by Nol van Bennekom
ROUGHLY two years from now, exactly one century since September 1, 1926 when swing and jazz came over from America, the most iconic orchestra of the Netherlands will celebrate its 100th anniversary. At least, that’s when an already existing ensemble, The Resonance Seven, was renamed The Ramblers. The Resonance Seven featured two bandleaders, Willem Burbach and Jan Gluhoff. These two “captains on one ship” always had fierce arguments together. It is not entirely clear which of the two was responsible for hiring a new pianist, but the fact is that a piano-playing young man named Theo Uden Masman had joined a few months earlier.
Theo’s business talents were superior to his musical skills, but no doubt Theo was sufficiently usable as a pianist. His business side was definitely helpful to the orchestra, and therefore Theo soon took over commercially. Willem Burbach, fed up with the numerous quarrels with Gluhoff, left the band, taking with him the name Resonance Seven which he owned.
And so, in September 1926, Theo came up with the name The Ramblers. Not long thereafter Theo Uden Masman also became musical director, a golden move, because the new leader ensured that the orchestra entered a veritable victory run on the wave of beautiful music that often came rolling in from America.
NOW THE Ramblers did have the wind in their sails as the 1920s saw the birth of the idiosyncratic Dutch broadcasting system with its growing number of different broadcasters. Radio was still in its infancy. In fact, not much had yet been legally established. Thus the various religious and political convictions could start their own radio broadcasting companies: the Catholics, the Protestants, the Liberals, the Socialists and even the Free Protestants. Among all these broadcasters, airtime had to be divided. The broadcasting bosses soon discovered that they could also very well play music through the radio station, and there was a demand for big band music from across the Atlantic.
Radio pioneer ir. A. Steringa Idzerda, with his own private station “Radio Beukstraat” in The Hague, had already proven a few years earlier with amateur band The Original Jazz Syncopators that his programs could be heard very well as far away as in Britain. Theo Uden Masman had played in this band as well. Meanwhile, while The Ramblers were drawing crowds in the Netherlands, as well as in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, they also played for the radio stations of the liberal AVRO and the socialist VARA. In 1936 they were given a permanent contract at the VARA. Through 1964 they performed more than 2,000 radio concerts, with enormous success.
However, not all of Theo Uden Masman’s initiatives succeeded. In 1944 when the American-led Allies were on the winning side in World War II, The Ramblers were fired by the Nazi-minded Nederlandsche Omroep because Theo, who was fiercely anti-German, refused to play for Frontier Care. This should not have surprised the Germans: the famous American black saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was a soloist in Jack Hylton’s English jazz orchestra. This orchestra was to tour Hitler Germany in 1935, but it was not allowed, under any circumstances, to bring “den schwarzen Neger Hawkins.” Hylton was upset about this. Theo Uden Masman offered to temporarily include Hawkins in The Ramblers, much to Jack Hylton’s relief. It led to several 78 rpm records, later brought together on the famous elpee “Hawk in Holland.” This remarkable collaboration was the absolute highlight of The Ramblers’ then-young life.
IN THE winter of 1944-’45, Theo Uden Masman wrote his book “Buttt…, we’ll be coming back”, about the early years of The Ramblers. He announced that it would be published after the war in 1947, but it never happened.
Theo died in 1965 at the age of 64. Because someone donated the manuscript to me in 2020, it became possible to publish the book 75 years after it was written, still in deluxe print and with many unique and often unknown photographs from the years 1922 to 1940. The Dutch Stichting Kunst en Cultuur Huizen became the publisher. The book has already gone through its second printing. The orchestra, the first ambassadors of America’s big band, swing and jazz music in the Low Countries, is still alive and kicking. It is today led by trumpeter Loet van der Lee.
* Nol van Bennekom has been a newspaper reporter for decades, and still performs as a pianist, a saxophonist, a guitarist and a bassist in Dutch jazz ensembles.
