Berry van Berkum

Saxophonist Gijs Hendriks and the organ Het ORGEL 98 (2002), nr. 3, 29-30 [summary]

Jazz musician Gijs Hendriks (1938) was initially not interested in the organ. This changed when he improvised with the organist Jacques Schoenbeck during a jazz festival in Lusserte, France. The result was a series of concerts with Schoenbeck in France and The Netherlands. He then got acquainted with Willem Tanke: Tanke composed, and Hendriks ‘tried to add something significant to it’. In 2001, Hendriks met organist Berry van Berkum, with whom he gave several concerts as well.

In concerts like these, Hendriks finds it important to preserve the swing of jazz, quite a task in large churches with their great reverberation, and to ‘play meditatively’. Hendriks: ‘It is not my aim to punish the audience. I don’t like aggressive music, although I’m happy to play strongly at times. I want to give the audience what it came to the church for, which is, in my opinion, comfort and warmth in the first place.’