Jazz Flugelhorn recorded by the NativeDSD Team

It all starts in this small town in the south of the Netherlands, when he joins the local brassband playing the flugelhorn at the age of 11. A few years later he gets so excited about Big Band Oss that he switches to trumpet to be able to join them.

In 1980 Angelo moves to Amsterdam to study musicology at the Amsterdam University and trumpet at the Jazz Department of the Amsterdam Sweelinck Conservatory. The extremely vivid and divers Amsterdam music scene is a true walhalla for a young, curious and eager trumpeter. In these roaring 80’s Verploegen plays salsa with Ruben Salas, Evolution 2000, Salsa d’Amsterdam, big band with Maiden Voyage and the Frank Grasso Big Band, gets involved with the theatre (Haagse Comedie, later on with Orkater, ZT Hollandia, de Veenfabriek), plays lead- trumpet in the musical Cats and gets acquainted with the improv scene, working with Jaap Blonk, Michael Moore, Larry Fishkind and many more.

Projects with NativeDSD

NativeDSD’s exclusive label Just Listen Records recorded and released seven DSD 256 projects with Verploegen in various combinations. The ‘Sweetest Sound’ was the first in which we invited him to do a recording for the label on our specific terms (play live, in balance, no mixing, no editing, just capturing the live music as it is with the best possible equipment at the best suitable venue).

It was obvious for me to return once more to my first love – the flugelhorn.

Angelo Verploegen

He picked ‘standard’ tunes he grew fond of over the years, looking for a certain degree of variety in melody, harmony, formal structure, keeping the drum-less trio sound in mind, allowing it to flourish, creating a casual, lush and intimate atmosphere.

Just the drums

Giving Verploegen more flexibility, he pitched the idea for ‘The Duke Book: The Music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’. Flugelhorn and just the drums to accompany him: “The Duke Book is about melody and rhythm, about sound and time, about exploring the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in all kind of ways alongside exploring the sonorities of our instruments” he writes in the liner notes.

Our first reaction..

“Flugelhorn and Drums…. A whole album? Both of you will have to be VERY good to keep the listener’s attention for the duration of a complete album. And yes, it is all very good. These boys needed no producing on my part. Setting up the microphones was also easy. A great space to play, two very musical minded players. I only needed to press record!” writes Jared Sacks the producer.

The Art of Traveling Light

We really wanted to continue our collaboration with Angelo and quickly came up with some new dates for a new session. He wanted to reflect musically on the travels made as a musician. Ironically enough reality caught up with this idea when traveling came to a literal standstill because of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak. Maybe a reason for the better for some reflection on the act of traveling?

We translated traveling lightly literally into a line-up without bass, thus underlining the concept of lightness and transparency in sound.

Angelo Verploegen

He writes “My many travels all represent a mixed feeling of melancholy, to have to leave my beloved family again, and of excitement about plunging into the unknown. And then of course there is all the inconvenience coming with the traveling itself, which I try to ease as much as I can by carrying as little as possible with him: practicing the Art of Traveling Light.”

When Night Falls

Twenty years after they first played together, Verploegen reunited the trio of The Sweetest Sound, with Ed Verhoeff on guitar and Eric van der Westen on double bass. During the pandemic they found the moment to paint a small portrait of the night: eleven vocal jazz standards that follow an evening from dusk until dawn, from ‘Close Your Eyes’ and ‘Dancing in the Dark’ through ‘Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars’ and ‘Stardust’ to ‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’.

Like in a good dish, sometimes no additional ingredients are needed.

Angelo Verploegen

Verploegen deliberately chose songs that were always meant to be sung, where melody and lyrics were written together; for him the lyrics are an extra layer in his phrasing. The trio recorded the album on 22 and 23 May 2021 at Studio150 Bethlehemkerk, a former Lutheran church in Amsterdam, and When Night Falls became NativeDSD’s 2022 Album of the Year in the Jazz Ensemble category.

The trio at Studio150, recording When Night Falls • Bethlehemkerk 2021 | Photo © Jonas Sacks

A Handful of Stories

Turning 60 made Verploegen look back for once. He picked a handful of his own compositions from the past 25 years, written for all kinds of line-ups and occasions, and recorded them with a classic jazz quintet: Nils van Haften on saxophone, Marc van Roon on piano, Guus Bakker on bass and Jasper van Hulten, his partner from The Duke Book, on drums.

All of the (a little over a handful) original compositions presented here tell their own story.

Angelo Verploegen

Little Dancer

The birth of his grandson in early 2023 moved Verploegen deeply, with joy and with worry about the world his generation will grow up in. He went looking for songs of love, hope, comfort and childhood, and recorded them in the most intimate setting he could think of: a duo with pianist Jeroen van Vliet, with whom he had played before at the closing weekend of the old Bimhuis and in his quartet Executive Lounge.

What’s in a Name?

‘What’s in a Name?’ marks the 25th anniversary of one of jazz’s more understated trios. Angelo Verploegen, Ed Verhoeff and Eric van der Westen have been playing together, drumless, since their first week-long residency at Amsterdam’s Pompoen club in August 2001.

For their third album on Just Listen Records, the trio chose twelve jazz standards with names for titles: Sam Rivers’ Beatrice, Ellington’s Angelica, Coltrane’s Naima, McCoy Tyner’s Aisha, Wayne Shorter’s Ana Maria and, the oldest piece here, Dinah from 1925, among others. An ode, as the trio puts it, to a hundred years of jazz and twenty-five years of their own partnership. Three tracks (Emily, Dinah, Alfie) are stripped down further still, to duets between rotating pairs.

Recorded live in one room at Banana Bread Studios with no technical artifice, and recorded, mixed and mastered purely in DSD 256, the album leans fully into what has defined the trio from the start: three instruments, no drums, and the open space that absence creates. Verploegen plays a Hub van Laar flugelhorn.

We hope you will enjoy these recordings made with no sound-equalizing, no mixing, no compressing, no editing applied here. Just the musicians in a beautiful medium-large concert hall, the best possible technical equipment.

Just Listen!

Angelo Verploegen, flugelhorn · Ed Verhoeff, electric and acoustic guitar · Eric van der Westen, double bass

Cover photo © Wouter Jansen