Jasper van't Hof – The Selfkicker (1976) (16/44 Vinyl Rip)

×

Jasper van't Hof – The Selfkicker (1976) (16/44 Vinyl Rip)

Close

Biography from Jaro.de:
Jasper van't Hof was born in Enschede, Holland on June 30, 1947. The child of a jazz trumpeter and a classically trained singer and pianist, his great interest in music became evident at an early age. The groundwork was laid with private piano lessons. At the age of fourteen he wrote his first compositions and became increasingly interested in jazz. His parents would have liked to send him to a conservatory, but Jasper van't Hof preferred to play live. At nineteen he was already participating in various jazz festivals and raking in prizes.
He celebrated his first great European success with the band Association P.C., founded in 1969 by van't Hof along with the Dutch drummer Pierre Courbois and the German guitarist Toto Blanke. The bassist was sometimes the Dutchman Peter Krijnen, sometimes the German Sigi Busch. The band produced a synthesis of jazz and rock never before heard in such high quality and acclaimed as a sensation at the Berlin Jazztage of 1971.
"Eighty percent of Association P.C. was electronics", Jasper recalls, and he accordingly soon belonged to the circle of jazz musicians interested in exploring the sound possibilities newly created by the electronic instrumentarium. This he undertook in a formation founded in 1973 with Charlie Mariano and Philip Catherine, the group’s name – Pork Pie – alluding to an old Lester Young number. Of the two excellent albums that came out of this collaboration, the second one, Transistory, was dedicated to the bassist Peter Trunk who had died in a car accident in New York in 1974. It was also very much in the Trunk spirit that Pork Pie merged the technical-artistic virtuosity of jazz with the dynamic extroversion of rock.
Jasper van't Hof recorded his first solo album, The Selfkicker, in 1976, following the dissolution of Pork Pie, and it was already a clear avowal of faith to fully developed melody and precisely conceived music; it is still one of Jasper’s favourite albums today. This period also witnessed a number of duo contacts with musicians like Archie Shepp, Manfred Schoof, Wolfgang Dauner, Zbigniew Seifert, Toto Blanke, Stu Martin, Alphonse Mouzon and Bob Malach. And solo performances by Jasper van't Hof were also not rare during those years: as a keyboarder with "all the works,” but often alone at the concert grand as well.