ray Brown’s Lined With A Groove being stunning high points. Pianist Rob van Bavel tapped into his seemingly limitless reservoir of inventive voicings and impressionistic lines. During the final jam on Rhythm-A-Ning, all participants present on stage, Ineke’s hard, alert swing was still in check. The audience was delighted and the knighted 70-year old Ineke was in good spirits.

During Eric Ineke’s Birthday Jam, the new Challenge Records release Let There Be Life, Love And Laughter: Eric Ineke Meets The Tenor Players was presented. An overview of Ineke’s cooperations over the years with tenor saxophonists like Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Lucky Thompson, George Coleman, Clifford Jordan, Grant Stewart and John Ruocco. Find the album here.

Photography: Map Boon

Hank Mobley To One So Sweet Stay That Way: Hank Mobley In Holland (Dutch Jazz Archive 2017)

March 27, 2017March 27, 2017 - Francois 2 Comments

To One So Sweet Stay That Way: Hank Mobley In Holland reveals a tenor saxophonist who may not display the kind of brilliance of his golden years in the late fifties and early sixties, but nevertheless remains a singular class act, especially in, surprise, a big band context.

Hank Mobley - To One So Sweet Stay That Way: Hank Mobley In Holland

Personnel

Tracks 1-3: Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Pim Jacobs (piano), Wim Overgaauw (guitar), Ruud Jacobs (bass), Han Bennink (drums) Tracks 4 & 5: Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Ferdinand Povel & Sander Sprong (tenor saxophone), Piet Noordijk & Herman Schoonderwalt (alto saxophone), Joop Mastenbroek (baritone saxophone), Frans Mijts, Gerard Engelsma, Eddie Engels, John Bannet & Fons Diercks (trumpet), Rudy Bosch, Cees Smal, Bertil Voller & Erik van Lier (trombone), Frans Elsen (piano), Joop Scholten (guitar), Rob Langereis (bass), Evert Overweg (drums) Tracks 6-10: Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Rob Agerbeek (piano), Hans van Rossem (bass), Cees See (drums)

Recorded

Recorded on March 20 at Theater Bellevue, Amsterdam (tracks 1-3), March 28 at VARA Studio, Hilversum (tracks 4 &5) and March 29, 1968 at Jazzclub B14, Rotterdam (tracks 6-10

Released

as NJA 1604 in 2017

Track listing

Summertime
Sonny’s Tune
Airegin
I Didn’t Know What Time It Was
Twenty-Four And More
Blues By Five
Like Someone In Love
Veird Blues
Three-Way Split
Autumn Leaves

Expert jazz sleuthing. The Dutch Jazz Archive unearthed ten live and studio cuts from the quintessential hard bop tenorist’s sojourn in the Netherlands in 1968. I think to myself, what a wonderful hard bop world! Mobley was a heroin addict and when he was kicking the habit resorted to booze. The classic pit fall in an all too typical jazz tragedy. Convicted twice, risking a long prison sentence due to the American three-strikes-and-you’re-out-system, Mobley had good reason to bug out for the dug out. What better way than to cross the great pond. Contrary to belief, Mobley arrived in The Netherlands instead of the U.K., touring France afterwards, where he recorded The Flip, and, subsequently, the U.K. and Denmark. The package of the CD includes great photographs and detailed liner notes including memories of collaborators pianist Rob Agerbeek and bass player Ruud Jacobs. Mobley played live with Agerbeek’s one-off trio in Rotterdam’s club B14 on March 29, with the Pim Jacobs Trio including Ruud Jacobs and guitarist Wim Overgaauw at the Bellevue Theatre on March 20, and, another studio session, with the Hobby Orkest on March 28, an orchestra of Dutch luminaries that gathered irregularly, including Dutch bop veterans and talents Piet Noordijk, Ferdinand Povel and Frans Elsen.

In his indispensable book on the sidemen of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Hard Bop Academy, Alan Goldsher offers a hip baseball analogy to illustrate the brilliance of Hank Mobley, labeling him as a five-tool player, a rare breed of all-round excellence. Mobley ‘had killer chops. He had a silky tone. He could tell the hell out of a story. He was a smokin’ composer. And he could swing you into the ground. Five tools. Six, if you count the fact that he looked great on a record cover.’ How true. Mobley’s a legend that carved out a niche during the era of the towering giants Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. The ultimate ‘musician’s musician’ – Leonard Feather’s famous appreciation of Mobley as ‘the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone’ stems from 1960 – Mobley’s unspectacular style, unassuming personality and the fact that he never led a stable outfit perhaps prevented widespread public recognition. By 1968, media coverage of the ‘new thing’ and stars like Miles Davis overpowered attention for a more conventional player like Mobley. Short on publicity but a saint for European mainstream jazz aficionados. Sound and style-wise, Mobley’s tone, still relatively soft and, as Mobley himself defined it, ’round’, had more bite to it, while his slightly dragging beat and relaxed phrasing are ever-present. Mobley retained a good portion of his innate sense of logic and continuity but at the same time concentrated on staccato lines and had shopped at John Coltrane’s store of harmonic finesse. No summer sale there, top quality stuff all-year round.

