Delve into the Dutch jazz scene of the 1950s and 1960s with a selection of classic and rare hard bop and cool jazz tracks from artists like Herman Schoonderwalt, the Diamond Five, Wessel Ilcken and Tony Vos. Holland never sounded this hip before!
“Jazz is garbage and a caricature of the modern orchestra; it is garbage arranged by half-grown musicians for the benefit of common entertainment.” In spite of the Dutch cultural establishment’s attempts to preclude jazz - as illustrated by this citation from the October 1926 issue of music magazine De Muziek - The Netherlands was one of the earliest adopters of the new music style as it came over to the Old Continent at the end of World War I and this compilation proves it like no other.
The roaring twenties gave birth to the first Dutch jazz bands, like The Original Jazz Syncopators, James Meijer’s Jazzband and The Ramblers. Paul Whiteman was the first major American jazz artist to visit The Netherlands. His concerts in the serious music temples the Kurhaus in Scheveningen and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam brought jazz to the general public, but also rang the alarm among the early Dutch jazz purists. Although Whiteman was nicknamed ‘The King of Jazz’, they regarded his mixture of jazz with symphonic music as merely commercial and too ‘sweet’ compared to the ‘hot’ African American jazz that they favored. The founding of magazine De Jazzwereld in 1931 (by then fifteen-year-old (!) future band leader Red Debroy) and the Nederlandse Hot Club in 1933 were attempts to propagate ‘authentic’ jazz among the Dutch public, and they contributed to the creation of a true jazz scene that was in full bloom when the Swing era set off in the mid-1930s.
