Marc van Vugt
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Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Marc van Vugt is a wonderful award-winning composer and jazz guitarist from the Netherlands. In this episode, you'll be introduced to several beautiful guitars in his collection that are featured in his new solo album, The Lonely Coyote. And you'll also get to hear stories from his travels and his perspectives about different musical scenes, composing, and some of the biggest challenges now for musicians worldwide.
This is available as both a podcast and video. See the link in the description along with a link to Marc's work and timestamps. Please follow and review this podcast to help new listeners discover Marc van Vugt and all the incredible musicians featured in this unique series.
Hi, Marc. Thanks for joining me.
Marc van Vugt:
Hi, Leah. Thanks for asking me.
Leah Roseman:
So I checked with you the pronunciation of your name. I think I can approximate it, van Vugt.
Marc van Vugt:
That's very good. Yeah, it's a difficult name but yeah, you're doing well.
Leah Roseman:
And you have a very long and wonderful partnership with the singer Ineke Vandoorn.
Marc van Vugt:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And for those people who are fans of your duo and other projects you've done together, they'll be happy to hear that she'll be featured on season three coming up of the podcast.
Marc van Vugt:
Okay. Cool.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Thank you so much for this beautiful recording of Simiane which we're going to play now. Can you talk a little bit about that song, and the guitar that it's played on?
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. The song I wrote about five years ago when I was staying in the South of France. That's what we do quite often. It's not specifically France, but we go somewhere where we can stay for a couple of weeks to write, work on music, work on new music. And at that moment, we were staying in the South of France about 40 kilometers down the Mont Ventoux, which is very famous mountain in France. And we were staying there in a house, and I have been writing quite a lot of music. And I dedicated one of the pieces to that little town. It's a gorgeous little town. It's the proverbial Provence, the French Provence. When you're there at the right time of the year, it's full of lavender. It's just a beautiful place.
Leah Roseman:
You've been composing music almost since soon as you started playing it, strikes me. And I was curious, the titles come to you after you've written the music sometimes or are you often inspired by something to write specific music?
Marc van Vugt:
I'm an incredible fast writer, and I'm much slower in words. So, most of the time I write and then I think about what inspired me, and then I'll work from that. It's hardly ever the other way around.
I write a lot of songs in combination with Ineke, my partner in crime and in life. She writes the lyrics most of the time, and I write the music, but we work always music first. So, that's just how I work.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So Simiane has a beautiful Latin groove, bossa nova.? I don't know if I'm correct about that, but a couple of your tunes on the album definitely, that we're going to talk about have that. And you go back way to the beginning of your musical career with Brazilian music.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And how did you get influenced by that music living in the Netherlands?
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, it's a bit strange, actually. Especially at that time, because there was a period when I was about 16 or 17 for about, I think three or four years, I only listened to Latin American music. I somehow got hold of some albums and was totally crazy about it, and that's what I listened to. And it was especially strange because at that time, it was very difficult to get that music. But I was so mesmerized, but what was happening in that music that I just found out ways to find that music. I started studying in Utrecht. Before that I grew up in a small village in the south of the Netherlands, then I went up to Utrecht to study there.
And they had a library, and that library had a music department. And they had an incredible collection of Latin music, and specifically Brazilian music. More specifically, I was totally knocked out by the music of Egberto Gismonti, and specifically the album Sol do Meio Dia. That was a life-changer for me. When I heard that album, it's with Collin Walcott on percussion, Egberto playing a guitar, and Ralph Towner playing guitar, and Jan Garbarek on saxophone. It still is, I think an incredible album.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I went and listened to it when I read that that album had influenced you.
Marc van Vugt:
Okay. Wow.
Leah Roseman:
I think you're the third or fourth guest who said how much his music has influenced them. Obviously, just-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Such a big inspiration.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And Utrecht, I was there on tour with my orchestra and they have an amazing music museum of musical instruments.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. It's called Museum for Speelklok tot Pierement, which means... Well, it's a automated music box museum. It's actually difficult to translate the title of the museum. Maybe you know it better than I do. But yeah, they have a huge collection of music boxes and organs and player pianos. I think they even have a player string quartet.
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Marc van Vugt
Do they? Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That was crazy.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. That's the one I would like to have. Would be great.
Leah Roseman:
Actually, I really enjoy your string writing.
Marc van Vugt:
Oh, thank you.
Leah Roseman:
And we're going on these tangents, we have to come back to your album in a minute. But since we went there, that project in Paris, Different Shades of Gray.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Can you speak to that? That seemed really interesting to me.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. In 2001, end of 2001, and then for two years we had a chance to stay in a house in Paris. It's a house built by Theo van Doesburg. Theo van Doesburg was one of the founders of the movement, Art Movement: De Stijl with Piet Mondrian and Rietveld, and those people. He was the brain behind the whole art movement. And for himself, he was a multiple disciplinary artist. He painted, he created color schemes, he was a graphic designer, and he was also an architect and he designed a house for himself, a studio house. So with an atelier and things like that. And he was very inspired by Le Corbusier, so he built that house for him, and it was in a small village right next to Paris which now has become one of the... Well, how do you call that?
Suburbs of Paris, it's called Meudon. And he built that house in about 1927. They started building, 29 it was finished and he died three months later. So he hardly lived there. But his wife, Nelly van Doesburg lived there until 85, and after that they decided to put it... Well, she actually arranged that it was put into a foundation that would lend it to artists, and we stayed there for two years. So, for two years we were actually living in an art piece because... I mean, you have to compare them to Mondrian, and at that time when we were there, the Dutch government was buying Victory Boogie-Woogie, which is one of the biggest, the most important art pieces of Mondrian. And they bought it at that time for about €80 million or something like that. It was incredible amount of money, and we were staying in a house that was comparable to the Victory Boogie-Woogie, not the same but... You get the idea. You're living in an art piece.
