Ilse Huizinga - History

History

Ilse Huizinga was born in Beverwijk, the Netherlands in October 1966 and grew up in Nijmegen. It was an old piano given to her family at the age of six, which first drew Huizinga to music. Inspired by Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday and Abbey Lincoln albums, her fascination grew further when she watched Betty Carter sing at the North Sea Jazz Festival. At the age of 17, she took her first singing lessons. She later studied with John de Mol Senior and Gertjan Arentsen in Amsterdam.

She regularly took part in open mike nights at the jazz club Casablanca, in the heart of Amsterdam's Red Light District. However, music did not feature heavily on her career ladder until she spent a year in Australia and finished a degree in Public Administration at the University of Amsterdam. Huizinga subsequently studied at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Sylvi Lane, including master classes by Dianne Reeves and Margriet Eshuis. She has toured in Spain, Turkey, Switzerland and France, and regularly performs in the United Kingdom. A winner of the Schiedam Jazz Award, she has represented the Netherlands at the international jazz festival in Vienne, France.

KLM selected Huizinga's debut album Out Of A Dream for its in-flight entertainment programme. On Voices Within she recorded her own voice five times, resulting according to critics "some of the best close harmony for decades". Her third album The Sweetest Sounds was voted Album of the Week on Dutch radio and is played on specialist jazz radio stations across Europe. Her informal debut was at Ronnie Scott's, and she has also performed at Concertgebouw and Amsterdam's Bijlmerbajes prison.

In 2001 Ilse Huizinga recorded an album exclusively devoted to the songs of Richard Rodgers, entitled The Sweetest Sounds. It was met with instant acclaim by the critics and nominated for Holland's oldest and most prestigious music award, The Edison Award.

There are several albums featuring selections of jazz standards on Daybreak Records that are highly regarded by critics, Voices Within, shows a multi-vocal side to Huizinga's talent, The Sweetest Sounds is an acclaimed 2001 highlight, whilst The Intimate Sessions - Volume 1 was recorded in 2006 specifically to meet demand in the Japanese market. Easy to Idolize (2003) and Beyond Broadway (2005) find Huizinga on form in selections of the Great American Songbook, accompanied by a stellar lineup of European jazz musicians.

In 2011 Ilse Huizinga launched Vocal Jazz Trip, a specialist tour operator based in Amsterdam that hosts vocal jazz master classes and jazz themed citybreaks in Paris, Berlin, Rome, New York City, Prague, London and other major cities.