TONY POSTULATES.....
Tony meets the Wizard of TOZ!
I recently went over to Germany to play a couple of shows with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain in Stuttgart and a jazz festival in Bingen, a small town on the Rhine which is very beautiful. It was there that I had the great pleasure of meeting Ton van Bergeyk, who is the guitarist with the Dutch College Swing Band, an extremely fine band who have been playing now for over 50 years.
Ton van Bergeyk is, more than any one else the person who got me interested in playing the ukulele while I was a finger picking guitarist back in the eighties. Commonly referred to on albums as the 'Dutch Wizard' (although not by himself) he had made several finger style guitar albums back in the 1970's, one of which contained the ukulele track 'Anno 1926' which was composed by the Argentine guitarist Oscar Aleman.
It was this track which was the first bit of interesting ukulele music that made me put aside the guitar and go and look for a ukulele in 1990. I seem to remember in those far off days that the only ukuleles you could get were 'Lark' ukuleles from China and very terrible they were too….you also got laughed at a lot if you played the ukulele in those days, but that's another story.
Anyway, I had an old Garrard four speed turntable (78,45,33,16) so I took the LP and slowed it down to 16 to figure out what the hell he was doing and to tab it out. I found an interesting programme about him by Stefan Grossman here the song Anno 1926 is about 7 minutes in and it still blows me away!
Anyway, it was a great pleasure to meet the guy and while I don't expect musicians to be 'nice guys' or whatever (was Wagner a 'nice guy', was Benny Goodman a 'nice guy') he most certainly was (as well as extremely humble and modest - qualities deeply incomprehensible to Tony Penultimate)!
He told me that he's very happy to sit at the back of the Dutch College Swing Band and comp away playing the occasional solo which is pretty mind blowing considering his talents, but he did say he'd uploaded some videos of himself playing the guitar and the ukulele here (but he left out his head!).
So go look and marvel!