And also, while she was still living there, Nelly van Doesburg, who was an artist herself, invited a lot of artists to promote the Stijl Movement and that she invited artists and other important people in art to come to the house. So in that house, Marcel Duchamp was there, Moholy-Nagy, the photographer was there, but also Monk, Thelonious Monk stayed there. He actually had a relation with her. There's a piece dedicated to her, Art School for Nelly. It's written by Monk and it's dedicated to Nelly van Doesburg. And all these stories it influences you, I had to do something with it staying there and being in that thing with such a history, and at the same time having Paris in the back, that huge city where so much goes on all the time.
Especially at that time, Paris was jazz central for the world. There were so many concerts every weekend. There were weekends that there were 200 jazz concerts only in the area of Paris.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Marc van Vugt:
It's just incredible, just incredible. So I needed to do something about it. So I wrote a suite, which is called the Vandoesburg Suite, the piece you were referring to, in writing you were referring to as part of that suite. So it's a suite that I wrote for my jazz-improv-chamber orchestra Big Bizar Habit, and it's a chamber orchestra. I wanted to combine my experience with classical chamber orchestras for which I wrote when I... Well, a long time ago. And I wanted to combine that with my jazz view, and so it's an ensemble made up of a string quartet with players from classical world music and jazz and improvised music, the string quartet and horn section, trumpets, reeds and trombone then a rhythm section we would have in the jazz ensembles with drums, double bass, piano, guitar, and, let's see here.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
That's excellent. Excellent music.
Marc van Vugt:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
There's so much to talk about. But let's circle back to your album, which is just released The Lonely Coyote.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Congratulations. It's really-
Marc van Vugt:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Marc van Vugt:
Bang. Bang.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marc van Vugt:
It's like, I don't care how you would pronounce it. It's just sound, because... Thank you by the way for the remarks. That's very kind. But Bengg, it reflects the sounds when you pick up a 12 string guitar and you just hit it, an explosion bang.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
So, it could have been graphically represented by something coming out of a Batman comic or something, pow, bang, that-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So this is such an unusual album because you literally used a different acoustic guitar for each track.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah. Some tracks have the same guitar-
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marc van Vugt:
... But almost... Yeah, almost. Yeah, absolutely. I'm mesmerized by string sounds. String sounds in general. Isn't limited to guitar, but guitar is my thing. I do know exactly what the moment that I realized that this was so important to me. When I was about 12 years old, I already was playing a bit of guitar, but then I heard the intro to A Hard Day's Night by the Beatles, and there's this clang sound, very first chords there. When I heard that sound, I was just mesmerized. I just disappeared in the sound and I thought, "Wow." Then I knew this is what I wanted to do ever since I've been playing guitar, and I always remember that drive, it's always there. It's always part of my inspiration.
Leah Roseman:
So this collection of guitars, do you own all of them or did you borrow some of them for the recording?
Marc van Vugt:
No, these are the guitars that I own. I'm lucky to have found these guitars. For a guitar players it's not unusual to have quite a few different instruments because it's part of how we play, and also it's more affordable than-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
... We would be doing that as a violin player. I think my whole collection doesn't even touch the price of a good violin, even though they're incredible instruments but the difference is huge. Yeah. So it's easy. Yeah. And I collected them... Well during the time that I played, and sometimes I just run into something and then I realized that's the instrument that I need and then I'll try to get something like that.
Leah Roseman:
You've toured many, many places in the world. When you're touring, is there preferred guitar that you take?
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, that's a whole different thing. I would like to take more, but it's become so difficult to bring instruments touring. Up to about eight years ago, I would in general bring my 11 archtop guitar most of the time if I would be touring, because it's an acoustic instrument and it's also an electric instrument. And I can do both, because I'm actually both. This album is The Lonely Coyote is only acoustic guitar. But a big part of what I do is playing electric guitar, actually. So this album is also a really a side step for me. This is the first time that I did an album purely on acoustic guitar.
So usually, I bring the 11, it's an old jazz guitar archtop, it's from the 60s and it's a beautiful instrument acoustically, and it's an instrument that you can amplify more easily. But nowadays, it's almost impossible to bring a guitar like that. You'll have to at least arrange an extra seat in an airplane if you're traveling. So, I'm mostly traveling with an electric guitar that can take apart, take off the neck and the body. I'll bring in the cabin and that goes into my checked luggage.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marc van Vugt:
I'm running the risk that if I lose my baggage that I'm in trouble, but that's how I travel nowadays. And it works... Until now, it works really good.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, interesting. I didn't know that even existed as a design feature.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Well actually, I designed it myself but I had somebody else create the parts for it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Are other guitarists using that now, that idea or the same plan for the guitar to come apart?
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, there's tons of examples for that are even better solutions. Actually, a friend of mine who's a... luthier designed something that you could really collapse and then bring it back straight away in one piece. This is-
Leah Roseman:
Like an umbrella.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Disassembled in 10 minutes, in five minutes and it's assembles, and in tune in 10 minutes. So it goes really fast. So it works, works for me.
Leah Roseman:
Can you show us the guitars you have at hand?
Marc van Vugt:
This is my baritone guitar. It's loud and baritone. It's very different from a regular guitar which is tuned with a lowest note being E, and this guitar is tuned down a fourth, so it starts on that B. So it's very low. It's got a low resonating sound. You want to see more?
