BOOMASIEL, OUR LANDSCAPE IN MOTION

This new musical project started in 2015 when poet Frans Budé asked me to set his poem 'Song of the two trees' to music for an exhibition in the Venlo museum van Bommel van Dam. During the opening of an exhibition with paintings by Willy Gorissen, Baer Traa and I performed the new composition 'Song of the two trees' and that left us wanting more. Since then, Baer and I have shared the stage more often.

When my brother Govert published his collection of poems 'Boomasiel' in 2018, it fell into place for me: I would record an album in which I would set Dutch poems to music. They were poems by Frans Budé, my brother Govert, Louis Lehmann, Geert van den Munckhof, Herman Verweij and myself. The poem 'Hunger' by Daan Kmiecik, together with Chick Corea's 'Children's Songs', inspired me to a new composition for piano and tenor sax. I also asked Tsead Bruinja, just like me a fan of Marillion and Fish, to make a Frisian translation of the Marillion song 'Pseudo Silk Kimono'.
An intensive period of composing, rehearsing, arranging and recording has now come to an end and I am very happy with the result. Frans Budé wrote a beautiful foreword and Daan Kmiecik provided the artwork for the album with illustrations and photography.



As with all my musical pursuits, this time too I kept it close to myself and to home. Although 'close to home' covers the load better for me. The musicians involved are all people I've known for years and most of them I've worked with on stage and in the studio.

The poems set to music are partly sung and spoken. Sung by Baer Traa and Marion Steeghs. Spoken by Huub Stapel and Tsead Bruinja beautifully recites 'Pseudo Silk Kimono'. Huub Stapel is not only a great actor and special man, but is also a link to my father Jan Derix, whose poems I previously translated into German for the song cycle 'Wandern' that I recorded with baritone Sef Thissen in the Concertgebouw. In 1994 Huub Stapel starred in the KRO miniseries 'The Partizans', the scenario of which is largely based on a book by my father, 'De Bospartizans van Baarlo'.
Furthermore, 'Boomasiel' was a perfect setting to finally work together with one of my favorite musicians, the Norwegian Bendik Hofseth who once succeeded Michael Brecker as saxophonist in the band Steps Ahead. In addition to Bendik, you can also hear bassist Eric Coenen, guitarist Ton Engels and saxophonist Leo Janssen, with whom I form the duo 'Angeli'. I arranged a number of poems for string quartet and quintet (including Yvonne van de Pol, Marie José and Jo Didderen).

The themes of the poems are very different, but they are all about insights, questions of life, love, music and nature, and in that sense are an ode to the landscape in us and the landscape around us.
The recordings took place at Kerani Music in Stein, in the Cosmic Orchestra studio of Mark Pütz, with Bendik Hofseth in Oslo and in my own living room studio in Horst. Again many thanks to Arno op den Camp for his time and craftsmanship. In addition to Dutch and Frisian, 'Boomasiel' also features sung Venloos and Horster dialect. So very close to home and close to home.

If you'd like to buy a copy of 'Boomasiel' drop me a line egbertderix@hotmail.com