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Marcel Worms

On Tuesday April 6th Marcel Worms will premiere my piece for piano solo, nieuwBlauw, in theater Kikker in Utrecht. It was written on request by Marcel for the latest edition of his blues project. Most of the eighteen pieces on the program are premieres, including works by Roderik de Man, Joey Roukens and Claudia Rumondor.

For this project Marcel asks the composers to write a new work for piano solo that is somehow related to the blues. I must say, at first I had some difficulty to find the right angle to approach the concept: so much music has already been written in this style, crossovers with all sorts of styles have already been made, chord progressions and licks have been turned inside out and upside down. So I went looking for the earliest blues recordings I could find and then I found the work Alan Lomax had done. His field recordings of hollers and prison songs, the so called chaing-gang songs, immediately caught my attention. Funny enough, the almost synchronous hits of axes and hammers influenced my piece as much as the sung parts in between them.