Leah Roseman:
Of course, yes.
Marc van Vugt:
Okay. Well, the next guitar is my Martin 000-21 from 1946. It's a guitar that's very dear to me. I always wanted a Martin guitar, and here they were almost impossible to find. So, when we were touring for concerts in the US and Canada, in end of the 90s, I was looking for one and we ended up somewhere in New York at the Mandolin Brothers, a huge guitar store, and they had a couple hanging there. And this one was hanging on the wall, and I picked it up, played a chord, and Ineke turned around and said to me, "That's the one you got to buy." This is from Sunnyside Up.
Yeah, it just has a beautiful sound. So that's the Martin. I was just talking about the bang, and the-
Marc van Vugt:
... Incredible sound. Well, here's the guitar. This is another piece of history for me. It's a 12 string guitar. I used to have a 12 string guitar somewhere in the 80s, it was hand build, was a very special instrument. I got it because the instrument I had had a warp neck and I got to know this builder called Yado Schlaakma, who's actually a very famous classical guitar builder and he lived near me. I was a young kid, I was about 17 at that time, I think. And I had this guitar with a problem. So I went up to him and he said, "I can't repair that guitar, it's not worth it. But you know what? I'll take the guitar and you buy for a..." I don't know, it was just very cheap. I could buy the 12 string guitar.
So I had that for years, but it got broken at a certain moment, and I lost it somehow. So I've been looking for a 12 string ever since. And a couple of years ago, I saw one for sale and that was this one, it's from the 70s. And this is a Guild F-512 and that's the 12 string guitar. If you want a 12 string guitar, that's the one you want to have as specifically from this period. And there was this guitar player who was selling it, and at the beginning he didn't want to sell it because he got so many offers that were way beyond what I could pay. Then his girlfriends said to him, "You know what? You should sell it to that guy because he plays so much better than you do. And the instrument will be at the right place." And so he sold it for a very nice price, and I've been playing it ever since. For me, it's important because it's the instrument also that Ralph Towner who's one inspirations uses on one of his recordings.
And it just sustains forever. And that's really special because that is something you don't have usually on a guitar.
Leah Roseman:
Do you play with nails or just picking with your hands? What's your technique like?
Marc van Vugt:
I'm going back and forth with it. I'm not a classical player. I'm not trained as a classical a player. I'm a jazz... I don't know, jazz player is how I view it. But I've always played acoustic guitar. I do play with my fingers and I'm always going back and forth with either using my nails or not using them. My nails are not very strong, so I keep losing them. I can do something about it, I know. But a lot of times I just don't want the sound of the nails. So I just want the sound of the fingers, so it's a mixture. But I'm playing a lot of hybrids stuff where I use a plectrum and pick, and combine it with these two fingers.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marc van Vugt:
But then I'm limited to three notes. So I'll switch whenever I want to four notes at the same time. So it's a constant change, and it depends on the instrument as well. On the electric guitar, I might use a plectrum more often. On nylon string, I will play more with my fingers, but I'm not really fast with my fingers. So then I do use a plectrum.
Leah Roseman:
On the album, I noticed you had prepared zither as one of the instruments.
New Speaker:
Yeah. You asked about the harp zither. It's a bit of strange story. And as I said, I'm crazy about stringed instruments and at a certain point I started collecting all these weird zither harp like instruments just to make sounds with them. Actually I wanted to play percussion with them. I used to play percussion quite a bit when I was a kid, and I thought I could do something with stringed instruments. It never worked out. But nevertheless, I did have these crazy harps, and this one was the most craziest one.
I found it, it was this one. I found it somewhere in a home shop in Utrecht. I think somebody made it by hand. It's actually terribly made, and it's a strange thing, but it works really well if you tune it a bit strangely and you do crazy stuff with it. For instance, it's not tuned right now, so you can do crazy sounds with it. But I also prepared it. So for instance, I have this little thing here and you can just tune it to certain overtone or... And then, it resonates and things like that. That I used on the very first piece that I tune part of it. You get these? koto-like sounds.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
New Speaker:
But it's a hell of a job to tune it. I did it for the recording, but I don't know whether I'm going to be using that live. It's going to be very complicated.
Leah Roseman:
It was very effective the way you used it. I really enjoyed that.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. I think it turned out really well. But it was quite a job to get it to sound right. Yeah. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
So Marc, before you put it away, just for those-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Marc van Vugt:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Let's just describe, so it's a large triangular wooden instrument with how many strings? Like what, 40? Like a lot.
Marc van Vugt:
I think it's about 20 strings or something. And it's a big triangle, yes. And the strings are grouped in three groups. But it doesn't make sense. I never realized... I never understood why it was made like this. The reason why I chose it is just because I could tune it in this crazy tunings and get these koto-like sounds and prepared sounds, and these kind of things it seems. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
It reminds me of two things. I was thinking a hammered dulcimer. It's similar, right? They just use hammers.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah. There's an Indian instrument that is hammered also like this. There's an instrument, we call it hakkebord I don't know what the English word would be for it. And there's a cimbalom which is used quite a bit in gypsy music, and it's more like a piano laid flat and then they use sticks to hammer the strings. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Years ago... Sorry, continue.
Marc van Vugt:
Oh no, it's a bit like that. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Years ago, somebody I knew... Like I wanted to play the guitar, but my hands are extremely small and I just gave up. Although, somebody else I know said, "Oh, you could just get a much smaller guitar," which I guess I could do. But anyway, I never pursued it and then someone said, "Oh, you should try the autoharp, it would be great for you." They lent me their autoharp, which I found very awkward. It's not an instrument we see. I think it was used in that comedic movie with Catherine O'Hara about the... You know what I'm talking about, with Eugene Levy.
