The Dutch Hobby Orchestra Our Time (NJA 2023)

NEW RELEASE – DUTCH HOBBY ORCHESTRA

The times they were-a-changin’ and weren’t in favor of the mainstream Hobby Orchestra. The recordings of this excellent Dutch orchestra seemed lost forever until they were retrieved by the indomitable Dutch Jazz Archive. Our Time is their lasting achievement.

The Dutch Hobby Orchestra - Our Time

Personnel

Frans Mijts, Jaap Leben, Eddy Engels John Bannet & Fons Diercks (trumpet), Cees Smal (trombone, valve trombone), Rudy Bosch, Bertil Peereboom Voller (trombone), Erik van Lier (bass trombone), Herman Schoonderwalt & Tony Vos (alto saxophone, clarinet), Piet Noordijk (alto saxophone), Sander Sprong & Ferdinand Povel (tenor saxophone), Joop Mastenbroek (tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone), Frans Elsen (piano), Joop Scholten (guitar), Rob Langereis (bass), Evert Overweg (drums)

Recorded

in 1967-68 at Soundpush Studio, Blaricum and VARA Studio, Hilversum

Released

as NJA 2301 in 2023

Track listing

Bright Moment
In Some Way
Perka
Our Time
Akim
Twenty-Four And More
Ballad For Ed
The Challenger
I Didn’t Know What Time It Was
Last Moment
Bluesy Joe
No Tricks
Sweet And Lovely
Hobby Music


Now that the stark-naked roller-skater, who wore nothing except a string, summer, winter, day or night, has passed away, Amsterdam has to make do with the remaining eccentric sights of flesh and blood. Coincidentally, I saw one of those attractions last week. This guy with a guitar on his back, who always approaches everybody with harmless but unsolicited and mildly annoying love and peace slogans, stopped at the same red light and approached me with increasingly bewildering flower power gibberish. A clear case of burned-out hippie-hood.

As time goes by, this species becomes rare and ultimately extinct, like the dodo. 1967 is a long time ago. The place was crawling with hippies. Rebellion was in the air. Robert Jasper Grootveld organized socially critical happenings in the mid-sixties. The anarchic Provo movement joined forces in 1966. In the wake of American and French academy riots, students occupied the university office Maagdenhuis in Amsterdam in 1969. The Byrds, Pink Floyd, Santana and Jefferson Airplane played at the Dutch equivalent of Woodstock, the Kralingen festival, in Rotterdam in 1970.

Although we have to be careful to carve definitions of the sixties in stone on the strength of a few symbols and admit that other factors have been at play, notably a diplomatic but evident willingness to meet progressive wishes from the establishment, as the Holland-based professor James Kennedy has pointed out convincingly in his standard work Nieuw Babylon In Aanbouw from 1995, something, admittedly, was definitely brewing. Most of the time, the brewing came in the guise of a capsule of LSD that was dropped in a glass of lemonade. The recipient proceeded to be far out baby, look through a glass onion and experience a vision that involved getting rich from the future invention of a beverage called Gatorade.

As usual, jazz was in a flux. Guiding light John Coltrane had passed away in 1967, there was a steady stream of avant-garde jazz and rock jazz was on the rise. Bitches Brew by Miles Davis was the game-changer of 1970. Times were rough for straightforward jazz artists. In The Netherlands, much to the chagrin of those artists, most critics favored free jazz over mainstream jazz, the start of a schism between tradition and impro that lasted for decades.

Acclaimed musicians like Piet Noordijk, Herman Schoonderwalt, Tony Vos, Cees Kranenburg, Ack van Rooyen, Erik van Lier and Ado Broodboom took all the work they could get in various orchestras while trying to succeed in small real jazz ensembles or working abroad. Altoist Piet Noordijk had made his mark with the Misja Mengelberg Quartet, trumpeter and valve trombonist Cees Smal was part of the pioneering hard bop outfit The Diamond Five. Both filled the ranks of the Boy Edgar Big Band, led by the charismatic and legendary chaotic bandleader/doctor Boy Edgar.

Musicians had grown dissatisfied with the course that the Boy Edgar Big Band had taken since the avant-leaning Theo Loevendie had been at the helm. Besides, they had a strong desire to swing their thing after the gruelling schedules at the studio were fulfilled. A hardcore big band was founded from those ranks when trumpeter Frans Mijts had gotten the opportunity to manage the newfound state-of-the-art Soundpush studio in Blaricum in the summer of 1966. On good terms with Schoonderwalt, Smal and pianist Frans Elsen (not a member of Edgar’s band), who all had expressed a desire to start an orchestra, Mijts invited their band to rehearse at Soundpush and played lead trumpet himself.

