dinner music

 
 

Celebrity chef Herman den Blijker wanted us to stay all night. But we had other places to go, however beautiful (and ambient-music-inspiring) the accoustics in the high-ceilinged entrance of his place were.

What places? Why, restaurants, of course. The latest sensation in dinner music, guitarist Lukas Simonis, Peter van Bergen, and yours truly pack all the energy and most of the notes of your usual digestive-jazz combo’s full night into bursts of maximum 10 minutes, after which we quickly move on to the next place. The aim of all this on Friday 19 April was to give the dinner guests on the fancy Rotterdam Wilhelminapier a taste of what was going on at the Red Ear Festival for experimental jazz and environs.

red ear

live @ lantaren / venster

One, two, three, go! Freestyle. No prior agreements about form, key, mood. Just act, and react. An intense form of working together, especially with people you haven’t played with before – will vocabularies match, will we “feel” each other enough to follow, contrast, complement each other? Do our repertoires of tricks and phrases work with the others’, do we inspire each other enough to find ways together, surprise ourselves, challenge and feed each other, and above all create interesting music?

Whether we succeeded? That I leave to you to decide, dear listener. But I had a fantastic evening.

The Red Ear Restaurant Tour was organised by Hajo Doorn & Worm. Suyin Gisela Ridderstaat took photos.

Hans Wessels made a short film clip about the festival.