Today is a bit of a landmark in the history of our humble label – first time we are presenting a double release 🙂
The music on both albums is written by the young Belgian saxophonist/composer Lennert Baerts (°1996). Baerts is considered one of the greatest talents of the current youngest generation of Belgian (jazz) musicians. After an intensive training as a football player with the youth of Belgian top team KRC Genk with a promising career as a goalkeeper in sight, fate decided to steer him in a completely different direction, and he developed at record speed into a gifted and skilled musician, with studying saxophone with Kurt Van Herck, Ben Sluijs and Frank Vaganée, and composition with Wim Henderickx and Bram van Camp.
The first album, ‘Times Change And So Must We’, is an impressive and genre-defying suite in three parts that Baerts wrote especially for the Muze Jazz Orchestra, here for the occasion in a twelve-piece XL line-up. MJO brings together a group of musicians from the Belgian province of Limburg and the surrounding area and was born within Muze, the cultural center in Heusden-Zolder, also the home town of Baerts.
The second, ‘Channeling The Flood’ is his more mainstream acoustic-sounding jazz quartet Anti-Panopticon, with adventurous and very musical interplay with and by some other great young talents from Belgium and the Netherlands: Floris Kappeyne (NL) on piano, Tijs Klaassen ( NL) on bass, Jesse Dockx (B) on drums.
Both albums provide an intriguing overview of the stylistic richness and some very different aspects of a fascinating young musician in full development, whose dedication, discipline and ambition are quite remarkable.
Order your copies in our webshop or find them in your favorite record store. In case they don’t have them in stock yet, tell the responsible to order them at our distributor Sonic Rendezvous.
You can download digital copies in the iTunes Store (SFR-CD016 & SFR-CD017), and the albums are also available on various streaming services, but please be aware: no better way of supporting independent music/artists than by buying physical copies! Thanks for being aware!
For info on gigs and more, please visit Lennert’s website.
Cheers everybody – we sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the albums as much as we do, and thanks a lot for your interest.
SFR.
