Ineke Vandoorn / Marc van Vugt / Christine Duncan / The Soundmakers – The Soundmakers Project
10.07.2025
More than once our pages have reviewed the works of Dutch musicians Ineke Vandoorn and Marc van Vugt, both together and separately. Our regular readers have had the opportunity to appreciate van Vugt’s subtle, creative guitar playing and Ineke Vandoorne’s vocals, always far from traditional jazz. But I’ve never heard anything like their new, mind-boggling The Soundmakers Project before.
Let’s leave it to Ineke and Marc to tell the story of the project: “On our Canadian tours, we saw Christine Duncan working with her Element Choir and we were blown away. The resulting sound was fantastic, but we realized that this method of working with an improvisational choir in combination with our original compositions was leading to a new context for our music. In January 2024 we invited Christina Duncan to participate in the Soundmakers Project, in which our music is combined with sound canvases created by a group of Dutch soundmakers led by Christina. We performed this program with three different groups of soundmakers in Hauten, Arnhem and Den Bosch. The final concert in Hauten, which involved fifty soundmakers, was recorded for video and audio.”
Characteristically, these fifty (!) performers are not traditional vocalists, but people who use their voices to create certain sounds. Hence the not very familiar term, which also found its way into the name of the project: The Soundmakers Project. Most of the compositions on the album were written by Marc, the lyrics were written by Ineke, and the Soundmakers Choir Improvisation is the brainchild of Christine Duncan. The result is more than impressive. The music of The Soundmakers Project is surprisingly diverse, and a kind word can be said about almost every composition. The starting Hatfield 22 is close to ambient in mood, Dansen is memorable for Ineke’s cool scat, and the aforementioned Soundmakers Choir Improvisation is a real treat for lovers of free-jazz. There are some beautiful lyrical compositions here, like White or La Caresse with Marc’s excellent guitar at the start. The longest piece on the album, the almost twelve-minute The Collar, is a kind of multidimensional avant-garde vocal-instrumental symphony. September 6th will see the release of this unusual album, which is a sin to ignore.
Leonid AUSKERN Jazzquad
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