(Jazz,Post-Bop) Karel Boehlee Trio - Secret Life - 2009, MP3, 320 kbps

Started playing the piano very young, when his father brought jazz music into his life, Karel’s mother played classical music for fun, his brother loved afro-american music, like James Brown, Stevie Wonder Aretha Franklin etc. his sister was more into popmusic. It created the right environment to gather many music styles. Boehlee learned to play the piano by listening, not through lessons. He started to realise that he wanted to be a professional musician, when he was more than 20 years old. In 1983 he studied at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Since then Karel Boehlee played with Toon Roos, Martijn van Iterson, Peter Tiehuis, Ferdinand Povel, Theo de Jong, Jesse van Ruller, Simone Pormes, Toots Thielemans, Trijntje Oosterhuis, Roberta Gambarini, Lo van Gorp, Hein van de Geyn, Martijn Vink, Gino Vannelli, Joris Roelofs, Ben Herman, Philip Catherine, Hans van Oosterhout, Frans van der Hoeven,Tom Beek, Fay Claassen, Peter Erskine and many more. With most of these people he recorded. He made 8 cd’s for the japanese label ‘Keystone Records’, with Hein van de Geyn and Hans van Oosterhout. Last year Karel had a tour in Japan and Korea with this trio.
Karel is perhaps Holland’s best-kept secret. I remember hearing him play in the early eighties, when I just returned from the United States. He was the first pianist of this kind of modern class I had ever heard in Holland. And on what level! Over the years Karel has improved and improved. The lines became more thoughtful, the harmony more precise; the rhythm was always very strong, but became larger, more in the pocket. Yet underneath all these ingredients there was always something more powerful: the sound! Karel’s sound is unique; his touch just seems to reach you right in the centre of where music enters the soul. With impeccable taste Karel will always come up with something fresh, something his own and makes it sound so good.

Pianist from The Netherlands, Karel Boehlee is well-known and very popular in Japan. He was a founding member of the anonymous-sounding European Jazz Trio, which helped ignite the "European jazz boom" in Japan over two decades ago. More recently, Boehlee has been releasing wonderful CDs with his regular trio from the M&I label, roughly at a pace of one album a year, without ever failing to captivate the Japanese fans. Boehlee is also a renowned jazz educator in the Amsterdam Conservatory, where the present recording took place.
His latest release closely follows the successful formula of his recent CDs from M&I: A program of well-known standards, some pop songs (including two Stevie Wonder tunes) and a few originals, performed with impeccable taste and restraint. There are no trail blazing or bombastic gestures aimed at surprising the listener either in arrangements or performance. The keywords here are quiet intensity and subtle interactions. The rhythm section supports and complements Boehlee perfectly. The recorded sound from the woody tone of the bass to the sparkling sounds of brushes delicately striking various cymbals is also excellent. This is a disc that I will go back to and play again and again.

Karel Boehlee - piano
Hein Van de Geyn - bass
Hans van Oosterhoud - drums

Оф.сайт: http://www.karelboehlee.com/