Wim & Raoul

One November evening, drummer Wim Janssen and bassist Raoul van der Weide—painters, rhythm partners and old pals—come to the Bimhuis for Bill Frisell’s silent movie gig. They quickly identify the unidentified encore: Konitz’s “Subconscious Lee.”

Eight days later, playing in the quartet Sound-Lee at a restaurant in Zaandam, they rarely look at each other; after 30 years they don’t need visual cues to communicate, at least not while keeping time. They do “Subconscious Lee” and other Tristano-y stuff; Natalio Sued on tenor sometimes channels Warne Marsh. Wim and Raoul give “Sal’s Line” a Latin lilt, half rumba, half samba. On “Palo Alto,” Wim dives into the holes his pianist brother Guus leaves in his solo, wedging open space of his own. But at the end of his own solo, as on other tunes, Wim does a quaintly old-fashioned thing: counts the band back in with a 1, 2, 1234 on snare.

A week or so later, they sit in Wim’s chilly high-ceilinged atelier, in a corrugated Quonset hut on Zeeburgereiland, near the entrance to the Piet Heintunnel, to reminisce a little. Their studios were moved out here when Westerdok behind Amsterdam’s Central Station was converted to high-rise housing. The loft of Wim’s space is filled with his paintings.

Wim: angular, reddish, a broad grin. Raoul: darker, rounder, puckish, a small friendly bear. They met in the mid 70s, when Raoul’s friend’s sister started dating Wim. (She married him; they’re family men.) They first played together in the band Mokum Swing, though neither of them could really play dixieland (Wim: We did have some nice gigs. Raoul: A perfume factory. A fencing academy.) Then came Punt Uit with Bert Koppelaar, Guus, and Paul Termos, their buddy whose death in 2003 hit the friends hard. (Wim and Raoul: In that band, we probably played the first reggae on the improvised music scene. We’d all lose the form, but we could come together again.) Then a trio with Termos, playing together once a week (Wim: There was always this tension between Paul and Raoul—very nice. Once Paul was yelling at him at a gig, behind a curtain, as if no one could hear.) Then they were in Guus’s septet. They played together a lot, were in and out of each other’s houses, talked about music all the time.

But Raoul gradually got sick in the late 1980s, the cause of his lethargy unknown. A midlife crisis? Depression? He stopped playing for a time. Wim continued with Guus, in a classic trio with Ernst Glerum. (Raoul: Wim had an incredible impact on Guus’s development. Wim: That’s your version.)

Raoul felt he lost 15 years of his life. This writer, impersonating a drummer on occasion, played with Raoul once in the late ’90s: Every tune started slow and got slower. Finally, in 1999, he was properly diagnosed with Hashimoto Syndrome, a thyroid condition, and started getting proper treatment. Nowadays he’s reborn as a player: authoritative attack, all sorts of ways to bend the time, a good listener’s way of riding the crest of an improvisation He’s high profile again, booking a monthly improvising series, playing solo and in ad hoc groups.

In 2000, Wim had a gallery show on the Leliegracht, and their friend pianist Frank van Bommel came. They said, we hardly ever see you, but when you do have a gig, it’s nice. Why don’t we start playing together? So they did, once a week.

Raoul: Incredible misunderstandings, very interesting. I need a little anarchy and insubordination in my music. Wim: That’s a problem in your head. Raoul: We scheduled a recording in October, all improvisations. I’d resolved to behave. But then—a story in itself—he broke his bass that day, had to hunt up a replacement quick. For all that, the recording sounds terrific—spacious without being vacuous. Wim’s free playing opens him up. One big fan of his free playing: brother Guus.

Wim gets out transparencies of some recent paintings he’s already sold: diptychs like consecutive movie frames, inspired by Hitchcock: Gavin Elster looming over Scotty Ferguson in “Vertigo”, in shadow and then brighter light. Why two panels? They’re about telling moments, when things change: Teresa Wright’s Charlie in “Shadow of a Doubt”, stepping off a porch and breaking her ankle. An art of moments: like jazz? Wim isn’t buying it.

Janssen wraps up for the day, to cycle home in the dark. Raoul walks around the corner to his own studio. There’s a piano, two basses, his crackle box. Also a bouquet of paint brushes, and many tubes of pigment, but no paintings to be seen. Yeah, Raoul says—these days I mostly do music. He has lost time to make up.