Dear visitor,
Welcome to the March 2018 update about my life on the road. 2018 will be a bit different than many other years: From January until June I will mainly be playing Arenas with different acts, which is a weird thing to say for someone with a jazz background.
After a successful edition of 14x Vrienden Van Amstel in Ahoy, Rotterdam ( Home !!! ), I’m now on the road with German Superstar Peter Maffay, joining his MTV Unplugged tour as a special guest with his amazing band.
And now, while the whole world is watching the Olympic wintergames, I’m quite occupied with my own olympic musical matters: Playing and recording live for 15000+ people, day after day.
This is something else man!
Even though I feel blessed so far with a career I even didn’t dare to dream about, playing with the most incredible players on the planet; being able to get my Arena-chops together tuns out to be a very valuable element in my everlasting search to improvement.
You can put me in any place or situation and ask me to play a solo, and I would love to do that, but putting me in a packed arena with some difficult sheet music is another thing, and it’s great to be able to train it day after day.
To me, some of the different parts feel probably the same as walking naked through a warehouse while shouting to the surprised customers what their fucking problem is. That kind of attitude is exactly the attitude I also have while playing jazz, without being aware of it, just enjoying the playing…. So it’s simply great to be able day after day, week after week to get used to this stuff and deliver! It was great to feel the nerves the first couple of days, which all turned out to be great concerts, putting me in a position where I can actually enjoy the shit out of every minute on stage. Which is a good thing because we will still be touring with this circus for more than a month from now, followed by 2 tours in the Netherlands until June.
For more pics/ stories and footage of me, proudly receiving a platinum album award for selling already more than 200.000 copies of the Maffay MTV Unplugged album, (which also features me in the beautiful song Nessaya, with Peter and Katie Melua,) please feel free to follow me on Instagram or Facebook.
Enjoy the rest of my sate, see you soon for the next update.
Love, peace and music.
Jan.