After have played sold out theatre halls with their idiosyncratic drum music the artistic leaders Mies Wilbrink and Willem van Kruijsdijk decided it was about time for a side project. They wrote wind instrument music to go with the drums and so a new show called “Beats ’N Brass” came into being. The response was so enthusiastic and overwhelming that they decided to release an album of it. In the beginning years of the band there had also been a tour with “De Vier Winden”, also wind musicians and of course there was the collaboration with Adrian Belew, the guitar celebrity and with ‘Last Poet’ Umar Bin Hassan, but now it is a matter of a newly written work. The result got the significant title “Lip Service”, an eclectic whole with all sorts of influences from deep within the African continent to New Orleans and from Latin to Raï, a journey between the dessert, the jungle and the club in the big city. Yet it’s still typically Van Kampen, an always quirky approach of what rhythm is and does. complemented now in the same quirky way with catching wind music: a bit strange, but very nice….
The tireless percussionists Johan Boere, Olaf Fase, Boudine van Slobbe and Emile Cleuver ( who replaces the pregnant Clara de Mik here) of course supported marvelously by the keyboards, drums, loops and bass of Robin van Vliet, are being complemented here in a superb way with three young Flemish players of wind instruments: Stien Carlier (sax) Daniël Vanderhoydonks (trumpet and flugelhorn) and Alex Loiacono (trombone) who also wrote the wind score. The enthusiasm radiates from the record, the atmosphere blows you over, in brief a wonderful album for if you were there and for the real Slagerij Van Kampen fan, but surely also for anyone who really loves a nice piece of music!
