Last week I was in Paris and visited Vandoren Paris on Rue Lepic 56, Montmartre, now main office, and back in the day clarinet and mouthpiece factory. Last time I visited was 5 years ago and Jean-Paul Gauvin was still working here, he retired 1,5 years ago. A few weeks ago I tested the new Vandoren mouthpiece V16 S+ and fell in love with it. Time to test some reeds. How would the red or green Java and V16 respond to it? After testing it, I came back to "my" ZZ jazz 3 reeds. For me, these reeds in combination of either this new mouthpiece or my old V16 A6 M are the best. After testing, we had some delicious lunch with one of the Vandoren experts, Pablo Trejo! Thanks Vandoren for endorsing me. Coming up: A new VandoJam (jazz session, sponsored by Vandoren)in Amsterdam. Stay tuned! Here's a video from last VandoJam at NeL.
So the first time we played the music from Royalty For Real wasn't in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, but in Bengaluru and Mumbai, all the way in India in 2023!Here you'll see me play Au Privave, Classy Cats and Royalty For Real, together with Timothy Banchet (piano), Marius Beets (bass) and Sven Rozier (drums).Au Privave is a well-known blues by Charlie Parker which I often like to start with, almost like a soundcheck tune. Although most of the time a soundcheck is done I found out it's a good idea to play a tune everybody of the band knows very well so we all can get used to the sound of the stage, the presence of the audience and it also gives the sound engineer the chance to adjust microphones last minute. During the soundcheck, the sound of the room is significantly different because of the lack of audience. All that flesh and clothes work a little bit like a totally empty room versus a room with furniture and carpets, if you know what I mean :-)Acoustics are so interesting and full of surprises.. Anyways.. hope you like it! - Last week I was in Paris and visited Vandoren Paris on Rue Lepic 56, Montmartre, now main office, and back in the day clarinet and mouthpiece factory. Last time I visited was 5 years ago and Jean-Paul Gauvin was still working here, he retired 1,5 years ago. A few weeks ago I tested the new Vandoren mouthpiece V16 S+ and fell in love with it. Time to test some reeds. How would the red or green Java and V16 respond to it? After testing it, I came back to my ZZ jazz 3 reeds. For me, these reeds in combination of either this new mouthpiece or my old V16 A6 M are the best.After testing, we had some delicious lunch with one of the Vandoren experts, Pablo Trejo! Thanks Vandoren for endorsing me. Coming up: A new VandoJam (jazz session, sponsored by Vandoren)in Amsterdam. Stay tuned!Here's a video from last VandoJam at NeL.
