Angelo Verploegen - A Handful Of Stories (2024)

“It’s not really in my nature to look back. For me, being a musician is mainly about staying in shape, preparing for upcoming projects, and finding an outlet for my inspiration and ideas. So, it’s a constant flow of forward motion.

But… turning 60 last year suddenly led me to look back, to reflect on what I’ve been doing all these years. In this moment of retrospection, I felt the urge to select some of the compositions I’ve written over the past 25 years for various formations and occasions and perform them with a classical jazz quintet lineup.

Now, if I could interest Jared and Jonas Sacks in recording this project for Just Listen Records, we would have a handful of musicians for our fifth (yet another handful!) album together. And things worked out! I feel extremely happy and privileged to have done this with a group of outstanding musicians: saxophonist Nils van Haften, pianist Marc van Roon, bassist Guus Bakker, and drummer Jasper van Hulten, along with the Just Listen crew. All of the (a little over a handful) original compositions presented here tell their own story…”
– Angelo Verploegen