Something about of... Anyway, I can't remember the name of it. She plays the autoharp. It was really funny.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, the autoharp is actually used in folk music quite a bit.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
In the 60s, 70s when they had-
... What do they called? The second folk wave or something. They used to use that quite a bit. I think I have one, but a very old one, and it's hardly playable. It's actually a series of strings and you just push a bar on top of the strings and then it'll mute the strings that you don't want to use, in that way you can form a chord in that way. Yeah, it's something that Joni Mitchell could have used on some of her songs. It's sort of instrument. Isn't it Becca Stevens that she used it on one of her songs? You see it now and then. Yeah, but it's a strange instrument. It's a different thing. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Marc, that's a sign of a serious collector when you say, I think I have one.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Well no, it's... Yeah. Well, I'm not that big of a collector. In general, we have a rule. One thing goes in, one thing goes out. And-
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to talk a little bit more about your album, more of the songs and the inspirations?
Marc van Vugt:
Okay. Yeah. Okay. The Lonely Coyote, the album is a collection of 13 compositions, and it's actually the first part of a whole series of about 23 pieces for solo guitar and duet. And I recorded them about a year ago. I had my own home recording studio. Actually, the room where we're in now is how I recorded it, just set up. I set up two mics, learned how to do it really well and recorded the pieces here in my own room, my own workspace. The pieces are different from when they originated. These are the pieces that I wrote and some of them I later a adapted them for another ensemble, for an orchestra or for... There's lyrics to some of them. And this is the original, and I wanted to record these pieces as they were intended in the first place.
Well, I do write a lot of pieces that are intended to be played by or sung by somebody or played by a certain lineup. But some of the music I just write because it's for guitar, and these were intended to just originally for guitar. So the inspiration of them varies. For instance, the first piece Bengggg really was just inspired by the 12 string guitar, and how can I do justice to the 12th string and write something that is the proverbial 12th string thing. And one of the things that 12th string guitar in pop music, folk music is mostly used for is a rhythm. And it's a thing that creates a lot of drive, a lot of groove, and I wanted to write something, but at the same time do something with sounds that would pay tribute to two of my 12th string heroes.
One is Ralph Towner, the other one's Leo Kottke, Kottke. Leo Kottke was one of the... Do you know him by the way?
Leah Roseman:
No.
Marc van Vugt:
No. Okay. He is the 12 string guitar player from the 70s, 80s. There was a huge influence on the folk movement at that time and he's actually still playing, and he did a lot of beautiful music on the 12th string guitar. So he was a trend setter, as was was Ralph Towner. Ralph Towner was more in the jazz area, so I wanted to write something that would fit them. And the piece also has this little figure that I think in Indian music they called tihai or something that's like a repetitive little figure that extends more and more and more. The second piece on the album, I'm not going to talk about all the pieces, but... I mean, it's 13 so it's going to be too much probably.
But the second piece is called The Lonely Coyote. And that was written in, I think... Well, we were in San Diego at a house of friends of ours, and we were staying there for about six weeks to work on our music. And they live outside of San Diego in the mountains close to the Mexican border. It's in the desert, beginning of the desert there and they had this an airstream, a trailer where we could stay next to their house. So we had our private home and they had a sea container, you call it sea container?
Leah Roseman:
Shipping container.
Marc van Vugt:
Shipping container, yeah. They had one there and that was my workspace. You could open the doors and a... It's San Diego, so the temperature is always great. So I was working there, and in between my working shifts, I would go out and look out on the hill, look at the nature, and you would hear the coyotes always, they were always there.They were trying to lure the ducks of our friends to come out. They would try to catch them. And one day I walked out and I... There it was in the field, just that one coyote looking at me. And it reflected exactly how I feel when I'm working, I'm in my own little world, lonely in that little world of music, finding your way, writing your music but at the same time lost in your own music.
When I'm writing, I sometimes feel as if I'm in that world, that little world of music and you're just trying to find your way in there. And that coyote reflected that. So, the atmosphere of that piece is very inspired by that. Relating back to your first question, when you said, "What does inspire you in writing?" Well, that really was. And I wrote it originally as a guitar duet. I wrote it actually in tribute to Alberto Gismonti at that time. We were talking with him about doing a joint concert here in the Netherlands, which we never managed to realize, but that was one of the pieces that intended to for that. Who knows? Whatever happens, maybe we still get a chance.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Okay, good.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious Marc about your... I'm always asking people these questions because it's interesting to me in terms of being in a state of flow. So because you're-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
... An improviser, I know you're often in that state. And as a composer, but they're very different things in the sense that when you're... Maybe you can just speak to that. How is it different for you from just improvising to composing?
Marc van Vugt:
There's a lot of similarity. To me, composing is a lot about improvising because it's... In general to me, composing is about that little bit of that is inspiration, which is very often just that tiny bit of what the piece in the end is. And most of what composing is what happens when you start fooling around, playing around with that little bit of inspiration. You hear that little thing in your head or you play something on your instrument and you think, "Wow, this is great." Then you start fooling around with it, and you start creating material rising from that. So, that's why they very often say, composing is 5% inspiration and 95% transpiration, which it's true. Most of the time it's just work. You start fooling around, you play with materials. I always feel very connected to visual artists. For instance, if you're working with clay, you take this little piece of clay and you just start molding it, and then it becomes something and it changes, and you get inspired by the change.
