One of the Belgian jazz records I cherish the most is the self-titled album by long forgotten vibraphone player Hein Huysmans. Recorded in the middle of the seventies with a quintet and a septet, this jazz funk album is definitely one of the more adventurous Belgian records. That’s why I found it weird that hardly any information on the record or the artist is available. Curious as I am, one beautiful day in fall I jumped in my car for a long ride to meet mister Huysmans and to have him tell me his story.

As we sit in the cozy rehearsal room of his home in one of the more rural areas of Belgium, close to the Dutch border, Hein Huysmans narrates about how he started playing the harmonica with his uncles at the age of three, about how he started studying the accordion four years later and how he started playing in commercial orchestras really quickly. “I played accordion in an orchestra, and one day they needed a vibraphone player. I liked the instrument, so I bought one and started playing. After a few weeks, I already took it to concerts.” Huysmans learned to play his instrument the hard way. “I never took any lessons. I just played and listened a lot. Milt Jackson, Gary Burton… Lionel Hampton too, but that was old. I saw him once, in Antwerp. It was great, but when I saw him on television later on, I noticed that he had studied parts of the solos, groups of notes. I never really liked that.”

The story of Hein Huysmans is that of a musician who had to choose between the struggles of playing his own, commercially less successful, music, or making a living out of playing music he liked less. “I was semi-professional back then, I played eight, maybe ten, concerts a month. One day, the manager of Marc Dex (One of the most popular singers in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, those days, ed.) asked me to join his orchestra. They had at least 25 shows every month; I could have made a living out of that. But I refused, I didn’t want to play that crap.” Instead, Huysmans opened his own music instruments store and continued to play in less known groups, focusing more and more on the jazz music he loved so much.

A Dutch bass player

By 1973, he had succeeded in forming his own jazz quintet. “It was difficult finding good jazz musicians over here,” Huysmans recalls. And indeed, if you’d make a map of the history of Belgian jazz, none of the big names are located anywhere near Huysmans’s hometown. Although Belgium gave birth to European jazz greats such as Bobby Jaspar, René Thomas, Jacques Pelzer, Francy Boland and Sadi, most of the jazz scene was located in Liège or Brussels.

The country’s northern part, Flanders, is mostly known for its traditional New Orleans-style groups or big bands. It was in one of those bands, the Yellow City Big Band from the city of Geel, that Huysmans met Jan Van Giel, who was the leader and piano player from said big band, and who’d join him in his quintet, together with drummer Frans Pelgrims (who was actually a classical percussion player) and saxophone player Gust Geenen (a friend from the same village). The most difficult though, was to find a likeminded bass player. Huysmans had to go to The Netherlands to find Toon Segers, a professional musician who’d play electric bass on his album a few years later.

Searching for new rhythms

How come they ended up playing a really modern jazz record with Latin and funk influences with a bunch of big band guys? Hein Huysmans answers: “We wanted to add something new to it, other rhythms than the standard ones. It was pretty modern for the time, I really wanted it to be like that.” On stage, the group played their own compositions, such as ‘Night People’ and ‘Marakesh’, both of which are featured on the only album the group ever recorded, standards and own arrangements of other songs. Hein Huysmans shows me an album by Hadley Caliman. “We used to play ‘Kicking On The Inside’ a lot. I really like that theme.”

“The quintet actually stayed together for pretty long,” says Huysmans, “we had a lot of concerts in the Antwerp area, but also in Brussels.” He shows me an old poster of Pol’s Jazz Club, a notorious jazz club in Brussels. It dates from December 1973 and announces ‘Placebo featuring Marc Moulin’ one week and the Hein Huysmans Kwintet the next. Although his album is often described as a Placebo featuring Dave Pike jam, Hein knows Marc Moulin by name, but has never heard of his mythical band Placebo.

Since Hein Huysmans had a good feeling about his quintet, somewhere in ’75 or ’76 – He doesn’t remember precisely and the sleeve doesn’t mention any date – he decided to take a shot at recording an album. The recording of the album almost came in danger when Huysmans and his buddy and saxophone player Gust Geenen had a biking accident, two days before the recording. “You see those red spots on my face?”, Huysmans asks while pointing to his picture on the cover. “Me and Gust were cycling and I rode into his rear wheel. They took me to the hospital and I staid in bed the entire weekend. And on Monday we recorded the album. I had a light concussion.” Huysmans asked two saxophone players, Eddy House and Eddy De Vos, regulars in the big band circuit, to join in on three of the tracks.

They recorded what, in my opinion, is one of the more adventurous Belgian jazz albums. Whether it are the pulsating funky break beats of ‘Night People’, ‘Marakesh’ and ‘Thinking Of’, the bossa nova tinted theme of ‘The New Time’ or the cool jazz influences in ‘Blues For Paul’, the album has something for everyone.

Local label A. Decap Sound, a label that put out tons of commercial accordion and organ records, agreed to release it. “I had recorded an album for them with accordion songs (as Heintje Huismans, ed.) and I had a good relationship with the people at the company, so they didn’t mind releasing it.” Hein Huysmans doesn’t have a clue about how many copies were ever sold, but he estimates that one thousand were pressed.

“After a while, the fun got out of it. That’s when I said: ‘I quit.’ The group wasn’t really motivated anymore, and we lived far away from each other, so after a while we only rehearsed when we had a concert, and that took the fun out of it,” Huysmans tells when asked about how and why his group quit. Although he doesn’t have his own group anymore and also quit playing with the Yellow City Big Band, Hein Huysmans continues to play the vibraphone and accordion every day.