Musician Joachim Badenhorst on escaping his comfort zone
Joachim Badenhorst, one of Flanders’ foremost reed players, may have gone through classical training in school, but his repertoire is far from typical thanks in part to his choice of experimental sounds, improvisation and DIY attitude
Finding a true calling
Badenhorst, 33, can often be heard playing the bass clarinet, with its characteristic deep sounds. Considered one of Flanders’ foremost reed players, Badenhorst was six or seven when he started playing the clarinet. “My father is a painter and in his youth he played the piano and the clarinet,” he says. “He gave me his old instrument; that’s how I started. I’m not sure I was really producing music in the beginning. It was more like blowing wind through it.”
Still, he really liked the instrument and went on to study classical clarinet in music school. “By the time I was a teenager, I certainly wasn’t in love with the instrument,” he says. “I faithfully went to music school and did my homework, but that was it.”
At one point he started listening to rock music and wanted to discard the clarinet in favour of the drums and electric bass. “But my parents advised me to continue playing it,” he says. “They paid for private courses because I disliked the music school, and slowly the love for it returned.”
He soon discovered Klezmer and Balkan music, and the talent of John Zorn, and realised that the clarinet was his instrument. “The passion even became an obsession,” he says. “At 15 and 16, I played as much as I could, all day long, if possible.”
Did jazz have a place in this process? “Partly,” he says. “There aren’t many jazz clarinet players I really like, but I fell in love with some of the saxophonists and trumpet players. The tone of the Klezmer clarinettists appealed to me more than that of the jazz men.”
Still, he did study jazz music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, a place known for its “bebop-oriented” curriculum. “Even when I studied bebop, I experimented with free improvisation,” he says.
The Hague was also where he was confronted with the limitations of the clarinet. “It produces less volume than the saxophone or the trumpet,” he says. “During jam sessions, it’s often difficult for the clarinet player to keep up. That’s why I started playing the saxophone. And of course, I love that instrument too. It’s great that I now possess a large palette of sounds: bass clarinet and tenor sax.”
Do it yourself
But there’s more than jazz and free improvisation to Badenhorst’s musical world. For instance, he also plays with Belgian-Icelandic band Mógil, who produce an eclectic mix of folk and jazz with some elements of classical chamber music.
One thing is clear: musically, it’s impossible to pinpoint Joachim Badenhorst. “I like that,” he says, smiling. “It reflects my interest in different styles of music. I like to push my limits and find out new things. I’d be bored if I always had to play the same kind of music or with the same people.”
I like to push my limits and find out new things
Badenhorst also has his own record label, KLEIN, which he runs with his wife, Bei. “It has its advantages,” he says. “You can control everything and do what you think is right. The disadvantage is that you lack the distribution and promotional channels of a more established record label.”
Not all of Badenhorst’s records are released on KLEIN. “I invest a lot of time in those releases,” he says. “All of them are DIY: a lot of tinkering and drawing.” It’s a reaction against the mainstream industry that reduces music to a digital file, he explains. Every release should be really special.
The furthest he went was with his solo album Forest/Mori. “I made the cover of every single copy myself,” he says. “That means each and every copy is a unique object. I’ve noticed people really appreciate that.”
Coming home
From 2008 to 2011, Badenhorst lived in New York. “As a young boy, I was already fascinated with the city and regularly travelled there later in life,” he says. “In New York, I met a lot of musicians with whom I still play, and also my future wife.”
A few months after meeting Bei, he decided to move to the US. “But three years down the road, we both had a desire to come and live in Europe,” he says.
It can be very confronting to hear your own voice if you aren’t used to it
Which in the end meant his home town of Antwerp. “New York absorbs a lot of energy and it’s not easy to survive there financially,” he says. “Since I’ve been back, I’ve been more focused on my different projects. I began with my label, I started playing solo, and I launched the Carate Urio Orchestra. Had I stayed in New York, all of that would have been more difficult.”
The Carate Urio Orchestra is the jewel in Badenhorst’s musical crown. More than all the other projects, this is his group. Not that he reigns as a dictator, but when the pressure is on, he makes all the decisions.
The septet easily navigate between improvisational music and noise to folk and post-rock. “This is the band where all my different musical interests come together,” Badenhorst says. “It’s all the people with whom I play in other, small and musically diverse projects, assembled in one large group; a laboratory to experiment with various sounds and genres.”
With Carate Urio Orchestra, Badenhorst also sings a few of the songs himself. That’s a first for him. “It’s a way of lifting myself out of my comfort zone and trying new things, a way of challenging myself,” he says. “It turns out it can be very confronting to hear your own voice if you aren’t used to it. I still have to learn a lot as a singer.”
Badenhorst sings in Dutch with an unmistakable Antwerp accent, arguably a brave choice. He doesn’t hide himself behind English. “I think you can express yourself best in your mother tongue,” he says. “Sometimes when I hear non-native speakers sing in English, it really sounds trivial. As a listener I am looking for frailty and honesty in the instrumentalist or the singer. That’s why I wanted to sing in Dutch.”
Rawfishboys (Joachim Badenhorst & Brice Soniano), Concertgebouw Brugge, 5 September
Photo by Hatakeyama Motonari