The orchestra rehearsed relentlessly at night and developed into a tight-knit unit under the arranging leadership of Elsen, Rob Madna, Smal and, finally, Rogier van Otterloo. It only performed live a few times and a record deal that was discussed with the German MPS label unfortunately failed to materialize. The Hobby Orkest (at first the orchestra was nameless but after a headline in a magazine article talked about a so-called ‘hobby orchestra’ because the musicians were playing purely for their own pleasure, it became known under this monicker) supported Hank Mobley in 1967, the sole big band recording of the famed tenor player, which is featured on the Dutch Jazz Archive release Hank In Holland.

Besides top-notch performers, Elsen, Smal and Schoonderwalt were excellent tunesmiths. Their best songs are Elsen’s sweeping melody Bright Moment and Schoonderwalt’s modal-tinged burner Perka while Rogier van Otterloo provided the cinematic Hobby Music and In Some Way, all dynamic arrangements and the latter benefiting from a flexible and rousing solo by Schoonderwalt. All tunes feature fine solos, not least the lovely Ballad For Ed, which highlights the beautiful, quicksilver and forthright trumpet stylings of Eddy Engels. Throughout, upcoming tenor player Ferdinand Povel convincingly speaks his piece and Frans Elsen is about the hippest of bop and modern jazz pianists around at that time.

While funk jazz and slow blues is not this band’s forte, the orchestra turns standard Sweet And Lovely into a multi-layered tour de force. It’s a great arrangement that slyly makes use of a change of rhythm, pace and volume and a fully engaging eleven minutes that inspires these gentlemen to blow like soldiers that dart through the inner-city streets on weekend leave. Modernized Basie swing comes in the form of Twenty-Four And More, performed before a live audience in the studio in 1968, a clearly inspiring atmosphere, not least to the legendary Piet Noordijk, who makes the roaring most of his minute or so in the spotlight.

For various reasons, the band fell apart in 1970. A short-lived reunion took place between the tail ends of 1973 and 1974. World affairs like the Watergate scandal took the spotlight, Johan Cruijff and the Dutch soccer team wrote sports history with ‘total football’. In jazzland, it so happened that the tapes of these recordings were either erased or consisting of unfinished pieces. Thanks to the Dutch Jazz Archive and the Frans Mijts Estate, at least we can enjoy a major chapter in Dutch and European big band history of the sixties.

The Dutch Hobby Orchestra

Find Our Time here.

Check out wonderful footage from the band on YouTube here. Put up four years ago by DJA producer Frank Jochemsen, you’ll hear Schoonderwalt, Smal and Elsen explain (in Dutch) their motivations and see them perform Bright Moments featuring tenor saxophonist Ferdinand Povel.

Ferdinand Povel and the Rob Madna Trio Live at Café Hopper (Daybreak/Challenge 2007)

DUTCH JAZZ – FERDINAND POVEL

Dutch luminaries conquered Café Hopper in Antwerp.

Ferdinand Povel - Live At Café Hopper

Personnel

Ferdinand Povel (tenor saxophone), Rob Madna (piano), Marius Beets (bass), Eric Ineke (drums)

Recorded

on May 31, 2000 at Café Hopper, Antwerp

Released

as DBCHR75370 in 2007

Track listing

Sleepless City
How Deep Is The Ocean
Will You Still Be Mine
Stella By Starlight
The Touch Of Your Lips
Choctaw
The Theme


As good as some concerts in big halls are and as good as the recorded evidence on wax sounds, there’s nothing like the atmosphere of the small club or café. Three Deuces. Birdland. Half Note Café. Lenny’s On The Turnpike. The Front Room. Boomers. And still going strong: Montmartre in Kopenhagen, Smalls in NYC. Over here in the Low-Lands there were places like Sheherazade in Amsterdam, B14 in Rotterdam, Persepolis in Utrecht, Pepijn in The Hague, Nick Vollebregt’s Jazzcafé in Laren. Way back when, the region was scattered with little spots that programmed jazz. Most of the places have disappeared. But there are some great new spots and some of the oldies are still around. De Tor in Enschede, Porgy & Bess in Terneuzen, Mahogany Hall in Edam, Paradox in Tilburg, Dizzy in Rotterdam, De Twee Spieghels in Leiden. When you hear a fluff or the choking of a valve you also witness the twitching eyebrow of the saxophonist and the chuckle of the drummer. You see the sweat running down the bassist’s neck. It’s live and lively.

