Holandiaramica
Artist : Eric van der Westen Date : 2006.07.08
Genre : Jazz Length : 30
Eric, born in 1963 in a small town in the South-west of The Netherlands, was 19 when he started to play the Double-bass which turned out to be a turning point in his life. Having experimented with almost every form of Rock-music, he turned to Jazz and Improvised Music after hearing records of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis for the first time. He enrolled in the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, took extra classes with people like Miroslav Vitous, Hein van de Geijn, Gary Karr and Ray Brown and graduated in 1990. By then he was already playing professionally with Dutch Jazzgreats as Willem van Manen and Paul van Kemenade. As a bandleader he set up several groups. First his OCTET which resulted in the highly acclaimed album "The Working Dreamer". Then there's his Double Orchestra: a 12-piece group in which the extraordinary combination of instruments gave him a chance to experiment with layers of music. He then took to his workstation QUADRANT which resulted in the composer-showcase "DIEPKLOOF and other songs from the book", and "NAALA and more songs from the book". In 1999 he initiated a very successful project called "Me, Myself and I- Looking at the Music of Charles Mingus". Eight Dutch composers wrote a piece based on a Mingus composition for Quadrant Extended (5+7). The recording, which was released in September 2000 on Challenge Records, received outstanding reviews.In 1998 Eric had started his own management company EWM, thus bringing his activities as musician, composer and producer under one roof. Prominent artists like Paul van Kemenade, Martin Fondse and Louis Mhlanga hooked up with EWM. His current projects involve programming the Jazz International Rotterdam Festival, a new big duo tour which will claim September-October and half of November, "Eyeing P.P.", a special multidisciplinary artistic project dealing with the life and works of Pablo Picasso will be launched after that tour, covering modern ballet, sculpturing arts and music.
