drumming secrets

Hello there.

This story is about my buddy Juan van Emmerloot, the drummer in the band and being a nice guy anytime.

But first a little history.

Juan and I met several years ago at a gig of Sarah Lavinia Feenstra in het Paard, The Hagueg, cause she was graduated at the conservatory of Rotterdam and later again at a yearly event called The Drum3Daagse, 3 days of drumming at Music Station, Den Haag, the music school of Cesar Zuiderwijk. Juan was a teacher there in 2008.

In Juan´s masterclass and workshop I learned essential things from him to improve your sound, to groove like hell and always play with a smile on your face. In short: the things Juan is very good at.

After that we kept in touch and I made some photographs at several gigs, check out his MySpace account.

So, I am addicted to The Drum3Daagse, but also at North Sea Jazz, the last 5 years in my hometown, Rotterdam. I try to go every year to see my heroes, listen to new drummers and have a great time.

And that, dear readers, is a seamless link to THE gig of North Sea Jazz this year, Juan with the artist "Waylon". Waylon is a fantastic singer who signed a record deal with Motown USA; he is the only Dutch artist who has ever signed up by this famous record label!

When I heard that Waylon´s original drummer, Bram Hakkens could not appear due to other obligations, I was very surprised to hear from Juan he would do the job and therefore it was for me a few days of more anticipation when we reached the date: July 10-th, 2010.

My only problem was to get my camera in, but I succeeded, hahaha!

I was blown away. Although Juan played on Brams´s Ludwig kit using his own Paiste cymbals, the drumsound was definitely Juan: Fat, groovy, a bit lazy and very in the service of the song. To be very honest, I was not familiar with Waylon´s songs due to the fact he had only a few hits in the charst and hearing those several times on the radio, but it was a great concert, sound was OK (also cheers to the sound engineer) and in balance. Solo´s a bit harder, so they popped out in the song, great. It was a sort of  cosy in The Maasstage in Ahoy at that time (and hot!) and Juan did a marvellous job to get that show together in a few rehearsels.

Nice battle with the percussionist at the end, acoustic songs, a very nice horn section, the complete picture was a nice one. Juan fitted perfectly in there.

After 1 hour and a ½ (and a few pounds lighter due to the heat on stage) they left to come back a few minutes later to give an encore. The organisation in shock, because the time schedule was very tight. But never the less, 1 encore and that was it.

It was a beautiful start of this Saturday night at NSJ. I send Juan an sms after the gig to congratulate him with a stunning performance.

I managed to shoot some nice pictures, in spite of a very dutiful security employee, who kept sending me away, because I was to close to the stage with my big lens, hahaha!  But check ´m out with this blog.

So, if you want to see how a super professional drummer looks like, check out Juan when he is playing somewhere on a stage near you. You can learn, just by looking.

And Juan, thanks again for meeting you and for that crazy evening.

Regards,

Jan Kloosterboer

Amature photographer and drum addict