LET ME SING AND I AM HAPPY

"Even as a little girl I knew I wanted to be a singer" says Greetje Kauffeld, and from the age of six she acted like one.

Meanwhile, she has celebrated her 40th anniversary as a professional musician. In the same year she attained this milestone she was also knighted as RIDDER IN DE ORDE VAN DE NEDERLANDSE LEEUW and awarded the prestigious BIRD AWARD at the NORTH SEA JAZZ FESTIVAL.

In Greetje Kauffeld's youngest years, music was her best companion. She spent her days listening to the radio or playing records by Doris Day and Frank Sinatra. "That's how I learned to sing", she says, "by singing along with them."
Sinatra and Day were good teachers. From the latter Kauffeld learned how to get very close to her listeners and to move them.The Voice taught her how to phrase. Young Greetje was so absorbed in singing their songs that she had already mastered the english language before she finished elementary school. Lyrics became increasingly important to her and they still are. As a 13 year-old, Greetje Kauffeld made her radio debut in a program for young people. She was also performing with the band "Raindrops" in small rooms near her home town.

In a national radio program on the 1st of February 1957, as a soloist with the Dutch big band "The Skymasters", Greetje launched her professional career, which soon became international. It was Werner Muller who invited her to be a guest performer with the "RIAS Big Band" in Berlin.
Subsequently she worked in German tv- and recording-studios with musicians such as Toots Thielemans, Paul Kuhn, Kurt Edelhagen, Sven Asmussen, Erwin Lehn, Siggi Gerhard Swingtett and many others.

A few years later she took the big step to the United States. She worked in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and appeared on the famous coast-to-coast tv show with Joey Bishop with jazz greats like Ray Brown, Herb Ellis and Oscar Costa-Neves.

Back in the Netherlands, she married producer Joop de Roo, who stimulated her further career. He introduced her to jazz giants Stan Getz, Phil Woods, Thad Jones and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, all of whom contributed to Greetje's album "Some other Spring" (1981). Previously, she had recorded with, among others,Jerry van Rooijen/Rob Pronk ("And Let the Music Play") and with an ensemble under her own name ("He was a King Uncrowned - a tribute to Clifford Brown").

In 1986 Greetje Kauffeld formed a special trio with only voice, guitar (Peter Nieuwerf) and tenor-saxophone (Jan Menu). Both this daring combination and the musical results show proof of her willfulness, her mettle and her justifiable self-confidence. The CDs "The Song is You" and "On my Way to You" (with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman exclusively) display her great ability for empathizing with the lyric and her determination to challenge her skills all the way through. "Every song is a story to me", "I experience the lyrics that I sing,creep into them as an actor embraces a new role." This strong identification characterizes her work. The resulting delivery, phrasing and timing, bring about an intimate relationship with her audience and create varying moods of intense emotion, stirring melancholy and pallianting gaiety. Even when she works with a large orchestra she succeeds in involving her audience, including the other musicians, in her renditions.

For the two CDs that followed "European Windows" (1992) and "The Real Thing"(1994), Greetje invited guest soloists to join her trio.
"European Windows", with bass-player, Ruud Ouwehand and drummer, Hans Dekker, is different due to its exclusively European repertoire by composers from Kurt Weill, Michel Legrand and Charlie Chaplin to Paul McCartney and John Lennon. On "The Real Thing", with violinist, Armando and guitarist, Maarten van der Grinten, Greetje sings duets with Humphrey Campbell. In her anniversery year another two albums were released. For "Mons Records" she recorded "Greetje Kauffeld meets Jerry van Rooijen and Jiggs Whigham", while "KOCH World Records" assembled early recordings with The Metropole Orchestra and guest soloists, Stan Getz and Thad Jones.

The "Bird Award" and the Royal Knighthood are as yet the highest, but not the only awards that have been bestowed on Greetje. In 1980 she was proclaimed best soloist at the Euro-Nordring Radio Festival. In 1989 she received the Culture prize of the city Rotterdam: "Het Gouden Hart" (The Rotterdam Golden Heart) In 1992 she was given the most imported Dutch prize in popular music, "De Gouden Notenkraker" (The Golden Nutcracker: nuts and notes are the same word in Dutch). And in 1994 she won the "Duke of Duketown Award", the jazz prize of the city of 's-Hertogenbosch.

In recent years Greetje Kauffeld has appeared at fifteen editions of the North Sea Jazz Festival. In Germany she's working together with various groups, such as The PAUL KUHN Trio, the SIGGI GERHARDT SWINGTETT and Pianist-Singer Dirk Raufeisen. A lot of concerts as well as RADIO and TV appearances were the result of that cooporation over the last years.Besides performing in San Diego, Palm Springs and Los Angeles and touring in Germany, Italy and other European countries. Going strong for more than forty years, Greetje Kauffeld is still a sought after artist. So much so, that she even had to decide to give up teaching at the Hilversum Conservatory of Music. What a shame for the students, but what great news for her audience!

Jan Rensen, music and media publicist