JASPER VAN'T HOF was born in Enschede, Holland on June 30, 1947. The child of a jazz trumpeter and a classically trained singer and pianist, his great interest in music became evident at an early age. The groundwork was laid with private piano lessons. At the age of fourteen he wrote his first compositions and became increasingly interested in jazz. His parents would have liked to send him to a conservatory, but JASPER VAN'T HOF preferred to play live. At nineteen he was already participating in various jazz festivals and raking in prizes.
The year 1984 marked the founding of the Afro-European formation PILI-PILI. Its first album was a major success, above all in the dance and pop scene. The legendary fifteen-minute title track "Pili Pili", which gave the band its name, resounded from the approximately 160,000 copies sold of this firstling, raising it to the status of a cult number. VAN'T HOF worked primarily in Germany, due perhaps to the proximity of the border, perhaps also to his marriage to a German woman of Hamelin.
PILI-PILI's success has taken VAN'T HOF on eighteen concert tours to date; the band appears on stage in Germany twenty to thirty times a year. PILI-PILI was a stepping stone for Angelique Kidjo, now an internationally successful ethnopop singer who worked with JASPER VAN'T HOF in his band for four years and recorded a number of CDs with him. The members of PILI-PILI include Marlon Klein (Berlin), also a musician in the ethno band Dissidenten, the bassist Frank Itt of Hamburg and the trumpeter Eric Vloeimans. The band is VAN'T HOF's most continuous project and celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 2004.
After twenty years of Pili Pili, Jasper van't Hof embarked on his new band project "Hot Lips," which featured wind instruments and no African musicians. They first got the idea for it on the Pili Pili anniversary tour, where the three-man wind section from Hot Lips got together and had so much fun playing that they realized it would definitely become a whole new project. Once again there's something new, initiated together with musicians who have long been closely connected to Jasper van't Hof; the music looks back and ahead simultaneously, and is based on the experience of his band projects such as Pork Pie or Catherine-Mariano-Van't Hof. But composing for three wind instruments was an entirely new experience as well as a challenge.
"Hot Lips" provide a convincing mix of varied and inspired compositions, attractive tunes, improvisations, sonic surprises, and European chamber jazz - not American, not Scandinavian, and inspired throughout by Jasper van't Hof.
Serendipity - Jazz and China DVD
Pinyin Manderin
