Turning Into Jazz- As Serious As Your Life
I never had had any serious music lessons after my initiation in playing guitar at the age of 10. Many times I’d try to start reading notes in some bass book or whatever. I knew that there was a whole world of music that I had no clue of. But when my psychology study at the University came to a halt before it really took off, my dad told me to take up music seriously if that’s what I wanted to do.
So I went down to the official local Music School. 
I had a meeting with the bass teacher Rinus Raaijmakers, who had just taken over from Double Bass master Hein van de Gein. Rinus was a fabulous guy. He had humour and was the first one to give me a little bit of confidence. Throughout my career I’ve had many doubts whether I was good enough to do what I wanted, like most professional musicians.
My first lesson was a disaster though. I came in and told Rinus I wanted to go to the conservatory where you could study jazz & improvised music since one or two years. His reply was: “ok, let’s play the blues”. He counted off and I started to play a groovy shuffled Delta -Eric Clapton kind of Blues which I’d played many times. By the way; I still love to play that nowadays! But back then after 2 bars Rinus stopped me….he said this is not the blues for the conservatory….you have to learn the jazz blues with several different chords. I had no clue what he was talking about. He gave me “Au Privave”, which is a Charlie Parker blues, and told me to learn the head by heart and the walking bassline which he wrote down for the next lesson. I jumped to it and of course I could play both tasks flawless the next lesson. That’s when he gave me my 1st real compliment: well…..this might be possible….
I practised my bass guitar and learned songs from Jeff Beck and Charlie Parker and another jazz standard “Blue Bossa”. I went to the Conservatory in Rotterdam to do the entry exam and got kicked out head first with the comments from both bass teacher Koos Serierse and the classical teacher saying “what the hell are you doing here? You can’t play shit”. Down again with the little self esteem I’d grown. They were right of course but it still hurt bad….and since I’m a lot of things but not a quitter I decided to go for it even far more dedicated than ever before. And it would pay off.
I started to get lessons from a true music guru. Steve Clover is without a doubt the most important teacher I’ve ever had. His background as a drummer that worked with Paul Bley, Fred Raulston and Gary Peacock when he used to live in Seattle made him like the true messiah of Jazz. Born in Elmhurst, Indiana but since the late 70’s an American Music Apostle in Europe.
His knowledge, being a ethno-musicologist, and dedication to his pupils was such an inspiring aspect of my musical upbringing that I owe him more than I can imagine. He was the one to give me a little bit of confidence by giving me time to really learn to play the Double Bass to which I had recently switched to. And it was damn tough: blisters on all fingertips, day after day after day.
He made me read books and the back of jazzalbum covers where they used to write whole stories on the recorded music and artists, to digest the history of the only music which contains really everything: jazz. Through Steve I experienced what an enormous joy and how fullfilling it is to completely submerge in music. If it’s theory or ensemble playing, Steve was on it. I learned so much from him. I owe him a lot. His motto was: “You did it, so you can do it; so you will do it!” I use it still.
He told me to go out and buy one LP and listen to it so often that I could dream every note of it. So I went out to our local record store “Tommy” which was a legendary good record store by the way, and bought 2 albums: Thelonious Monk “Sphere” 
and Charles Mingus “Live”. And I stated to listen to the music. At first I couldn’t tell head from tail, but after several times I started to like the relaxedness of Thelonious
but also the raw energy of Mingus. With him I had the feeling that all what I liked in music was played at the same time, as if all boundaries were gone. It was as if someone had given me an insight in how the music had become a tool of all comprehensive expression. 
I was drawn to this monstrous Double Bass player that steered his band in any direction he wished, right here and now. The Mingus seed was thoroughly planted. His band was the ultimate vehicle to express any musical emotion at the speed of light. And it still is…..
I dug deep into jazz and had a few fellow students around me that had the same mission. We started to study solfege & music theory. I have, to this day a somewhat reluctant relationship with music theory. I sincerely believe in a naïve approach to music. Theory can help but it can never overtake your heart. If it feels right; it’s right but if it’s theoretically right it can feel seriously wrong and forced.
But at that time I was engulfed in all the things I needed to learn to get admitted to the conservatory. I started to play workshops with a local tenor madman Henk Koekoek, who was and is one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever come across. He enjoyed working with young new musicians and quite soon I started to play around Tilburg learning jazz with him and my fellow students. Most of them were much further in their devellopment than I was but since there weren’t too many double bassplayers I started to play a lot.
It’s also around that time that I saw my 1st jazz concert in the local jazzclub Paradox, which would have an important place in my musical carreer.
Jasper van ’t Hof & Pierre Courbois played a whirlwind freaky duo concert that was just amazing. It was a burning energetic concert with nothing I’d heard ever before. It was free, loud-being electric-, but most of all it was as if I witnessed Deep Purple’s Ian Paice & Jon Lord in full flight but then way more delicate and virtuoso at the same time.
