It isn’t jazz, exactly, though it lives in a jazz environment, nor is it classical. It’s not folk, rock and roll, or sacred music, either. Yet American accordionist Will Holshouser and Dutch trumpeter Eric Vloeimans combine elements of all of these and more in their compositions—sometimes all in the same piece—to articulate their compositional objectives. In the process, they have created sui generis music that is at once lyrical, playful, and deeply felt. The two will bring their music—and likely their new album, Two for the Road—to the Outpost on Tuesday, September 27, as part of the 16th annual New Mexico Jazz Festival.

A few years ago, after hearing Holshouser’s delightful trio album Singing to a Bee (reviewed here), I mentioned to him that he might find the music of Eric Vloeimans very interesting. Two Vloeimans projects, Oliver’s Cinema (with accordionist Tuur Florizoone and cellist Jörg Brinkman) and Levanter (with clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and pianist Jeroen Van Vliet), shared some characteristics with Holshouser’s music. Both men are confessed lovers of melody and pull from a wide musical palette in their compositions and their playing, offering expressive and uncategorizable chamber music in a jazz setting. Both are emotionally articulate across a broad range of feeling, from the deeply contemplative, even reverential, to the impishly playful. Each of them is sublimely musical and virtuosic on his instrument, and both employ their virtuosity in the service of the music, not vice versa.

Different paths
As it happened, Holshouser and Vloeimans had just met, brought together by mutual friends on the Dutch scene, and immediately found common ground, arriving from quite different paths.

Growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holshouser studied jazz piano as a youth, took jazz ensemble classes in the community division of the New England Conservatory while in high school, and played in reggae and punk bands. He didn’t encounter an accordion until he was in college. “A friend that I played music with bought me an old accordion at a rummage sale,” says Holshouser. “It was almost like a gag. ‘Yeah, here, check this out!’ It had never occurred to me to check out an accordion before, but I am so grateful to this friend because it opened all these doors for me.” Holshouser has worked with a wide range of colleagues, from Regina Carter to Han Bennink and Michael Moore, from Loudon Wainwright to Karin Ahluwalia. His own projects include, among others, Musette Explosion, with guitarist Matt Munisteri and tubaist Marcus Rojas, and the Will Holshouser Trio, with trumpeter Ron Horton and bassis David Phillips.

Vloeimans, drawn to the shiny silver and gold brass instruments played by folkloric musicians in the Netherlands, started studying trumpet as a youngster. He had no interest in that fusty music, though, and studied the classical repertoire at Rotterdam Conservatory of Music. “Then I met some people from the jazz department, and they gave me some improvisation lessons, and then they asked me, ‘Why don’t you do this?’” says Vloeimans. It was an interesting proposition, and he decided to do both, finding that the classical training provided an excellent technical foundation. “Even now, I still study classical for my embouchure, for my endurance, for my tone.” After college, Vloeimans studied with Donald Byrd in New York and played in the big bands of Mercer Ellington and Frank Foster. He has gone on to perform with many artists, from Peter Erskine to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and to lead numerous award-winning projects of his own, from the explosive electric jazz ensemble Gatecrash, with its good-natured swagger and cheery fearlessness, to the more reflective Oliver’s Cinema and the go-for-baroque Carrousel.

Let’s get together . . .
So when Eric was touring in the U.S. on another project, the two of them got together at the musician’s union near Times Square and had a brief rehearsal.

“You know, there are some people you meet in your life, and you talk to them, and you think you’ve known them for quite a while. In what life did I meet you? . . . This was really a very good mesh,” says Vloeimans.

They decided to play a few gigs together to see how that would go. “We each brought in some tunes and sat down and played these very informal shows, and I feel like we hit it off right away,” says Holshouser.

“It was not painful,” says Vloeimans, with an impish glint in his eye.

That musical connection led to their first album, Eric & Will (reviewed here), and a tour of the U.S. was scheduled for 2020, which, of course, the pandemic sunk. In the interim, they managed to release a second album, Two for the Road, beautifully recorded live in the Netherlands in fall 2021.

. . . and feel all right
Two for the Road continues the synchronistic collaboration of Eric & Will, carrying it forward with 11 original compositions, eight from Vloeimans and three from Holshouser, and a cover of Kermit’s “Rainbow Connection.” The opener, “Tibi Gratias,” a Vloeimans composition that Holshouser says is a tribute to the trumpeter’s old house and which is indeed infused with gratitude, could be quite at home in a church. It opens with a solo trumpet, playing one of the many lovely melodies on the album that will stick in your head, reappearing unbidden time and again. The trumpet is soon joined by the other four members of the baroque brass quintet. Oh, no, wait, that’s Holshouser on his accordion, playing what appears to be four independent horn parts and sounding very much like four brass instruments. This music, which has something regal in it, slows time and the heartbeat, the better to enable deep contemplation.

Contrast that with Holshouser’s “Deep Gap,” dedicated to Doc Watson, who exhibited an eclecticism not unlike Holshouser’s and Vloeimans’. “He drew on blues and old country hymns,” Holshouser says. “He invented, as you probably know, playing fiddle tunes on the guitar, and he was from a town called Deep Gap, close to where my grandparents are from.” So in Holshouser’s tribute, you hear what sounds like a Celtic reel at the outset, then a hymn, then a fiddle tune, and then something with a Middle Ages folk feel, as the composition dances you through the influences that Watson absorbed.

“It’s part of what I love about what Eric and I do in the duo is that, you know, in some ways, it’s kind of a jazz format. We have tunes, and we improvise a lot. But our references can be from anything,” says Holshouser. “So we use these sounds and flavors that are in our backgrounds, growing up what we heard, or professionally. So we can take sounds that we like—not in the sense of copying—but sort of digesting and blending them into something that’s very much our own.”

Highlights abound. From Vloeiman’s Innermission series, written during the pandemic lockdown, there’s “Innermission 1,” with its Latin feel in 5/4. “Innermission 12” works its way from the farmyard—Holshouser’s accordion clucking like a flock of chickens—to a musette to a tango. There’s the rollicking, bluesy “Innermission 2” and the rapid “Innermission 9,” which ends in a drunken waltz. Holshouser’s “Redbud Winter,” commissioned by the American Accordionists’ Association, offers a folk/jazz suite that travels through a series of contrasting emotional glades, from the expectant to the troubled to the elegiac to the celebratory.

From one track to the next, the humanity of the two men glows like a welcoming light in the night, and their music offers spirit-lifting solace, hope, and fun. They’ll offer a full dose on September 27 at the Outpost.

Eric & Will
Tuesday, September 27, 7:30 p.m.
Weil Hall at the Outpost Performance Space
210 Yale SE, Albuquerque
Tickets: $25 (member/student); $30 (general)
For tickets or more information, go here.

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© 2022 Mel Minter