In the live setting of club B14, Mobley also focuses on suspenseful chopped lines, but simultaneously on all-too drastic twists, turns and ad-libs, therefore drifting away from a long-lined, coherent tale. He sounds a bit fatigued. The discovery of the tapes from club B14 is a blessing, but one has to ‘read through the lines’ of the rather inferior sound quality. In general, Rob Agerbeek has the upper hand, expertly mixing modern jazz with the traditional legacy of blues and boogie-woogie in Miles Davis’ Veird Blues and Mobley’s Three-Way Split, which is the liveliest tune of the performance. On the other hand, Mobley’s work in the studio on March 20, the day Mobley stepped out of the airplane with a probable jet lag, is focused and marked by Mobley’s unique sense of rhythm and suave phrasing. The Pim Jacobs Trio is excellent, the full-bodied, walkin’ bass lines of Ruud Jacobs and Wim Overgaauw’s swift phrasing and delicate clusters of chords in Sonny Rollins’ Airegin are especially imposing. The most surprising features on To One So Sweet are Mobley’s two tunes with the Hobby Orkest, the only known recording of the tenor saxophonist with a big band. The band is lively, the arrangements are smart and Mobley, one of the kings of the hard bop quintet format, is all velvet, sensuality, glowing blocks of wood in the fireplace. Marvelous! Clearly, it’s unfortunate that no one came up with the idea of recording Mobley in a big band setting earlier in his career, nor would afterwards.

A swell idea. Like the idea of The Dutch Jazz Archive to prowl public and private vaults for Mobley material, which it acted upon superbly.

To One So Sweet Stay That Way: Hank Mobley In Holland is the fourth release in the Dutch Jazz Archive’s series Treasures Of Dutch Jazz, following releases of Boy Edgar, Ben Webster and Don Byas. You can order it on the website of The Dutch Jazz Archive here.

Just Friends

March 18, 2017May 1, 2017 - Francois Leave a comment

ERIC INEKE – On Saturday, April 1, drummer Eric Ineke will be celebrating his 70th birthday with a Super Jam at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam. There will be performances by Ineke and other Dutch luminaries such as Rein de Graaff, Ruud Jacobs, Peter Beets and Tineke Postma. Find info and tickets here.

During a long and fulfilling career, Ineke, foremost European modern jazz drummer in the tradition of Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, Billy Higgins and Louis Hayes, has collaborated with countless American legends like Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Lucky Thompson, Hank Mobley, Freddie Hubbard and Johnny Griffin and sustained long-time associations with Ferdinand Povel, Dick Vennik, Ben van de Dungen & Jarmo Hoogendijk, Benjamin Herman and Dave Liebman. For nearly four decades, Ineke has been playing with the Rein de Graaff Trio. Ineke has been leading his own hard bop quintet, Eric Ineke’s JazzXpress, for eleven years now.

Remembering And Recommending Horace Parlan

March 5, 2017May 1, 2017 - Francois Leave a comment

HORACE PARLAN – Horace Parlan passed away on February 23, 2017 in Naestved, Denmark at the age of 86. Parlan suffered from polio as a child. With his right hand crippled, as a consequence Parlan’s playing style in a gospel-drenched hard bop and post bop vein was a rare combination of sparse, rollicking left hand lines and inventive, three-fingered right hand voicings. Check out Parlan’s singular style on a 1986 concert in Köln, Germany with the typically good-natured Dizzy Gillespie and a particularly eloquent Clifford Jordan. Parlan settled down in Denmark in 1972 and eventually became a Danish citizen.

