Belgian drummer Kobe Gregoir has lived and worked in the Netherlands for over a decade, where he studied jazz and teaches at The Hague Conservatory. In his work he pays tribute to the 1950s and 1960s when jazz had its heyday. This first album as leader of his own Kobe Gregoir Group is also a paean to the hard bop and soul jazz we know through such illustrious labels as Blue Note, Verve, Prestige, ...
The Kobe Gregoir Group is a classical jazz quintet with, in addition to piano (Vivienne ChuLiao), double bass (Ignacio Santoro) and drums (Kobe Gregoir), tenor sax (Claudio Jr. De Rosa) and trumpet (Carlo Nardozza). Additional flavour is added by the spoken word interventions of Dutch slam poet and writer Danielle Zawadi. In her socially critical lyrics, she addresses the daily problems and search for identity as a black woman in a dominant white society.[info sheet from distr.]