Ruud Breuls, Simon Rigter, Karel Boehlee, Jos Machtel and Marcel Serierse can play. No doubt. They belong to the absolute top of European jazz. They have played with everybody who is somebody in the world of jazz. But what really makes this album special is the love and dedication they bring to Armstrong’s music. Listening to the 8 compositions presented here one realizes that genre is completely irrelevant.

The 8 pieces of music were performed live in the studio in front of an audience of 80 people. The musicians were placed in front of a stereo pair of microphones

with additional spot microphones on each instrument. The musicians were playing without headphones, the reason being that we believe that when we get the musicians to play together in the same room, without headphones, it creates a number of musical and technical benefits: As they are not ‘separate’ by the headphones, the musicians, in order to hear each other are forced to create a natural and musical balance, a balance which is then easily captured by the main stereo pair of microphones.

Because of this natural and musical balance the need for compression to control levels is no longer necessary. Since everybody is in the same room, the boxed sound which is so common in many modern recordings is absent as the sound of the room helps ‘glue’ the sound of the recording. The recording took place in the now legendary Studio 2, situated in the the building of the Dutch Music Centre of Broadcasters (MCO). It is the oldest recording studio in the Netherlands and has hosted a wealth of prominent artists; Django Reinhardt, was there in 1937, Jazz at the Philharmonic featuring Ella Fitzgerald in 1953, and in the 1960’ Wes Montgomery, Clark Terry and Eric Dolphy all recorded in the studio.