Okay, that's the next inspiration. You start fooling around, and then you keep building. And in composing, to me it happens the same way. It's always there's something happening. I like a track playing around with it. I like that too, and then you build from there. I write down a lot of these little fragments, and they become a pile of notes on paper or in the computer, whatever. Sometimes it's just recorded this way I collect material. I always call that, a collecting phase. And then I start looking for, what do they have in common and how can I combine them? How can I turn that into something that is coherent? And I know they belong together because I say so.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
I'm the composer, I'm the artist. I can say this. But also, it's just because with time they are connected. And I think, by now I can connect anything that happens somehow within a certain timeframe.
Actually, even if it's not in that same timeframe, by now I can connect almost anything. I mean, that's our freedom as an artist, we are allowed to make that decision. It's up to us. And I grew up as a composer in the 80s and I had my schooling at the conservatory here in Utrecht, both as a classical composer and a pop and jazz composer. And classical composition at that time was contemporary music composition, and was very much influenced by all these things that were going on in the 80s. Serial music still was there and all these variations, modern variations of serial music. A lot of music at that time was pretty rigid, very like, it should be like this, if you do that, then you should be doing that because if not, then you're not true to your own material. And luckily enough, we're free from that rigidity. Rigidity, you say that?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
We can playfully go with what we like. At the same time, I'm very pleased that I was trained at that time because it's also nice to sometimes just restrict yourself and follow a rule. So sometimes I just set out a rule and I say, "Okay, it's going to be this material and I don't want to use any other material." So limit yourself to that. So it all works to me. The most important thing to me still is that I feel connected to it my connection still goes back to that one chord of A Hard Day's Night.
Leah Roseman:
Can you play it for us?
Marc van Vugt:
I can't play it because it's two chords on top of each other on two guitars. So you can never play it. That sound create that sound of one guitar.
Leah Roseman:
Got it.
Marc van Vugt:
But that connection and the inspiration that I got still what a... Is my drive and what is my... How do you say that? My ruler to which I measure the quality of my music or how much I feel connected to the music. It's the same thing. It's the inspiration that that gave to me has to be in the music I write, and I always feel connected. That's flow. Yeah. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Because you often write songs for Ineke.
Marc van Vugt:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Do sometimes the melodies come before the harmony? How does that work for you?
Marc van Vugt:
Very often actually, harmony is in the way I write mostly second, but sometimes... No, it's not always true. It depends. Sometimes I find these chords and I'll hear the melodies straight away, but for me, if I write a song, melody is more important in general than the harmony. But they are both connected. My sense for melody is a bit different than in general, I think in pop music. And a lot of music there, melody moves within the chords. In my music, I write quite a lot of melodies that are moving above the chords, which are embellishments.
So, I will use a nine or a 13 or something like that, or as a melody notes, which makes it a bit far away from the original chord, and you create melodies that are more eerie a bit. I don't know if that's the right word, but they feel floating on top. There's a composer that I actually got to know later in life that has the same way of writing and I feel very connected to him. Kenny Wheeler, you probably know him because he-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
... Was Canadian and then moved to England. And Kenny does that too a lot in his music. He's beautiful writing, incredibly strong and yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Did you meet him when you did the Banff session?
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got to know... Yeah, we went to Banff in 91 and 93, and both times he was there. Actually, for us that was a life changer going to Banff. It totally created a new perspective on life as a musician being there, and getting to know all these incredible musicians and getting to know Kenny was incredible. We stayed in contact after that, and we recorded an album, our first album in 94. "The Question is Me," is with him as a featured guest. And we kept in contact ever since until he passed away about five years ago, I think? Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
When you went there, did you discover that the training North America and jazz is more on the jazz standards to your training in Europe?
Marc van Vugt:
Well, what we saw at that time is specific, I think for also for the time. I mean, we grew up in the 80s regarding our musical studies. So we went to the HKU University for the Arts. So that's Utrecht conservatory. And at that time there, when I entered the school, there was no jazz or pop department. And I actually wanted to study composition, but the composition teacher there was a classical composition teacher called Hans Kox, who was a pretty famous classical composer here in the Netherlands. He said, "Well, you can enter. I'll accept you, but you have to enter as an instrumentalist as well." So I had to study crazy to be accepted for guitar. At that time, I entered to school for electric guitar studying with Eef Albers, who was one of the jazz greats at the moment in the Netherlands. But there was no official jazz department.
So the first two or three years I was just running in between everything. I was studying classical music, I was studying pop and jazz guitar, but there was no department yet. And only in the third year we managed to convince the board that they should create a real department. And then they said, "Well, that's fine, but then you should do it."
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
So I was the first coordinator for that department together with a piano player Bert van der Brink. We were setting up the department. And then, our training was very often that the music that we were playing... In the beginning, jazz music was mostly about... The schooling was mostly about being a musician that was performing already, you would go to the school to meet somebody that was more experienced than you and you would say, "Well, last weekend I played this song and it sounded not so good, what can we do about it?"
And so we would work on that song and I would take it back on stage and see if it worked. If not, I would go back. And that was more of the training, the training for jazz pop music. And yes, we did study standards as well, but not as much because we were mostly focusing on our own music specifically me because I was writing so much. So I was mostly playing my own music. When I came to Banff in 91 it was advertised as modern jazz, and then it was with Steve Coleman teaching and Cassandra Wilson would be teaching there for vocals.
