How I Discovered Jazz Music

Sometimes people ask me, “how did you get into jazz”?

The path to jazz was not obvious, as I grew up in the 80s in a small town in The Netherlands, about 20 miles east of Amsterdam. There was no jazz radio, either regionally or nationally, so I never really heard of jazz. There was a national “oldies” station, so we listened to that, and I really enjoyed the older music from the 50s and 60s (which was generally popular as well), but there wasn’t any true “jazz” as such, and the music never went earlier than the 50s.

Then, in 1987, Nina Simone had a big revival hit with her song “My Baby Just Cares For Me” in the UK and in the Netherlands. It peaked at #1 in the Dutch Top 40, and as a result, there was a music video that played regularly on TV for some period of time. It was a clay-stop-animation video, produced by the studio that would later go on to make “Wallace & Gromit,” and “Chicken Run.” I was seven years old when this video aired, and I was instantly smitten. By the singing cat, by the story, by the dark club atmosphere, but most of all by that unbelievably hip yet nonchalant rhythm—and not least of all that amazing piano solo. I had never heard something so rhythmic and at the same time melodic before.

This song and its music video still remains one of my favorite jazz songs of all time. (I even recorded a version of it on my last album.) Additionally, there was some very occasional play of jazz-adjacent songs like “What A Wonderful World” and some Dinah Washington recordings.

It was only when I was a teenager that I discovered that these song were not simply “one-offs” but that there was a whole genre of similar songs. That discovery started with a tea commercial:

and it continued with several other songs in commercials (among which “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” and “Mad About The Boy”). It was finally after a fellow student in my high school sang “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” during a talent night and I simultaneously heard Julie London’s “Cry Me A River” somewhere, that I started to suspect that there really must be more to this situation.

I went to the library and looked up “Cry Me A River,” hoping to find the sheet music for it, and indeed there was a whole book of sheet music that contained about 200 songs and was titled “The Great American Songbook.” I was floored. And thus began my adventure into the classic songs of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and jazz.