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I worked my way through Ilja Croon’s Guitar method book 1 and 2 and when I had learned the barre chords I was ready to try everything on my own. I must have been about 13 years old when I played with my friends Ad Ghering -a hockey-playing-drummer whose father was an (upright) jazz bass player where I first saw a real huge impressive double bass- and Rene Samuels the guitarist that I met when I had my first guitar lessons with Peter van de Par who’d become a successful antique trader later. My first electric guitar was an Eco semi acoustic that I bought from Peter. It had a huge feedback and was a nice, easy to play guitar. But It was my Rokkoman Les Paul copy that I would play on for some time. It didn’t take long before I’d switch to bass guitar and bought myself a Hondo Precision Bass 
and an Ibanez Cube Amp. In our local music shop “Bill Coolen” I’d spend hours and hours just looking at the most fabulous basses and guitars that were way out of my league. Especially real Fender Precisions or Rickenbackers
like the one my hero Roger Glover in Deep Purple used to play like a wet dream. In fact they still are: an old ’62 Precision or a good old Rickenbacker are still worth a fortune.
and “All Right Now from Free”…that stuff beside some originals. One of the first songs I wrote was “Never Coming Home”, on which I played harmonica as well, slightly based on “Heroin” by Lou Reed from “Rock ‘N Roll Animal”. “Babi Yar”was another original song inspired by “Hard Lovin’ Man” from Deep Purple about a massacre of the Jews in WW2;I was way too serious those days….
Rene Wouters played the guitar and we were a real band for about 5 years. We started of rehearsing on Friday afternoon at our former primary school. Later on we rehearsed in the attic of a barn of Ronald’s farm. We build a room of blocks of hay to isolate both for sound but also for temperature. Of course all in vain…. In summer it would be extremely hot and in winter there was no way to heat anything up but coffee and booze, but at least we wouldn’t have to carry our gear in and out the room every time. I remember we’d go to some ponds at night after rehearsal and have a great time. I taught a good friend Ben Doomen how to play functional organ in an old chapel- de Hasseltse Kapel- in Tilburg, opposite his home. We had a vocalist Robert Sauvé, who had a lot of nerve, not such a great voice though, and had an excellent sense of humor. They came and went. 
We eventually added a guitarist Ashna Vishnudat who was a real virtuoso to our standards. He loved Al DiMeola and that jazz rock stuff that was extremely popular with musicians in the late 70’s, and could play like that too. My eclectic spirit didn’t help to find a musical course though…. We tried several musical styles; Deep Purple and Rainbow like hard rock (Axe) , U2 and Joy Division type new wave (Transmitted Tears) etc. to get even a bit of success but it wasn’t really happening in the end. We played some loud and nice gigs but never enough to get a working band ethic that I longed for so much. To this day I regret that we didn’t play more gigs back then to really get the hang of touring in a Rock And Roll Band. I’m always looking for a working band atmosphere; I still do. My efforts to enroll Conservatory put an abrupt end to my band efforts in contemporary pop music. I had the idea that I couldn’t continue in the same way and had to start to go my own way though I had no clue in what I was doing. Instead of focusing on a band effort I took a shot at diving in a new music genre that soon would completely change my musical environment.
I recall the sound which was very thick and heavy. Different and raw. In my memory it was Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” but of course I couldn’t really tell. The time frame is way too blurred. However I do remember the TV showing us the first man on the moon and the relentless B 52s bombing of Vietnam, Watergate -which took forever- and of course the World Championships in Mexico in 1970 with Pele and Rivellino. My dad was a huge soccer fan and sports 
was one of the most important elements growing up. I would often play soccer with my brothers and many kids from the neighborhood at a small abandoned square in front of our house which used to be part of a temporary wooden school when the quarter was build in the early 60’s.
My dad had bought his first car, a Vauxhall Viva- the English version of the infamous Opel Kadett- which allowed us to go to soccer games in Rotterdam to see Feyenoord, one of the best teams in the world at that time. I recall seeing Ajax with Cruijff & Neeskens and Feyenoord with van Hanegem and Franz Hasil play each other in the most beautiful soccer stadium ever “De Kuip” in Rotterdam. I knew all the players by heart. Us kids collected small soccer player pictures and glued them in special books. Same stuff that’s still going on nowadays. To this day I can recall some of the names of players that played with small long gone soccer clubs like DWS, GVAV en Holland Sport.
loved to be outside playing and roaming the streets and woods around the town I grew up in; Tilburg, the Netherlands. I lived in a typical Dutch 60’s quarter -square and straight- on the western edge of a deteriorating industrial town where the textile industry had left. Just a couple of hundred yards from our house you’d find woods and farm land. The next village was about 10 miles away westward. I never had the idea I lived in a city because it felt really like a small village with plenty of space around.
