Tag: Glenn Miller Orchestra

Traveling..

So, february is now officially the travel-month. After playing Krakow – Poland recently with VinnieVibes (which was great, flying in and out, leaving and back home in 36 hours, but a great audience) I’m now looking forward to drive 1000 kilometers to Copenhagen – Denmark next week. They’re having a big event called Vinterjazz, organised by the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and we’re very happy to be playing there with Traeben. This band is located in the Netherlands, but with two Danish members it’s really nice to be able to play such a big event in Denmark too. If you’re around, we’ll play our Valentinesgig the 14th in the club called Metronomen, and it’s going to be great!

Then back from Copenhagen I’ll be spending time with my students at the conservatory here in Amsterdam, just before I leave for a tour in Russia with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. And this is going to be the heavy, real touring vibe. I just received the schedule for it, and basically you could say that the first night we spend in a hotel is going to be after 5 days. The distance will be St. Petersburg to Vladivostok (!), coming from Amsterdam that is 8200km one way. We’ll play 11 gigs in 12 days, and since the cities are not in a row following up to the east, we’ll be traveling back and forth as well. But we will visit some cities I’ve never been before, so hopefully I can get a glimpse of those when we’re there. For instance, check out Norilsk on googlemaps, the most northern city of siberia, one of the few above the Arctic Circle – if it stays like this it’s going to be mild, last week it was -42 Celcius..

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Touring Italy

Talking about touring, this was something incredible. In the middle of the summer the Glenn Miller Orchestra did a tour in Italy, where we travelled more than 5000 kilometres, up and down ‘The Boot’, from Bari to Venice to Aosta. Everywhere we were received real nicely, we saw beautiful places, had incredible food (!) and played on awesome venues! To give you an impression of what it looked like, I put some photos here, I hope you enjoy it!

Summer..

It’s been a while since I posted here, and a lot of things have happend, so it’s about time! First of all I have to tell you that we played the North Sea Jazz Festival with the Koselleck Bigband in july. It was great, we did a good performance and a lot of people were there to hear it. Thank you for all the enthousiastic reactions!

The rest of july were holidays for me, off for some sailing in Poland :-). Then in august I had a tour with the Miller Bigband in the Alps, which was awesome! The views we had there, with some 30 degrees celcius every day – just great! We stayed in the beautiful town of Bolzano for a couple of days, and since we had such a fine band put together, we went playing in the streets there. People loved it, and we even made some extra money, haha.

So right now everything else is getting started again. Some gigs with the Jazzorchestra of the Concertgebouw, we just finished recording the second album of the Tim Langedijk Trio, the live cd of the Holland Bigband is ready for release – things are happening! And last but not least: a couple of months ago the great comedian Sven Ratzke recorded his live cd with Cord Heineking, Charlie Zastrau and me in the Sugarfactory in Amsterdam, and as a trailer he put the next video on YouTube. Enjoy!

From Russia with love

I just came back from a 2 week tour with the Miller Orchestra in Russia. We toured 11 cities in 13 days, including Moscow and St. Petersburg. What a country that is! People loved the music, and loved to hear us play. The last day in St. Petersburg we had a sold-out concert for 3500 people!! Every day people were asking for autographs and took pictures with us – it was a great atmosphere!

The trip itself was pretty rough. We travelled around 4000km all by nighttrain and busses, even into Siberia! Luckily they have what they call an ‘early spring’ this year, because the cold wasn’t too bad. But it was supposed to be -30/-40 degrees Celcius, and that would be really cold! The drumkits that I played went from pretty bad up till good. Most of them were too poppy, with pinstripe skins (which I HATE), but I had 2 great DW kits. And of course my own cymbals, which saved me from getting too depressed 🙂

Here are some pictures, so you can see a little bit what was going on: