The classic sound of Willem Breuker's big band, Kollektief, is precise, forceful and a little jokey -- like Spike Jones. I'd been thinking about Breuker, who was in a hospital and dying of cancer, ...

Willem Breuker's music is an experience—part circus, part orchestra, part theater. The man himself is no less complex and some of his thoughts on being a musician bely his humour and good nature. At ...

The Willem Breuker Kollektief--the Netherlands’ most prominent and often controversial jazz ensemble--was formed 28 years ago. Saxophonist Breuker, a creatively mischievous character, organized an ...

The picture on the back of the CD booklet for the Willem Breuker Kollektief's At Ruta Maya Café shows a low-lying, nondescript building that looks like an old Howard Johnson's. The website for the ...

It was in high school in his native Netherlands that Willem Breuker first learned he would have no future in music. “They said I had no talent to be a musician,” Breuker recalled during a recent ...

Ten musicians comprise the Willem Breuker Kollektief, but even much larger bands rarely promise as many different ideas as this group expressed on a late Monday night at HotHouse. When saxophonist ...

If there's a talking point to the North American tour that takes the Willem Breuker Kollektief to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal over the next few days, it's the proclamation that greets visitors to the ...

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Willem Breuker, a Dutch composer, multireedist and band-leader whose jump-cut style and theatrical panache made him a contrarian hero of European jazz, died July 23 in Amsterdam. He was 65. His death ...

Even before the 1927 premiere of the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, sound was integral to the flicker of celluloid. Pianists would accompany serials at matinees, and pit orchestras would provide ...