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  • Pleasure

    UMS234

    Artist: Kees Hazevoet

    Label: Atavistic

    In Amsterdam, at the end of the 1960s, pianist/clarinetist Kees Hazevoet and alto saxophonist Kris Wanders (a Dutchman based in Antwerp, Belgium) faced a dilemma not uncommon in jazz circles: the search for the right drummer. Wanders and Hazevoet began working together in 1969, and they initially turned to a now-deceased Dutch drummer named Eugene Broekhoven, with whom Kees had been rehearsing. Broekhoven had played with Willem Breuker's group in the mid '60s, but at the time he hooked up with Hazevoet he was earning a living in the house band at a strip club.
    "Ever since I started listening to jazz (and trying to play it), I had a special interest in the drummers," says Hazevoet. "I always felt that they are the ones that make a band sound good (or bad). And I always had a special bond with the drummer and tried to choose them carefully. Most of the local drummers weren't up to the task, to say the least. Nevertheless, I often managed to make them play in a way that they didn't know themselves capable of - something they themselves acknowledged."

    Hazevoet cultivated this kind of simpatico relationship with Broekhoven, and he recalls that Wanders was impressed by the drummer's playing, enough so that he took Broekhoven on a tour of Germany without Hazevoet, only to find that without Kees's guidance he played considerably less well. After the tour, Wanders refused to play with Broekhoven again. The problem was that Hazevoet had arranged a recording session that would os...