Back to Rene Helsdingen with more (Motivation, Lord Shepherd, Helsdingen Jazz)

Here he appears as a simple (acoustic) quartet.  In an early example of crowdfunding, the following blurb on the back:

"Money makes this world go round and so this album would not be in your hands today if it were not for the 400 sponsors visualized on its cover.  They all believed this album deserved to be realized and they put their minds where their hearts are."

Instead of this, he should have patented the concept, created gofundme, and become a silicon valley billionaire.  Or he could have come up with the idea of hiring a bunch of idiots to drive their own cars and pretend like they're taxis, then make billions not calling them taxis.  Or, even easier, borrow billions of dollars from the bank to make a rocket to fly to Mars next year.  Or maybe lease office space and then sublease it to other people and pretend it's all his, instead of just all borrowed from banks, or rather, one bank.  And make billions of dollars.  Or even easier, invent a new way for people to message each other on their phones and make billions of dollars.  Another really successful and original idea would have been to make a site where people can upload stupid videos of themselves acting like idiots.  That's a guaranteed winner, every second of the day.  Every single day, today.  But no, being a musician, he would never do any of that.  He just wanted to make virtuoso music, and that didn't bring in much money at all.

Going back to that subject, the one we love so much, which has also brought us no billions of dollars at all and instead has cost us quite a bit in invested LPs and time, what we have here is basically free jazz, un-fusion, perhaps not essential in the way the preceding album was.  As an example track B2, Time:





I'm not sure those crowdfunders got their money's worth, considering the album is just over thirty minutes, and simple contemporary jazz with the mandatory automatic instrumental soloing 'by the numbers'-- a job that soon will be accomplished entirely by jazz-musician-robots (or a programmed AI) anyhow.  What a wonderful future we have to look forward to.  And for those many who are so optimistic about that subject, which I've made of fun of so often before, I wonder what they think of the following headline I read today taken from JAMA (US life expectancy drops for the third year in a row).  Not a surprise for all of us in the US and other countries which will soon suffer the same sad fate with increasing income disparity, lowered standards of living, increasing opioid addictions, starting to suffer the many inevitable stressors of climate change.
Sadly, I threw in two other albums from him that are not worth mentioning too much about.