Jozef Dumoulin: Fender Rhodes + FX
a personal quest to find the core of a practice of an instrument that is normally never played alone for so long.
cd "A Fender Rhodes Solo" released february 2014 on Bee Jazz
audio-tracks from "A Fender Rhodes Solo"
The Entry Point
Sungloves
full record on youtube
excerpt from a solo concert at the Vic Jazz Festival in Spain, in May 2012
full concert shot in February 2017
“My story with the Fender Rhodes isn’t the result of any ambition or desire. I hold the feeling that the Rhodes and its sound effects came to me, and not the other way around. To be honest, I have never been particularly familiar with nor felt close to the past of this instrument in Music (Funk and Psychedelic Music). If I let myself fall into this instrument, it is because I was seduced by the possibilities it opened me to. It is particularly the ties to a guitarist’s playing and to electro music it allowed that drove me to dig deeper into it.
The Rhodes was an instrument I was using, far from being a conscious researching tool. For me, it wasn’t an element more important than another. As a result, when my music started to be directly associated with this instrument, I had not seen it coming.It made me wonder what would happen if I would, for a change, consciously approach the Rhodes. I understood it would make me move forward musically and technically.
This is how the idea of a Fender Rhodes solo album was born.
I made it a personal challenge, with very clear constraints that would help me bond the approach I had always had and something new. The four constraints were to use the Rhodes and only the Rhodes, to only record improvisations, to isolate tracks with a ‘regular’ duration within these improvisations and to avoid overdubs.
As for the effects, I allowed myself everything.
I am very pleased that I stuck to these constraints, this album has changed me a lot. And I am also very happy that I was able to record it at home, a place that I hold dear to my heart.”