Best known for his cooperation with Charles Mingus on Mingus Ah Um and Blues & Roots and appearance on Dexter Gordon’s Doin’ Alright, Parlan was featured on a series of other fine recordings in the sixties of, among others, Stanley Turrentine, Roland Kirk, Booker Ervin and Lou Donaldson. Parlan’s unlikely pairing with Archie Shepp on 1977’s gospel-themed album Goin’ Home was a big succes, acted upon by 1980’s Trouble In Mind but not surpassed. As the legend goes, during the recording of the album both musicians shed more than a number of tears. Parlan recorded prolifically as a leader for Blue Note, often with bassist George Tucker and drummer Al Harewood, a tight-knit trio that came to be known as Us Three. Parlan’s Steeplechase albums from the seventies are particularly exciting.

BBC World Service visited the pianist in 2015 for their radio broadcast series The Documentary. A widower in a nursing home, the blind, fragile and shaky-voiced Parlan has retired from playing and talks us through his career. It’s a touching portrait.

Check out a thorough obit in The Washington Post here.

Find essential Parlan below, in chronological order. RIP Horace Parlan.

Horace Parlan Quintet - Speakin' My Piece

(Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um, Columbia 1959; Horace Parlan – Speakin’ My Piece, Blue Note 1960; Stanley Turrentine – Up At Minton’s, Blue Note 1960)

(Dexter Gordon – Doin’ Alright, Blue Note 1961; Horace Parlan – Up & Down, Blue Note 1961; Horace Parlan – No Blues, Steeplechase 1975)

*(Horace Parlan – Frank-ly Speaking, Steeplechase 1977; Archie Shepp & Horace Parlan – Goin’ Home, Steeplechase 1977; Horace Parlan – Relaxin’ With Horace, Stunt 2004)

The Three Sounds Groovin’ Hard (Resonance 2016)

February 18, 2017May 1, 2017 - Francois Leave a comment

THE THREE SOUNDS – What exactly is the definition of ‘soul jazz’ is still up for discussion. Strictly speaking, soul jazz signifies the period in the mid-sixties when jazz artists started interpreting the popular tunes of the day, Jimmy McGriff’s Uptight and Ramsey Lewis’ The In-Crowd being major cases in point. In a broader sense soul jazz has always been regarded as earthy, blues-drenched mainstream jazz, a rainbow under which, starting in the fifties, resides a myriad of artists like Jimmy Forrest, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Gene Ammons, Cannonball Adderley, Stanley Turrentine and Jimmy Smith, to name but a few. In the early sixties, soul jazz became a fad on zillion album sleeves and in countless advertisements, particularly by Prestige, unintentionally incited by Cannonball Adderley, whose unforgettable spoken introduction earmarking ‘soul’ as the core of their art form on his quintet’s In San Francisco was also acted upon by Riverside. The general consensus is, and was, that soul jazz was tending to the black folks that let their hair down in the clubs – the fine-tuned network of clubs of the so-called chitlin’ circuit – after a hard day’s work. Entertainment. The lines for artists weren’t as strict as one would presume. For some, like Bobby Timmons or Ray Bryant, soul jazz was just one of the ways available to express their jazz personalities, for others, like tenor saxophonist Willis Jackson, it was their one and only thang. Soul jazz has often been downplayed in regard to its low-brow ethic. Rather foolish, the value of soul jazz as a breeding ground for classic jazz musicians – the hard-worn discipline of the road and the musical lessons of experienced elders – cannot be overstated.

Without a doubt, The Three Sounds featuring pianist Gene Harris was a group that pleased crowds with pleasant, down-home, groovy ‘soul’ jazz. In fact, it was the biggest selling soul jazz act on the Blue Note roster. Resonance Records, the company that also released the stellar albums of previously unreleased material John Coltrane – Offering, Bill Evans – Some Other Time and Larry Young – In Paris, has recently released The Three Sounds – Groovin’ Hard: Live At The Penthouse 1964-1968. The Three Sounds lasted in various combinations from 1958 to 1971, for a big part with the original line up of Gene Harris, bassist Andrew Simpkins and drummer Bill Dowdy. Groovin’ Hard is available on CD and as a download, but the real treat, of course, is the vinyl edition. As usual, the package is a luxury bag of top-rate mastered 180-gram vinyl, an extensive, insightful book of essays and photographs.

Find Groovin’ Hard on Resonance Records here

Bruut Superjazz (Dox 2017)

February 6, 2017February 6, 2017 - Francois 1 Comment

Thanks Lou. Thanks Quinten. Thanks Dick. For six years now, Holland’s hippest crossover jazz group Bruut! has made grateful use of differing styles of music, creating a hodgepodge that the foursome dubbed ‘superjazz’ almost from the word go. A likely title for its fourth album, a rockin’ blend of surf music, funky jazz and jolly swing, underscored by the alluring alto sax of Maarten Hogenhuis.