My mother keeps telling me – to this day- that I was a very busy kid -now they’d probably diagnose me with ADHD- and that I would use my cutlery as drumsticks and would be drumming on everything that was available on the table when we had dinner. I played drums on the empty wash powder boxes my my mother saved for me while play backing our favorite popsongs using pvc pipes you use for electric wire as my drumsticks. My friends would imitate playing guitar on old tennis or badminton rackets.
I recorded as much music as I could on my first cassette recorder with a build in speaker(!). I would check the national hitlist which was available at the Tobacco store in a small mall nearby and wait for the songs I wanted to be broadcasted. Then I hoped the DJ would shut up so I’d have the whole song and not some stupid introduction. I do recall recording “Jet” by Paul McCartney and Wings and many other different popsongs. We would be searching for all great new songs and especially new clips that were extremely fascinating in those days. It was long before MTV hit the screens and videos were very rare. Colour TV was just coming within range for average, moderate income families like mine. It also took some time before our dad bought a decent Philips stereo amplifier with good -loud- speakers and a real -stand alone- pick up to play LP’s and singles…. Me and my brother were in heaven. We always played music when we were at home. Our thirst for new music was endless and that would last for decades. 
The fast solo’s and agility of the rhythm section was just mythical.
It was the right album at the right time: a teenage kid in a small town suburb in the early 70’s hearing music that you couldn’t listen to on any radio station. It was of course also very important that my parents didn’t like it at all. Way to rough. This was my music. This was what I wanted to do: make records, albums and play all over the world. I had one problem: I had no instrument but some of my older brother’s friends played guitar and they, being about 3 years my senior, were the real cool guys. They had long hair and upcoming beards, wore old soldier’s coats and cowboy boots with square noses- not pointed- square! I was fascinated by them learning to play guitar – I thought they were amazing: they played barre chords (!) – and I kept asking my dad for one like theirs. My dad was a generous and loving man and he realized I wasn’t going to back down -something which is not in my nature- so he went with me to the town’s legendary guitar shop Bill Coolen where he bought me my first guitar. It was the cheapest acoustic steel stringed guitar we could get and it was a tour the force playing that instrument but it didn’t take long before I could play a few chords. The teacher I had found in our neighborhood, and where everybody went if you wanted to learn to play guitar, was a real gentle, nice, jazz musician who loved Les Paul and Chet Atkins. I really liked him a lot. I admired his chords and way of playing but I really liked it when he started to play old school Rock ’n Roll. I hadn’t come for the smooth jazz stuff he played – which in later years I truly regretted-, I had come to learn the rough stuff and just enough to start my own band. I wanted to have my own hardrock band. I had found my mission.
For a short while I thought CSN&Y were the best that ever happened to me. That was until I played it while hanging out the window in the evening some summer night and one of the girls next door asked me what I was playing. As I replied CSN & Y she said: “no way this is not Deja Vu because I know that music well”, so I went to my brother and asked what he had recorded over the now classic album. He said it was “Naturally” by J.J. Cale. J.J. is my main inspiration since then. All my life I’ve kept listening and playing his music. In my darkest hours he gave me comfort and in the best of times he made the happiest man on the planet. In the end he’s been on my shoulder ever since.
I just was impressed by the endless line of apartment blocks with restaurants and small shops at the ground floor. In the nineties I had been a frequent visitor of Johannesburg, another huge city but Istanbul is a different ball game. It’s like an overflowing beehive 24/7.
, AC/DC and Deep Purple 
which was all around us in our youths, learned to play jazz well afterwards and often had a trip down memory lane when we looked for ways to describe and play grooves or when just making fun. And fun it was.
Mustafa stuck to his langtime decision never to drink a drop of alcohol anymore but Jarrod couldn’t escape the lady right in front! It was hilarious. He had no idea how not to embarrass Sezen but the point is that Jarrod just can’t stand and handle strong liquor. He just gets very sick….it wasn’t the last time I saved his ass as he would save mine at least as many times. I like JD every now and then and then was as good as any…..
As Sezen entered the stage the audience couldn’t hold back anymore. They screamed and shouted, whistled and were in awe. That night it sounded as if the whole world shouted for Sezen Aksu. It was louder than the loudest concert I had played or listened to. It was heart-warming to see so many people longing for the person who’d been a part of their lives for so long. Someone who comforted them in harsh times and who celebrated their feasts and parties with them. The Grand dame of Turkish music was getting steamed up, was picking up speed and we were right there, following every move, every musical curve she took, skipping parts and continuing longer or stopping short before the ending. We were on the move….
