Biography Paulien van Schaik

PAULIEN VAN SCHAIK (taken from her website by redlaad)

At the theatre academy in Amsterdam they told me to do something with my singing first and then come back the next year. I never went back, music was all I ever needed.

At the end of my studies at the conservatory I found that I also wanted to write songs. After a year in the United States (at the Berklee College of Music) where I focused on songwriting, I started building up a repertoire of my own songs. At the same time I got to know Hein van de Geyn. He’d heard a demo with my songs and asked me ‘when we were going to do something.’ After recording sessions of these songs however, we always ended up playing standards together. What a combination, just a voice and a bass. Such fun, we became all the more excited playing together. It was so thrilling, pure and honest. Three concerts, recorded live, resulted in our first CD ‘Tenderly’, which was awarded the ‘Edison Jazz Publieksprijs’ (a renowned Dutch music award). ‘In Summer’ is our second album, on which we invited Belgian trumpet player Bert Joris as a guest. We are now working on our latest project, which is an expansion of the duo with cellist Frans Grapperhaus and violinist Yvonne van de Pol. We’ve started doing concerts since February and from September 2006 we’ll be doing a theatre tour in Dutch theatres as a double bill programme for the Jazz Impuls Foundation.

Songwriting has taken second place in these past years, until a while ago, all of a sudden I wrote a song with Dutch lyrics. That kind of scared me, because I had never written in Dutch before, let alone sung in Dutch. What was I supposed to do with this? It has however been smoldering ever since and it really caught fire now. Since September 2005 I have cleared my agenda, to have more time to really get going with this. In my own songs also I am looking for pureness and honesty, the naked truth. A whole new world opened up for me when I found that in my native language, I had so many more possibilities. In the meantime I am slowly but surely building up a repertoire and also making a nice programme with these songs. To be continued!

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