The making of...

We have to go a long time back in time, to the previuos century, to find out about the birth of the band. Leo Haemels: "The de Wit boys ( Jaap and Piet ; both in the Freetime Old Dixie Jassband) particularly stimulated me to start playing the cornet again. Every once in a while I sat in on a rehearsal of their band, or we played an evening to old Chris Barber records for fun. I had been playing in the fifties in several bands, most notably in the famous big band of Danish orchestra leader Boyd Bachman. So, you start out looking for other jazz musicians in Enkhuizen, and through several networks the second Enkhuizen jazzband was born, mainly consisting of people having played jazz during their college years. Rehearsals in were in de Nieuwe Doelen in those days. The band started off having no name, although the working title was "Haemel's Devils", more or less stolen from my wife, who called me a Haemel-devil, when I was bit naughty. We were still looking for a real name, when during one of the rehearsals, Wim de Jong ( later a Jazzfestival board member) fumbeld a little piece of paper in my hand that said "The Old Fashioners". The name of the band had been settled.

The original band and what happened in Seventies

The band started out as a "Hot-Five"-like band, consisting of (see picture below, from left to right) Dick Degeling on trombone, (now playing in Over the Waves), Leo Haemels cornet (also in Over the Waves). Ernst Hudig on clarinet ( now in the Bovenband). Ger Taatgen on banjo and Tjitte de Boer brass-bass. Ger and Tjitte left the band in the middle of 1978. In those years the band was described in Dr.Jazz as the 'band of standing' of Enkhuizen, as there were a lot of doctors in it, but some newspapers were less polite and called it the 'old-fart-band'. In 2004 both names are not true anymore.

The first band: The Old Fashioners in de Nieuwe Doelen (1976).