Saturday 24 January in The Hague,
Netherlands
I have caught odd glimpses of Eric Vloeimans on Dutch tv and I looked up a few of his videos before going to the concert
and there are 2 things I knew were guaranteed: brightly coloured clothes and
superb trumpet playing.
The great man did not disappoint on either
count: his flowery shirt would not have been out of place in Carnaby Street in
the 60’s but I’m not saying whether that’s a good thing or not. His trumpet
playing is the stuff that dreams are made of: a warm sound, incredible
technique and an excellent tone even in the very high register.
This concert took place in a live music
venue which is more used to being frequented by people less than half my age
who go there to get their ears wrecked by over loud dance music and their heads
wrecked by chemical substances. Most of the audience
had to strain to get half a glimpse of the stage, and we were standing. All part
of a worthy attempt by the city’s symphony orchestra to reach out to the
community. A great idea, but if you have a symphony concert with a guest
soloist who is heading for his 60s you attract an audience with an average age
of 55+ who struggled up the stairs and all looked pretty miffed when we
realized the few chairs available had been snapped up by those who had nothing
better to do with their Saturdays than bag a seat 45 minutes before curtain up.
Well there was no curtain and there wasn’t really room for all the players on
stage, they looked really uncomfortable and it was a crush for the conductor
and soloist to get to their places. I can’t help thinking we might as well have
all been more comfortable in the orchestra’s base, the concert hall a few
moments’ bike ride away.
Vloeiman is unusual as a jazz musician in
that he tends to avoid playing standards and prefers to mainly play his own
music. He’s doubly unusual in that his compositions use a diatonic language
with melodies which are reminiscent of folk songs, rather than a jazz
vocabulary. As a listener the sensation is of listening to film music which
ranged from the plain to he pretty to the exquisitely beautiful, and which is
enlivened in its better moments by the soloist’s inspired interjections.
On this occasion we heard, among others,
Evensong Part 1 and Imaginings. At the end of the programme he played piece
called something like Song for Syria which rose to a higher level of intensity,
and the encore was a piece called Lex. From what I could understand of his
introduction this piece is inspired by the story of a survivor of the
concentration camps who was kept alive because he entertained the prison guards
with his trumpet music. Vloeiman made use of his lovely range of tone
production which includes a breathy effect reminiscent of the sound of a bass
flute. At the end of Lex the breathiness becomes total and the sound disappears
altogether: a very moving tribute to a war victim and an emotional end to the
concert.
In between we heard 2 of Satie’s
Gymnopedies. I can’t see the point of making chocolate box ad style
arrangements of these pieces which Eric Satie wrote for the piano, but there
certainly was an Oooooooh at the end which shows it touched the tickly bits of
many of the (older) audience around me. There is no accounting for taste. I
kept wishing for some of the jazz energy and power which I heard in Madrid at a
concert in 2012 of Satie’s music by the Afrodisian Orchestra directed by Miguel
Angel Blanco. Now that was jazz!
I felt sorry for the players of the
Residentie Orchestra for 2 reasons while I was waiting for the concert to
start. Firstly, because they had no room to breathe, and secondly, I felt
especially for the 2 trumpeters. How does it feel to share the stage with such
a luminary? In the end, from the first orchestral trumpet notes, played with
mutes in Evensong Part 1, to the triumphal tones in Song for Syria, the
trumpeters in the orchestra were superb, as were the rest of the players.
When I first came to the Netherlands I found
the custom of having long speeches to introduce concerts really irritating. Now
that I understand more of the language I find the custom even more irritating.
On this occasion there was a presenter who had prepared a Prezi that included
photos and some music video clips. He came up with some names which took us all
the way back to the beginnings of the crossover of jazz to classical and so on,
as he thought. The quick review included the Swingle Singers: high on search
engines now because of the recent death of their founder. Unfortunately the
main point of showing a clip of their
music seemed to be to smirk at their 60’s hair styles and clothes, not to
recognize the significance of Swingle’s great achievement in making
contemporary arrangements of classical music.
This historical resume took us so far back
in history that we got all the way to the 60’s: 1960’s. Sadly, no mention of
Scott Joplin, Ragtime pianist who composed an opera in that style, or Duke
Ellington, who in 1929 was writing extended jazz pieces in a symphonic style
such as Black & Tan Fantasy. I suppose
his presentation was there for entertainment rather than to inform, but still …..
I have shown Mr Vloeiman´s excellent clip
with the Holland Baroque Orchestra several times this week and the young
students have really enjoyed the music and admired his wonderful playing. It´s
a moving connection of contemporary jazz with a simple accompaniment played on
Baroque era instruments, plus accordion. You can find the link on his web site.
Anyway, I was thinking about Joplin and
Ellington and the origins of jazz in the USA and my mind went back to a concert in Madrid years ago, 10 years or
more, by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra. What a fascinating night it would be to put
together Marsalis and Vloeiman on stage. They are almost the same age, born in
1961 and 1963, both are working in extended forms in a classical sense, and
both of course are superb jazz trumpeters. What a tantalizing prospect!
If it ever happens, Mr Vloeiman will have
to ditch the flowery shirt: from what I have seen, Mr Marsalis doesn´t play the
trumpet better, but he has a much more classy wardrobe.