I think Kevin Eubanks was originally advertised to be teaching there. But when we arrived there... So those people were at that time, the headlines for modern jazz music in New York and everywhere. But when we arrived there, everybody was playing standards and we were scared like crazy because that was not our thing. So it was a hard time the first time and the second time I took my revenge because I was prepared. So I knew all the stuff. For two years I studied like crazy. Yeah, yeah. People were more trains from a jazz perspective. Nowadays here it's a mixture so it's not the same as it was when we started out. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to ask you about designing the program at Utrecht because I'd read that you had helped design, and it said the department for jazz and improvised music which I found interesting that that was in the title.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the Netherlands has a huge tradition of what they called, free improvised music. In Europe, I think the Netherlands were... In the 80s were looked upon as the place where free improvised music was happening. We did have quite a few ensembles, like the ICP orchestra with Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg, and the other people that were the... How do you say that? The statues for that or I don't...
Leah Roseman:
Proponents ?
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Something like that. But music was very devised into those that were playing standards and those that would play improvised music or those that would play pop music. And very much in boxes. To us, it was strange. We liked it all. I like free improvised music, I like standards, I like pop music, I like world music, I like classical music. So to me, it was always strange that there was all these strict boxes. Improvise, we said jazz and improvise because jazz music for some people represents standards and improvise music represents free improvised music.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marc van Vugt:
Nowadays, I think it's both. Boundaries are sort of lost. These boxes are most of the time gone. For some people they are not. But in general, I think in the world scene we get all these mixtures, and I love that. I think it should be like that. And what you see now at the schools is that a lot of young players grow up and don't think in these boxes totally at all.
Whether it's classical or improvised or jazz or... You have to learn your instrument from a certain perspective and you need to dive into something for a period just to become good at the instrument. It'll help you to learn the instrument from a certain perspective. And after that, I mean, you're free to do whatever you think you can be doing. And of course, you can't play everything. Like I said, that was something that was strange to me is that some people would always say that they were able to play everything. I never believed that, I mean, even if you're trained as a classical player, you can't play every classical music.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
And if you're trained as a jazz player, you are bound to be specialized into for certain things, and I think that's good. That's okay.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I mean, I would say that most humans can only be excel, let's say in a more narrow range, but it doesn't mean they can't play other music badly.
Marc van Vugt:
No, no. And I think that's fine, that's fine.
Leah Roseman:
Yep.
Marc van Vugt:
It's also fine to explore other music than the stuff that you're really good at. Well, you have to be cautious because certain things you can better have people played because they're really great at it. I won't play classical guitar pieces because that's a very different world. It's also a different world in how you approach that instrument and how you form tone and how you... That's a totally different thing. So yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I shouldn't have used the word badly, I was just doing that ironically from a perspective.
Marc van Vugt:
No, no, no, I understand. I totally understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, you were saying when you grew up in the small town, you had very limited resources in terms of the type of music you're able to hear.
Marc van Vugt:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
But that is good because now, I think people are overwhelmed. You can access everything but maybe people don't focus in enough.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, that's true. That's one of the biggest challenges I think for musicians growing up now is that there is so much available that it becomes too much and then there's no choice made for you. So you have to deliberately make your choice, which is not easy, and combine that with the whole social media thing. I mean, social media for a musician now gives you a perspective as if everything is only possible when you're the greatest and the best in the world. And that's not a good mirror. I grew up in a time when I would go out to the town near to my village, 10 kilometers away from there. I would drive there on my bike to go out to my... On Friday night, and we would visit the local jazz club and there were musicians playing there that would play there more often because that's how it went.
And you would see them play and our mirror at that time was them, the local heroes. Those that would play the music that you liked or at least you went out to listen to. But they were doing it also in that world. It was that world that they were playing there, they were doing their thing in that world. So they were a real image for you because it was a real image.
Nowadays if your mirror is that incredible player that lives, I don't know, somewhere... Well, in the States looking at it from Europe. And it's incredible to see them play, but their world is very different from ours, and is very different from when you grow up in a small town here. So, somehow that reflecting yourself to or relating yourself to the local heroes got lost. I think that's a loss, that's a loss. And it's something we see a lot with young students studying at conservatories that they hardly go to concepts of their own teachers because they can see whatever incredible name on YouTube. So it's a different thing. There's a lot of good things about it because they can see it, it's available, but it brings other problems as well.
Leah Roseman:
I remember years ago, I was preparing a violin piano recital and I was telling my students and the parents of my students to come, and more than encouraging, I expect you to come. It's not something I do very often because I'm an orchestral player. And I remember one of the dads being a bit bemused like, "This is important to you that they come." I was like, "Yes, they should hear their teacher actually perform." But I've heard this many times that-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
I think it's a problem from this time, this timeframe. And I'm very curious how this will evolve because it's really strange. The good thing is... For instance, in a project I did at the HKU a couple of years ago, I had a guy coming in from the Nepal. And I asked him because I was curious, he studied guitar and I asked him, "Why did you come here, first of all?" He said, "Well, there's nothing at that time in Nepal to learn about guitar, because it's a non-traditional instrument. There's no guitar teachers and there's no hardly any scene where I can play with other musicians." I said, "But then, how did you learn it?" And he said "YouTube." Before he did his audition for the conservatory, the only teaching he had was YouTube, learning it from YouTube. I mean, that's the good thing about it. I mean, that's just incredible.
Leah Roseman:
I was just thinking about your travels. You did a tour in Indonesia many years ago.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And I saw, I think a photo of you collaborating with local musicians. Did you jam with people like playing traditional instruments? Was it gamelan or-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Actually when we travel, we like to do that a lot to collaborate with local musicians for two reasons or three reasons. One, it's just inspirational to work with other musicians. Two, it's great to connect with the local scene because it'll put your music in a certain perspective, and it might draw another crowd as well. And the other thing is just a cultural exchange, specifically if you go to a country like that, like Indonesia. We've been there a couple of times, three times actually, and the last time was just before COVID in 2020. Yeah, it was just before COVID, now 2019 December. We were there for about three weeks and we collaborated with some gamelan musicians in Yogjakata and also with some jazz players in Jakarta. But the collaboration with the gamelan players was incredible.
