Chris Abelen Revisited

Over the years, my albums have accumulated quietly — composed, recorded and produced on my own terms, released into a world that was under no obligation to notice. The early ones were reviewed well, in the Netherlands and internationally — Downbeat, Jazz Times, Cadence, Jazzpodium, NRC Handelsblad, the Penguin Guide to Jazz, among others. The later ones less so, as the music world moved on to other things. That’s the nature of the business.

Chris Abelen Revisited is my attempt to tip the odds slightly. I’ve gone back through the catalogue and picked the tracks I’ve always felt were the most direct, the most immediate — the ones where the melody does the heavy lifting and the groove is hard to ignore. Call them my idea of hits, for what that’s worth in jazz.

Each single gets a new cover and a fresh release on all streaming platforms. The music itself is unchanged — why fix what isn’t broken? — but hopefully a few more ears will find it this time around.
To go with the series, I’ve put together a playlist — A fresh take on jazz — mixing the re-released tracks with more recent material, including songs from the new EP Cubicle Life. Old and new, back to back, the way it should be heard. Available on Spotify, Qobuz and YouTube and others.

The Hall — Revisited

Originally released as The Hall with the Seven Doors on Dance of the Penguins (1996)

Every composer has a piece that started somewhere specific. For me, The Hall started in a hallway — or more precisely, in the hallway of our first rented flat in Amsterdam Zuidoost. It was a modest place by any measure, but whoever designed it had clearly been very ambitious about doors. Seven of them, opening onto rooms that could charitably be described as compact. We were young, we were in Amsterdam, and we had seven doors. What more do you need.

The piece is built on a blues — one of the oldest and most reliable frameworks in jazz, a twelve-bar harmonic cycle that has supported everything from Robert Johnson to Miles Davis. I took a liberty with it in the last bar. Where a standard blues would resolve home via the fifth chord — the musical equivalent of a familiar route back — I substituted a chord a half step above the tonic instead. It’s a device jazz musicians call a tritone substitution: the two chords share enough notes in common that the swap sounds logical, but the bass moves in the opposite direction from what you’d expect, sliding smoothly down by a semitone rather than leaping up a fourth. The effect is subtle but unmistakable — a slightly sideways arrival home, as if you came in through the wrong door. Which, given the flat, was entirely possible.

In the arrangement, the trombone carries the melody while the other horns stack the supporting chord tones above it — unusual for a trombonist, who would normally be tucked away on a second or third voice behind a trumpet or saxophone.

The piece reappeared as a live version on What a Romance (1999), and later — with its title trimmed to simply The Hall — on A Day at the Office (2016), the album written for a mini-opera about modern office life. By then the seven doors had been quietly dropped from the title, but the music remembered them.

For this single release — The Hall Revisited — I went back to the A Day at the Office recording, but stripped it down to the four horns only, filling out the rhythm section with samples from Logic and Band in a Box. Angelo Verploegen’s trumpet solo is untouched, as are the horn parts themselves, but the order of things has changed. The result is something considerably more upbeat than the original — almost irresistibly so. Consider yourself warned.