A swinging introduction

In the year 1974 the first Old Style Jazzfestival was held in Enkhuizen, Holland. The yearly festival apparently inspires people to start a band, although before the seventies there were some jazz-related activiteis in Enkhuizen. In the Fifties there had been a couple of jazzbands, some of them were :

	The Dark Alley Stompers with a.o. Dick Degeling and Will Thijssen (1957-1958)
The Moonlight Players, with the Kroeb brothers (1957-1959)
	The Mississippi Stompers with a.o. Jan Jaap Kroeb and Ruud Peerdeman (1959-1963)

For a short while, there was a real jazzclub, named "Tramo", but in the Sixties jazz activity was virtually non-existent in Enkhuizen.(*)

In 1971 the Freetime Old Dixie Jassband was founded. Partly infected by this band's enthousiasm, Leo Haemels, in those days host of the Nieuwe Doelen, the cultural centre of Enkhuizen, planned on starting a jazzband of his own.

For furhter information on the history of jazz in ENkhuizen, a book in Dutch is available “Sgt. Pepper’s Spicy Words of Jazz”, surf to the website of Sgt. Pepper's jazzclub