It's incredible to do a collaboration like that because you were... Then you have these two jazz musicians that play music that is about harmony and melody, and jazz music is about a lot of changing tonalities and stuff like that. And you collaborate with instruments that are limited by a pentatonic scale that is just one scale and one tuning. That's how you deal with it, if I put it really bluntly. And then you work with musicians that are so aware of what they do that they easily adapt within the complexity of our music, and that's just so incredible.
It's not like we western musicians sometimes like to see our music as being more elaborate or more evolved or something. And then you come in that country and they work from a perspective that traditionally their music is limited, but they just know how to adapt that into your music. And I think that is just incredible just to be aware so much about the limitations that you can just use them in music that is where it's almost impossible to use it. So you can use this note here, but you cannot use that note in the rest of the piece. But exactly on that part you can use it, that awareness is just incredible. And these musicians that we collaborated with in Yogjakata were just magicians in doing that. It's just incredible. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Did you get to try any of those instruments? The gamelan instrument?
Marc van Vugt:
Oh yeah, yeah, but forget it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Just for fun.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, just for fun. But it's a totally different world, it's about rhythm, it's about... And an incredible complexity on rhythm. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And have you ever been to Brazil?
Marc van Vugt:
Yes, I've been to Brazil, but it's a long time ago. 81 I think? I was there for about three months traveling, but I was really young and still very inexperienced as a musician. But we saw a lot of things there, and it was a crazy time at that time because Brazil was very far from the Netherlands. I remember that when we went there, my father said to me, "I don't agree you going there because if something happens, I can't help you. That's too far away." We had to communicate by telegram, and we would send a telegram to our parents. "So we arrived. Stop."
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
Something like that. Yeah. I like to go there. I still have contacts. Actually, I got an invitation two weeks ago when my album... I send out the press releases of my album. I got an invitation to come down for a show there, but we'll have to see if that's going to work out.
Leah Roseman:
Marc van Vugt:
That'd be great. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
No, I was curious because we started the conversation with your early influence with Brazilian music and-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Yep. One of your first ensembles, right? Was a Brazilian band.
Marc van Vugt:
It was a Brazilian band. We used to play Brazilian influenced music.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
When you said you played a lot of percussion before, was it hand percussion or drum set or both?
Marc van Vugt:
No, no. Hand percussion, hand percussion. I played a lot of all kind of things congas, Brazilian pandeiros, stuff like that. I mean, all this stuff like that. Yeah. But that's a long time ago. I'm not very good at it anymore, but it's a... As soon as I started to seriously study guitar, I stepped away from that because you have to focus, you to have focus. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
On that trip in Brazil, were you there during Carnaval?
Marc van Vugt:
No, we were there in our summer. So that's there winter and so different part of the year. But we just did see incredible amounts of music and yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And as a teacher, you coached composition students for many, many years. What was your approach with that?
Marc van Vugt:
Oh, okay. Yeah. I was at school, I was a composition major teacher for about 35 years or something. My approach in general is that I work from the perspective from the student. I have them come up with material and we start talking about what they are doing, what they want to achieve. That's my starting point that I used to create material for them to study, because if they show what they are working on, if they come with their own sketches, then it becomes easy for me to say, "Okay, I see you do this. Maybe start working on that." For instance, if they come up with a song which is very often the case which is why they've written a song. In general, when composition students come, they will come with some chords and they will come with a melody or something like that.Or sometimes just with some chords and they say they have a melody, but then the melody is just the top of the chord.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
Which is not a melody, which is it's the top of the chords. So, that's comprehension. Number one, there's a difference between a melody and the top of your chords. So, it immediately creates the material that they have to work on, in the first case where they don't have that melody is start writing a melody, and then you'd start talking about melody. And what's actually a melody? And when is a melody good and not? And there's this whole series of exercises that I use that'll train somebody to write better melodies. Some of those rules go back to my classical composition teacher that would have me write melodies in whole notes for weeks, just whole note melodies. Yeah, start doing that.
You can use a scale, you can use a row, you can write it in a mode, whatever, but then write a good melody that is only... How do you say it? Compose with whole notes. And it'll tell you a lot when you start doing that. And then after a while, start using half notes and what's the difference? And then you start learning that there's accented and non-accented notes when you use quarter notes. So this evolves, there's a whole system that'll train you into better writing, and that is how you should be writing. But when you are writing and you want to evaluate what you're doing, it's nice to go back to these basic exercises because by doing that, coming from the perspective that you already wrote something, it'll put it in a different perspective, and it's only for that I do it.
I never tell somebody, you have to do it this way or that way. But I will always try to keep a mirror in front and say, "Okay, you're doing this, but there's something that you should become aware of, and exercises that are part of it." So that's one way of approaching. The other thing could be working on harmony, because melody very often dictates harmony already by itself because it's very often it's in tonality. There's whole tradition of how functional harmony works and it goes back to anything in classical music, up to everything in non-classical music.
But then, there's also a way of looking at melodies where they ask for a different harmony and then you will step away from functional harmony. Functional harmony being everything that goes follows the rules from I, IV, V or II, V, I or VI, et cetera, chords steps, stuff like that. So, that's an approach. So there's so many ways of looking at this, and this is still within the scope of, "Okay, there's a melody in the harmony, but there's so much more, there's rhythm." So there's a lot of subjects to touch upon. But I like to approach it not from a perspective from, "You have to do this," but from the perspective from, "Okay, you're doing this and you want to learn more. Okay. What you do is what already, but now let's do the next thing and learn to work from there."
