top of page

Slupp

I grew up in a Jewish home outside of Gothenburg, Sweden. My family was not very strict according to religious rules, but from an early age I was exposed to Jewish culture and the harmonies of the music.

 

My musical career started in one of those fairly dreadful recorder ensembles for kids. One day I said to my parents that I wanted to play the violin. They thought I’d quit very quickly, but I actually liked it. The first years I studied classical violin. I played in various youth symphony and chamber orchestras. When it was time to choose a profession I considered going to the conservatory, but I was afraid I’d loose my passion for the instrument so I chose another career. Thanks to that I ended up in a student orchestra that was fun. Musically it was not very challenging, so I started to think about playing another instrument. Being a rather short person people giggled at the thought of me playing the tuba, so just for fun I learned one song. But then I was hooked! I really love the power and drive of that instrument. At that moment there was a shortage of tuba players playing Dixieland so I ended up learning how to play it, how to read chord schemes, and how to make bass lines by ear just by playing a lot in bands.

In the beginning of the revival of Klezmer music somebody gave me a cassette of The Klezmorim. I thought the music was really cool and I started my first Klezmer band. We played in and around Gothenburg, but also toured to Oslo, Norway, and even Estonia and Latvia. I still remember the tears in the eyes of an old Jewish Estonian woman while she grabbed  the hand of her grandchild when we started to play. At that point it was long ago that they had heard that kind of music. 

 

A job offer brought me to The Netherlands. I was lucky to end up living around the corner of a pub where a huge band played Klezmer music (and everything else) every week. A few of the members of that band wanted to start a new Klezmer band and I was asked to play the tuba with them.

After playing  for a while we started to expand our repertoire with some Greek and Turkish songs, often with irregular measures. That opened my horizon beyond Jewish music.

Through the years I played in various groups until one day a saxophone player wanted to start a trio with me and a drummer. The drummer and I didn’t talk very much at first, but through playing we soon developed  a strong connection to each other . Fairly soon, to the utter dismay of the saxophone player, we fell in love and ran off with  the “Azart”, a touring theatre boat. On this ‘Ship of Fools’ where we were the rhythm

section of the accompanying band. 

 

We both realized that as a rhythm section one is always dependent on other musicians and at one point we decided to start our own thing.Thanks to the musical freedom I discovered on the tuba I could be free enough on the violin to play all those lovely and fiery songs of the east together with Rupert’s newly acquired drums from Egypt, and so our duo was born.

bottom of page