Friday, January 8, 2021

The Diamond Five featuring Greetje Kauffeld - 1973 - Back Together

The Diamond Five featuring Greetje Kauffeld
1973
Back Together


01. Sneezy 7:33
02. Meditation 5:31
03. Because 7:35
04. Jam-Bazz 6:00
05. I Fall In Love Too Easily 4:21
06. Day By Day 6:75
07. The Beat Goes On 4:40

Bass – Jacques Schols
Drums – John Engels
Piano, Electric Piano – Cees Slinger
Tenor Saxophone – Harry Verbeke
Trumpet, Flugelhorn – Cees Smal
Vocals – Greetje Kauffeld (tracks: A2, B2, B4)




Music was Greetje Kauffeld's most loyal company in the last years. She listened to the radio or played Doris Day and Frank Sinatra records all day long. "That's how I learned to sing," she says. "By singing along with them."

Sinatra and Day were good teachers. From the latter, Kauffeld took over the ability to approach, endear or move the listener very closely. She learned to phrase from The Voice. She was so occupied with it that she had mastered English pronunciation before she graduated from elementary school. Texts got meaning for her and it has always remained that way. At the age of thirteen, Greetje Kauffeld sang on the radio for the first time, in the youth program Minjon with the Zeeland group Raindrops.

On February 1, 1957, she became the regular singer of THE SKYMASTERS and started her professional career, which quickly took on an international character. This was thanks to her participation in the Festival de Canzone in Venice.

The Dutch team with Mieke Telkamp, ​​Christine Spierenburg, Willy Alberti, Johnny Jordaan, Greetje Kauffeld and the orchestra "De Zaaiers" conducted by. Jos Cleber won the first prize; The Golden Gondola. Following this performance by Greetje, the well-known German orchestra leader invited her for a guest performance with his RIAS Big Band in Berlin.

Other musicians with whom she made recordings for German radio television and record studios were Toots Thielemans, Caterina Valente, Paul Kuhn, Kurt Edelhagen, Sven Asmussen, Erwin Lehn, Horst Jankowski and Udo Jürgens.

In 1968 she wanted to broaden her horizon and took the big step to the United States of America. She has worked in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and, along with jazz stars such as Ray Brown, Herb Ellis and Oscar Castro-Neves, was seen coast to coast on Joey Bishop's television shows

Back in the Netherlands, in 1969, Greetje Kauffeld married producer Joop de Roo, who further stimulated her development towards the more jazzy repertoire. Through him she became acquainted with greats like Stan Getz, Phil Woods, Thad Jones and Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen who contributed to her 1981 CD "Some other Spring".

Before that she had already made records with Jerry van Rooijen / Rob Pronk (And let the Music play) and with a combo under her own name (He was a king uncrowned - a tribute to Clifford Brown)

Until the early 80s, Greetje Kauffeld worked due to family circumstances - in 1970 and 1972 daughter Nathalie and son Mark were born respectively - exclusively in the studios of radio, television and record industry.

In 1986 Kauffeld formed a special trio, consisting only of voice, guitar (Peter Nieuwerf) and saxophone (Ruud Brink, later Jan Menu). Both this daring formation and the actual musical result show her idiosyncrasy, her guts and her justified self-confidence.

On the CDs "The Song is You" and "On my Way to You" (with lyrics exclusively by Alan and Marilyn Bergman) you can hear how her strong empathy for the songs is tested to the limit and successfully. "Every song is a story to me," she says herself. "I experience the text that I sing, I crawl into it as an actor steps into his role" This powerful identification with the lyrics that she interprets is characteristic of her work. The resulting declamation, timing and phrasing create an intimate bond with the listener and create an alternating atmosphere of intense emotion, compelling melancholy and relativizing cheerfulness.

It is worth mentioning the realization of two special CDs "European Windows" from 1992 and "The Real Thing" from 1994. For the first CD Greetje Kauffeld expanded her trio with bassist Ruud Ouwehand and drummer Hans Dekker and she chose a repertoire of exclusively European composers. from Kurt Weill, Michel Legrand and Charlie Chaplin to Paul McCartney and John Lennon. On "The Real Thing", with violinist Armando and guitarist Maarten van der Grinten, she sings duets with Humphrey Campbell.

On the occasion of her 40th vocalist anniversary, there was a gala concert with the Metropole Orchestra conducted by Jerry van Rooijen in the Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht.

CDs were released with Jiggs Whigham's RIAS Big Band and the Metropole Orchestra, with guest soloists Stan Getz and Thad Jones.

Greetje Kauffeld received the BIRD Award from the North Sea Jazz Festival, where she has performed twenty times since 1982, and she received a royal award: Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

In the years that followed, Greetje Kauffeld became an even more in-demand singer at home and abroad, so that she had to end her teaching positions at the Conservatories in Zwolle and Hilversum, only since 2002 she has been available again as a guest teacher at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

A highlight of the new millennium was the tour "The Award Winners" she made with Willem Nijholt and Johan Plomp's The small Big Band, in which award-winning American, French, German and Dutch songs were played and sung.

Concert Poster 2004In March and April 2003 she toured Germany with Paul Kuhn & The Best, a theater program around his 75th birthday.

In 2004 she went on tour again with the program "Lieder, swing und alte schlager - Bekannt durch Film, Funk, Fernsehen" with Bibi Johns, Alice & Ellen Kessler, Chis Howland & Die Götz Alsmann Band.

The SuperAudio CD My shining Hour: Greetje Kauffeld salutes the Centenary of Harold Arlen with The Paul Kuhn Quintet can be regarded as a new jewel in the crown of one of the Netherlands' most internationally renowned singers.

In Germany at the end of 2006, publishing house MaveriX Verlag will publish a robust autobiography by and about Greetje Kauffeld: "Was für Tage ....." written in collaboration with journalist Ingo Schiweck from Düsseldorf.

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