November 2, 2017 In ChocoJazz

ChocoJazz Meets De Stijl – Live at the Netherlands Club of New York

Coming back from Zutphen to New York felt a bit like coming home. But no time to sit down and relax, because we had another ChocoJazz show coming up! Since this year is the year of De Stijl – the art group De Stijl was founded in Leiden 100 years ago – The Netherlands Club of New York wanted to celebrate this by throwing a party. And since the mayor of The Hague, Pauline Krikke, was in town they wanted to commemorate the influence of Mondrian and De Stijl by giving the owner of the building where Mondrian found the ‘Boogie Woogie’ a memorial plaque. Since we are talking about Jazz and art anyways, it would only be appropriate to perform at the The Netherlands Club with our ‘ChocoJazz Meets De Stijl’ show, which we performed earlier this year in Leiden.

Sold out!

And… the tickets were sold out within an hour! A hundred people came that night to The Warwick Hotel to celebrate De Stijl, meet the mayor and of course see what ChocoJazz is all about. I asked my longtime Berklee friend and bass player Max Ridley to come join us at this show, and having played lots of free jazz with him at the Lilypad in Boston before, I knew he would be a natural. We performed four paintings with the colors Yellow, Blue, Red and Black & White and played to these colors. Max’ bass filled up the room as my sounds inspired Teddy to create his edible paintings, which everybody -kinda hesitant at first- got to eat afterwards. It was a great night we got to inspire a lot of people and of course met the mayor!

Thank you Mayor of The Hague Pauline Krikke for attending our show and thank you Netherland Club of New York for hosting. I would also like to thank Koppert Cress USA at Long Island for arranging the beautiful edible flowers and cresses, Le Nouveau Chef for Teddy’s Chefs clothing and Original Beans for providing the most stunning chocolate were everybody got crazy over! And of course my dear friend Max Ridley for coming over to New York, blowing everybody including me away, having a few laughs and then grabbing a 4AM bus back to Boston..Musicians life..

Oh, and you can read Pauline Krikke’s Blog here.

Photo credit by Colin Faber.

November 5, 2014 In Uncategorized

Singing for Beatrix

After a long period of closing, finally the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague re-opened after their renovation. They did an amazing job, and if you haven’t gone, please do so. Their collection houses the Royal Cabinet of Paintings which consists of 841 objects, primarily Dutch Golden Age paintings; Vermeer, Rembrandt, Jan Steen and many more.

So for their opening events I played a couple of gigs with different guys, Jernej Bervar, Marciej Dormeradski, Frans van Geest and Martijn van Iterson.

Very special was that on one of those Princess Beatrix was invited and it was really cool to see her.

Anyway, here some pictures 🙂

October 14, 2014 In Uncategorized

Summer hang with Jernej & Tina

Here are just some pictures of my tour-week with Jernej Bervar from Slovenia. Jernej is a fantastic guitar player and he and his girlfriend stayed with us in Leiden, Netherlands. We had a blast, lots of concerts, played for Beatrix the Dutch former Queen. We had a gig in Gouda on a big stage in the water, did some music on a boat, did the tourist thing, and had lots of good food. 🙂

Lets do this again soon!!

August 4, 2014 In Uncategorized

Songwriting workshop @ Leiden University LAK

This summer I was teaching a summer workshop week for the University of Leiden at their cultural center (called LAK.) The goal was to write and record your own song in 4 days.

During the first day we spoke about writing better lyrics, the second day we spoke about writing music, chords, and melodies. On the third day the students worked on their new song and the fourth day we recorded the final product. I am superproud of my students because some of them never wrote a song and they all worked so hard and did such a great job!!

Here you can listen:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/45787448?secret_token=s-nKKv9″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

 

 

By the way… a similar workshop happened in 2012 where I worked with 6 teenage students and 6 adult students and if you are  interested in the songs they wrote, listen here:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/2520479?secret_token=s-OFCLb” params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]