Next week the venerable North Sea Jazz Festival is held again at the AHOY in Rotterdam. From Friday the 13th of July to Sunday the 15th hundreds of artists will perform in a dozen halls in Hollands main seaport city.
As always we will be there, although to be honest the main attractions at the festival are o in the early hours of the first day. 
The O'Jays are finally performing and they start their set at 5:15 PM... As soon as they finish we will hurry to another hall to see the magnificent Durand Jones & the Indications again. Late on the Friday neo soul legend Maxwell will do his thing. The other two days at NSJ don't really match this first day but we will see...

On Saturday June 16 two legends of 80s soul will be performing at the Escape club in Amsterdam (on the Rembrandtplein in the centre of town).
​We will be there of course because this is a really special gig! 

On Friday the 25th of May soul legend Madeline Bell will be performing the songs of Ray Charles featuring the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw ate the Q Factory in Amsterdam East . Looks like a promising gig and we will be there.

On Friday April 27 Hans & Harry will be sitting across the Etos on the Haarlemmerdijk in the centre of Amsterdam playing records, having a drink, selling soul 45s and generally having a good time. Join us there if you feel like it from around 9 AM to 4 PM

This Saturday the Book Presentation takes place of the retrospective book on the history of legendary Amsterdam live venue Paradiso. The book was written by music writer Hester Carvalho and includes a contribution from Harry on a legendary concert by Curtis Mayfield at the Paradiso in 1990 just before his accident.
www.paradiso.nl/nl/programma/paradi50/25202/

Upcoming live soul gigs at the Paradiso are:
Avery Sunshine on April 25
Durand Jones & the Indications on May 10
​Cameo on May 24

This upcoming Friday March 2 the Whispers will perform at the Paradiso.
And we will be there of course!
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On March 1 we have Marc Janssen as a special guest on the radio show. Marc is a very very serious soul collector and is now co-running the mighty Everland record label, which re-releases many ultra rare soul albums and 45s. Marc will tell us a lot about how Everland works and will play a number of the releases of Everland in the show.
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In December of 2017 my wife and I visited Tokyo for nine days and we had a very good time there. One of the perks of Tokyo is the number of record shops there. These are not only plentiful, but also of astounding quality. Funny thing is that the smaller independent shops seem to be of lesser quality than the main chain stores!

What follows is a subjective overview of the stores I visited in the 9 days we were there. It is impossible (and not good for the marriage) to try to visit all the stores. One store I missed was called Oldies But Goodies which was way out east in the city. They sell loads of Jamaican vinyl so I would have liked to have gone there. Alas, for another time.

Looking at the list of shops I did manage to visit it seems ridiculously short. The largest guide to Tokyo record shops on the web has dozens of them neatly organized by area. Unfortunately the guy who wrote it does not like soul, jazz, reggae or latin so most of his comments are irrelevant to our type of vinyl collector.
Still, it is an impressive document which I urge you to read if you plan to visit Tokyo anytime soon.

This leaves me to focus on the shops I did manage to visit and where I bought around 65 albums plus a few stray 45s.
That is one thing that is striking about these shops: they are 95% albums and only around 5% 45s. This is great for an LP collector like me, but I imagine 45 fiends will feel somewhat short changed.

HMV
Let me start with the shop that I found to be the best for all types of black music. Surprisingly enough this is the HMV shop. Now I don’t know if this has anything to do with the UK high street emporium, but it does have the exact same logo so who knows.

Where the UK HMV’s are general purpose, CD-driven mainstream affairs dedicated to new releases, the HMV in Tokyo is heavy, no make that HEAVY on the used vinyl. The branch I visited had all things rock on the ground floor and on the second floor was the most amazing collection of all black music genres  with row after row of vintage albums all neatly organized in subgenres.

On the wall there were scores of ultra rare LPs casually exhibited as if it was completely normal and to be expected.
There had been a sale of rare soul records a few weeks earlier and the remaining stock from that sale was placed in a number of bins.

The well known “items” on the walls and in the bins were pretty expensive, as an example the modern soul album from Pulse on Olde World was for sale at 600 Euros. But the lesser known records were reasonably priced and it was great to see so many of these obscurities for sale. One serious item I bought was the Marvin Holmes & Justice LP “Summer of ‘73” which I already had on reissue vinyl but I could not leave it there as it is such a great deep LP.
It was also great to see the quality of the Latin and Reggae sections. I spent well over two hours on that second floor and had to drag myself away. Apparently the black music buyer from Disk Union now works for HMV and it shows! What a store!
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Disk Union
Disk Union is of course the most famous of Japanese record stores. It is a chain with multiple shops in Tokyo and specializes each floor to have only one genre per store. We went to the Latin/Reggae store, the Soul/Rare Groove store and the Psych/Folk store. The latter was intended to yield my number one want of the moment, Sheila Grahams LP on Canadian CBC records. Unfortunately they did not have it, although they did have it in the past. Bugger.

The Soul/Rare Groove store was amazing of course, with a neat gospel bin tucked away on the floor somewhere so I could get a lot of bargains from that one bin.
There was a very good selection of soul records there, but overall it was not quite of the same level as the HMV shop. The Latin/Reggae shop was amazing, with loads of original vintage Rocksteady and early seventies Reggae albums in excellent condition. The good exchange rate of the Yen to the Euro made the prices relatively cheap so I got a lot of goodies there.

Hans will be visiting Tokyo this week so will not be in the studio. Harry will be assisted this week by sweet and group soul expert extraordinaire Mark Fisher 

Yes it is true! After years of cajoling and pressuring he finally caved in and agreed to guest on the Fingerpoppin Soul radio show: mr Tony Rounce, the living legend of Ace records.
He will take over the full show on Thursday December 28 from 22-24 CET.
Expect great things! 
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For a bio and youthful picture of Tony please look here