A fresh take on jazz

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, including 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.

A fresh take on jazz 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.

On this page I’m gradually adding a short piece about the story behind each track, starting with The Hall Revisited

1. 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.

4. Honey text me back

Originally released on Songs on the eve of dismissal (2018)

“Honey, Text Me Back” is a track from Chris Abelen’s EP Cubicle Life (music by Chris Abelen, lyrics by Bastiaan Geleijnse, vocals by Linda Ropa), a song that starts out sounding like a wartime love letter and ends up being about mortgages, GDP, and a gentle warning against office cocaine habits. This arrangement differs from the original recording: the drum part, which leaned heavily on the afterbeat, has been replaced by two tambourines playing four equal beats in sync with the bass, and the original guitar part by an electronic sample version. The lead sheet comes with a play-along track, so you can join in on your instrument while Linda does the worrying for you.

13. Remembering Willem Breuker

Originally released as Remembering Willem B on A day at the office (2018)

Chris Abelen Releases ‘Remembering Willem Breuker’, a personal tribute to a Dutch Jazz Legend

About the single

Dutch composer, musician and arranger Chris Abelen is releasing ‘Remembering Willem Breuker’, a composition born out of years of close collaboration with Willem Breuker, the composer, saxophonist and bandleader who passed away in Amsterdam in 2010. Abelen spent three and a half years as a member of the celebrated Willem Breuker Kollektief, and later worked closely with Breuker until his death, taking on the instrumentation of his new compositions. This unique position (both inside the band and behind the scenes) gives the track an intimacy and authenticity that sets it apart from the typical tribute recording.

The music: a deliberate build

The single opens with a solo bass clarinet, before a soprano saxophone takes over the melody, both instruments closely associated with Breuker himself. The soprano melody is played by Floris van der Vlugt. The idea for this instrumentation was inspired by the famous Requiem scene in the film Amadeus, in which a dying Mozart dictates the Confutatis to Salieri; a high, fragile melody gradually surrounded by more and more voices. Different notes, of course, for there is only one Mozart, but the same underlying idea. Layer by layer, more instruments join in, until the track blossoms into the full, colourful orchestral sound that was the Kollektief’s signature. That structure is anything but accidental. Abelen recalls sitting beside Breuker at the piano, and the moment a melody had taken shape, calling out: ‘Done! Don’t touch it!’, only to be met with a look of disbelief from Breuker, who insisted many more instruments were needed. ‘A losing battle, of course,’ Abelen says. ‘In the end, every available instrument joined in happily. But in this piece, I finally get to do it my way, and then arrive exactly where Willem always wanted to end up.’