Leah Roseman:
And you had a mentor who didn't teach any other students. You had a couple of sessions with, who was very famous in the Netherlands, whose name I can't pronounce. So if you could-
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. It's true. Yeah, I had several teachers, but most of the time... No, one of them, the one you're referring to is Rogier van Otterloo. Rogier is quite famous in Europe, actually beyond Europe because he was the conductor of the Dutch Metropole Orchestra, which is the Dutch Radio Orchestra. Actually, I think it's still one of the only... Well, he was for a long time the only professional full-time broadcasting orchestra of that format act, because most of the time they are of combinations of radio orchestras are assembled specifically for the occasion. In the Netherlands we had one that was dedicated to jazz and pop music and film music, it was the Metropole orchestra. They are still there, they're an amazing orchestra, still doing a lot of work. And one of their conductors was Rogier van Otterloo, he wrote a lot of music and he conducted the orchestra from a beginning of the 80s until his death in somewhere 86, I think, for about six, seven years.
And I was one of his only students that he ever had. He didn't want to teach. But my teacher at that moment, Henk Alkema was teaching at the Utrecht Conservatory said, "You have to get him to teach you." So he found him and he said, "You have to teach this guy." And he said, "No, I'm not going to do that." But there was a workshop every year of the Metropole Orchestra. I would show up with a piece, and he would look at the piece. Even in my first year, I showed up with an orchestra piece which was crazy. He looked at the piece and he said, "Well, it's way too complicated." We cannot play that in one rehearsal, and if it's not possible to play it in one rehearsal, we won't do it. So next year I showed up with another piece. In the end he was interested and he said, "Well, okay, come by." So yeah, I could come and then he would review my music and talk about different things, how he looked at the composing and stuff like that. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was listening to some of his music yesterday. He wrote some for very many famous films. Which brings me to another question, because you've written for silent film, right?
Marc van Vugt: :
Yeah, yeah. That's a project I did in 96, I think? Yeah. It's a project where I worked with the films of Georges Méliès. Georges Méliès is a French cinéaste how do you call it?
Leah Roseman:
Cinéaste.
Marc van Vugt:
Yes. Well, filmmaker.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
He started out in the beginning of 1900s. He sold a brothers Lumière who were said to be the first to create moving pictures. He saw them, he himself, males, was a photoville artist, he was a magician he performed mostly in these photoville theaters where you have to imagine the 1900s where in the theater you would show up and there would be a dance act and a clown, and music, and then maybe a little bit of theater. And then he would do work as a magician, and he saw the possibility to use film in his photoville theaters. So, at that time where the brothers Lumière did their shows, it was part of a photoville theater. So they would show, for instance, a little film of maybe two minutes where a train would run into a station, and it would run right up to the audience and you have to realize at that moment, it was the first time people would see live film. And when that train ran in, people ran out of the room because-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marc van Vugt:
... They were afraid to hit by the train. Méliès created all these fantastic travels to the moon. Voyage a la impossible is one of his movies, Voyage a la Lune is a one... That's a very famous one where they travel to the moon and they crash on the moon. And I think most people must have seen films of Méliès. They are a combination of drawn material, filmed material, staged. It's really crazy. I did a program where I wrote music to some of his films about eight or something, and we performed them live and we had a video artist perform his... A video artist, contemporary video artist whose work really... His method really resembled that of Méliès, and he performed those videos live on stage and then we alternated that with the films of Méliès.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
New Speaker:
A small version of my chamber orchestra there to perform from life to that music. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yep. So you've been involved with so many different projects at first.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wrote a lot of orchestral music for the project with the Metropole orchestra. We did a big project in 2000, I think, where I wrote most of the music with Vince Mendoza conducting. Well, he used to be the conductor for about 15 years or 10 years or something. And also with John Clayton conducting and... Yep. So yeah, we've a lot of that music, choir music.
Leah Roseman:
So Marc, at the beginning of this conversation, you said, "Oh, I can go get my archtop."
Marc van Vugt:
Oh, you want to see my archtop?
Leah Roseman:
Yes, yes.
Marc van Vugt:
So this here, it's all guitar from the 60s. I found it somewhere in 97, I think? Somebody was just putting it up for sale and somewhere in the north of the Netherlands and I drove for about, I don't know, two hours to go there and saw the guitar and I thought, "This should be it." I've been touring it with it all over the world. I've taken it to Canada, I've taken it to the States, taken it to Indonesia, to everywhere. It has gone from the desert in San Diego, near San Diego to the humid climate of Jakarta. It's still in great working condition because I took it to Banff in 2000 when I was... Didn't do a residency there and humidity there goes down to about 20%. So this guitar was almost falling apart. And then a year later or two years later, I took it to Indonesia again, where it was so wet that it would swell. So it has had some of used but it's still there.
Leah Roseman:
I want to thank you for your perspectives and your stories and your beautiful music today, Marc. It was wonderful to meet you.
Marc van Vugt:
Okay. Likewise, thank you for inviting me, was really... Yeah, it's nice to be talking about the music, and thank you for all the attention also you're giving to my music, and specifically to my new album, The Lonely Coyote. So, thank you so much.
Leah Roseman:
The link for the album, of course, will be in the description so people can go right there and buy it.
Marc van Vugt:
Okay, that's good. That's good. Really good. Okay.
Leah Roseman:
Have a good day.
Marc van Vugt:
Yeah, same to you.
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives and music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peaks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.
