Biography
Tenor-and soprano-saxophonist Dick de Graaf debuted 1986 with his acclaimed LP ‘Hot, hazy and humid’ (Limetree Records). Before he had won the Dutch Jazz Competition in 1981and he had presented himself as a tasteful soloist in the Amstel Octet and John Clayton’s Tribute Big Band, Jeff Reynold’s Maiden Voyage Big Band and in the Frank Grasso Big Band.
Dick has performed at many national and international jazzstages ever since. He played with a.o. Chet Baker, Misha Mengelberg, Jasper van ’t Hof, Kenny Weeler, Tom Harrell, Benny Golson, Billy Hart, Toumani Diabaté and Erkan Ogur and toured festivals and clubs in Europe, South and West Africa, the USA, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, USA and Canada.
As a bandleader, composer, arranger and self-managing artist dedicated to jazz – in his definition “a host of elements from all kinds of music that surrounds us”- Dick de Graaf recorded more than 20 CD’s that received positive response by both public and press.
His Challenge Records Awarded CD’s ‘Sailing’ and ‘New York Straight Ahead’ got enthusiast critics in the important music magazine Down Beat.
His project ‘The Burning of the Midnight Lamp: Dick de Graaf plays Jimi Hendrix’ appeared to be very succesful. With his Septet he has been drawing full houses in Holland, Germany, Austria, Ireland and Finland.
Another example of his broad musical horizon is the project he recorded in Mali with a group of young musicians from Bamako: the CD ‘Djigui: les Sofas de Bamako featuring Dick de Graaf’. June 2000 this group made his European debut during the Festival Mundial 2000 in Tilburg. On his hybrid superaudio CD ‘Four Winds’ he continues his tracking of multicultural music. On this CD a sextet with a.o. Inga Juuso (Samiland), Moussa Diallo and Mamadou Diabaté (Mali) play a handful of Dick’s originals.
2001 Dick released his internationally acclaimed album SOUND ROOTS Dick de Graaf meets Peter Martin, Roland Guerin and Adonis Rose Trio in New Orleans. To promote this record he started his European SOUNDROOTS quartet and toured Europe, Indonesia and Singapore.
In june 2003 the CD SCHUBERT IMPRESSIONS FOR JAZZ QUINTET was presented at the Northsea Jazz Festival followed by an international concert tour. Following his Schubert Impressions, Dick presented another jazz-meets-classic project A TOUCH OF BELA in Hungary during the Esztergom Bela Bartok Festival in july 2005. June 2007 he was commissioned to write and play his Bach Reflections at the famous Bach Feste in Leipzig.
Among his recent projects are Trio Nuevo: Jazz Meets Tango (2006), his acoustic Dick de Graaf Quartet (2007), his powerjazz quartet CRY BABY! (2009), his solo improvisations with Bach’s cello suites (2010) and the brand new project Out Of The Blues: Celebrating the Music Of Oliver Nelson. Dick is artistic director of the small bigband Clazz Ensemble and musical director of Italian pianist Andrea Pozza’s European Quintet (I, GB,NL).
Dick de Graaf is a part-time teacher of saxophone and ensembles at the jazz department of the Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. September 2010 he entered the DocArtes programme in Ghent, preparing a PhD thesis “Fourth Stream Ahead: towards new harmonic concepts in jazz”. He is an endorser and international clinician for Rico Reeds.