Café Hopper in Antwerp, Belgium is a warhorse in existence since 1991. The beloved founder, bassist Mary Hehuat, sadly passed away last year. His sons had already more or less taken over business for a couple of years. Let’s hope that the place will continue their jazz programming. Between Low-Land icons as Toots Thielemans and local heroes, the little stage housed Lee Konitz, Nat Adderley, Wynton Marsalis and Brad Meldhau. In 2000, Hopper had typically booked a top-rate crew and presented tenor saxophonist Ferdinand Povel and the trio of pianist Rob Madna featuring bassist Marius Beets and drummer Eric Ineke. Not conscious about all Ineke’s enormous output, the release was pointed out to me recently by the latter tireless ambassador of hard bop, prominent mentor of young national and international lions and lionesses at conservatories around the world.

“Ferdinand was on top of his form’”, said Ineke.

Check. On fire.

Let’s for once resist the temptation to start the discourse which explains that not everything from the United States is pure gold and that Europe, after initial startup problems, spawned a pool of major-league players in the 1950s-70s, whose excellence often surprised American legends and pros, who on rare occasions even were outstripped in the act of improvisation. Let’s totally set aside the fact that Europe learned jazz from the homeland and its implied minority complex and see if a piece of jazz is hip or not whether it’s from America, Finland or Korea or black, white or yellow.

Today’s listening pleasure is from The Netherlands and plainly outstanding. Povel came up in the late 1960’s and developed into one of the prime Dutch saxophonists. He spent many years in the big bands of Peter Herbolzheimer and The Skymasters and was guest soloist in prime national and international big bands but also freelanced with the likes of Maynard Ferguson, Philly Joe Jones, Dusko Goykovich and John Marshall. Madna (1931-2003) was one of the earliest high-level modern jazz pianists in the country in the 1950s and played with Phil Woods, Lucky Thompson and Freddie Hubbard. Ineke got on a roll in the late 1960s and 1970s as accompanist of Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin, among countless others. All have been influential mentors and teachers. Up to 2000, they had played and recorded with each other for decades, followed in their footsteps by ‘young’ bassist Marius Beets, who accompanied numerous artists with the Rein de Graaff Trio and is part of hard bop outfit The Eric Ineke Xpress.

They perform the boppish Madna tunes Sleepless City and Choctaw, and the standards How Deep Is The Ocean, Will You Still Be Mine, The Touch Of Your Lips and Stella By Starlight. Their rapport is evident and it all swings so smoothly like meandering rivers through the Alp valleys yet propulsive like a Lear jet. Close your eyes and listen to the tenor saxophonist and his long stories, brimming with ideas, never repeating himself but instead weaving one beautiful and logical line after another, bossy and soulful. His beat is slightly and pleasantly idiosyncratic, his sound is solid, burnished and punchy. Though he’s never roaring, there is in his playing a compelling urgency that challenges his rhythm section to come up with inventive goods. Above all, he’s controlled and graceful and particularly shines throughout Sleepless City and How Deep Is The Ocean.

Madna takes center stage with a sizzling rendition of Will You Still Be Mine. His refined restyling of Stella By Starlight is very enticing and underlined by subtle cymbal shadings by Ineke, who sets up a kind of floating time while locking in tightly with Beets at the same time. The tension builds, reflecting a great symphonic theme, that’s Stella by starlight and not a dream…

To boot, the sound is resonant and clear, courtesy of one Stephan van Wylick and this allows us to fully experience the typical pleasure of live barroom jazz. Just one night. But multiply and you have a life full of the real thing.

Ferdinand Povel

Live At Café Hopper is reissued on the Japanese Ultra-Vybe label.

Recommended listening:

Ferdinand Povel – Beboppin’ (Limetree 1983); YouTube link here.
Rob Madna – I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good (Omega 1977, featuring Eric Ineke); YouTube link here.
The Eric Ineke XPress – Dexternity: The Music Of Dexter Gordon (Daybreak 2016)

Listen to Good Bait, another good one by Povel with Rein de Graaff, Marius Beets, Eric Ineke and Pete Christlieb below on Spotify.