Organist and pianist Laurens de Man creates a cultural exchange between the Dutch city of Haarlem and the American district of Harlem. Haarlem, the city where the Fokker organ brought the musical 31-tone movement to life from the 1950s onwards, and Harlem, the New York neighbourhood that took its name from Haarlem and was a cradle of intellectual jazz. For this reason, the guest of the classically trained but boundlessly curious De Man is a rising star of the Dutch jazz world, singer and Edison award winner Anna Serierse. Dutch Music Prize laureate De Man, himself a teacher of classical piano for jazz pianists at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and from September 2025 also professor of organ there, shares with Serierse a fascination with the emerging jazz music of the early twentieth century. Together they make the musical crossing from Haarlem to Harlem.
The Haarlem section of the programme naturally includes a work from the repertoire of the Fokker organ, which stood for nearly 50 years in the Teylers Museum in the Spaarnestad. In addition, the rich Haarlem tradition of organ music is expressed in works by, among others, Cornelis Helmbreecker, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Albert de Klerk, all of whom played on the famous Christian Müller organ in the Sint-Bavokerk on the Grote Markt. Helmbreecker and De Klerk as city organists, and Mozart as a 10-year-old boy during a journey through Western Europe.
From Harlem, the programme comes to life in the music of Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Thelonious Monk. Ellington was one of the most important figures in the jazz world of the 1920s and 30s. He performed regularly at the famous Cotton Club and other venues in Harlem. George Gershwin, an important composer of the time, frequently visited clubs and theatres in Harlem, such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater, to meet jazz musicians and learn from their music. Gershwin and Ellington knew each other and had mutual respect for each other’s work. Thelonious Monk also performed frequently in Harlem in the 1940s, but that was after Gershwin’s time. Thanks to the Fokker organ, the music of these American musicians gains a unique Haarlem cloak of ‘meantones’, with a starring role for vocalist Anna Serierse. In this way, two revolutionary musical centres are united not only in name but also in sound.