The members of The Six Winds

This are the current members, You can see the past members here.

Mariette Rouppe van der Voort plays the sopranino and graduated with the flute at the Rotterdam Conservatory. She has played in well known Dutch orchestras like De Volharding and Hoketus. These groups were important for the the Dutch music scene because they were playing challenging works of modern composers. Also she was active in the local improvisation scene in Rotterdam, trying to create a good musical climate in the city. She worked on a regular basis with the Dutch reed player Ab Baars in several projects. In her own ensemble, De Rouppe Group, she works with, among others, the British piano player Veryan Weston and the Belgian trumpet player Bart Maris. This group is playing improvised music based on compositions of Cage, Kagel, Gurtag, Cowell and Rouppe van der Voort.

Dies le Duc’s reputation is based on his abilities as a composer and orchestra leader. He plays the soprano saxophone and is a productive composer who writes music for theater, dance, film and all kinds of outdoor events. In the city of Middelburg in Holland he was responsable for the so-called ‘2000 project’: a soundscape on the market place with music from a bell tower, a barrel organ and thirty musicians. His most recent outdoor event was the performance of a composition for seven percussion players and the amplified sound of boiling water.

Kazutoki Umezu plays the alto sax and lives in Saitama, Japan. He is one of the well known musicians in the east Asian region and plays in the typical Japanese mixed style. His music comes from many sources such as: jazz, rock, blues, world music and traditional music from Japan and Korea. Umezu likes to play in different styles with various musicians from all over the world; for instance, he played jazz with Mal Wadron, Aki Takase and David Murray, free music with Peter Brotzmann, William Parker and George Lewis, down town New York avantgarde with John Zorn, Marc Ribot and Tom Cora, blues with B.B. King and Fusanosuke Kondo, traditional eastern music with shamisen player Michihiro Sato, okinawa music with Tetsuhiro Daiko, and shamanistic Korean music with Kim Suk Chul.

Andrew White plays the tenor and comes from Washington D.C. White is active in many musical fields. He is a multi-talented artist playing hobo and bass as well. He played funk and soul together with James Brown, pop with Stevie Wonder, rockjazz with Weather Report and avant-garde with Julius Hemphill. He produced no less than 42 records and CD’s, an autobiography, theory and exercise books, colorful stories about the music bizz, arrangements, compositions, transcriptions (he is well known for his 836 John Coltrane transcriptions). White is said to be one of the most voluminously self-produced artists in the world with more than two thousand products.

Ad Peijnenburg plays the baritone and is the founder of The Six Winds. His special interest for percussion players and drummers made him perform with musicians like Thebe Lipere and Louis Moholo from South Africa, Alan Purves from Scotland, Steve Hubback from Wales, Takashi Kazamaki from Tokyo and Han Bennink, Wim Janssen and Rick van Iersel from Holland. Peijnenburg is known for his once only projects, in which musicians from all over the world participate; among them are Lol Coxhill, Butch Morris, Denis Charles, Joe Sachse, Billy Jenkins and Lars Rudolph. In addition, Peijnenburg has a special interest in Japanese improvised music. This is reflected in the founding of the Dejima Ensemble, in which Dutch and Japanese musicians meet one another.

Klaas Hekman plays the bass saxophone but graduated at the conservatory at The Hague with the flute. He has been playing the bass sax for more than twenty years now, and he proved that it can be a solo instrument with unknown possibilities. Klaas Hekman is also a member of De Nazaten, a band that plays modern dance music from Surinam, and of Intermission, a hard core impro-music band (other musicians in Intermission are the three string bass players Wilbert de Joode, William Parker and Hideji Taninaka). With Intermission Hekman participated in the project ‘Rising’, together with the improvising dancers David Zambrano and Touru Iwashita (butoh, Sankai-juku). Black Tulip Transit was an exchange program set up by Hekman between musicians from Rotterdam and New York. This brought him in contact with down town musicians like Roy Campbell, Bill Saxton, Zane Massey and Reggie Nicholson.