Cornelis Hazevoet

Cornelis Jan "Kees" Hazevoet (born 15 March 1948) is a Dutch ornithologist and former professional jazz musician. He played piano, clarinet, and sometimes trumpet during his musical career, during which he was among the leading figures in the introduction of free jazz to the Netherlands. He is now curator of birds at the University of Lisbon's natural history museum, and an expert on the birds and other fauna of Cape Verde.

Early life Hazevoet was born in Amsterdam. His family and especially his mother had an interest in music; his parents kept classic jazz records, and got him started playing piano at a young age. He also had an interest in nature and biology from an early age. As a teenager he grew more interested in jazz, started playing trumpet and then clarinet, and attended workshops run by Theo Loevendie. At the time, many of his inspirations were jazz drummers, including Art Blakey. He went to school with bassist Arjen Gorter, who would collaborate with him again after they became professionals. Hazevoet hoped to enter a conservatory, but failed to be admitted.

Musical career Hazevoet started playing jazz in 1963, and in 1965 began to play free jazz, due in particular to the influence of the American avant-garde jazz pioneer Albert Ayler. During the 1960s, he was among the most prominent of the musicians who introduced free jazz to the Netherlands.

In 1970, he became secretary of the Foundation Jazz in Nederland, a Dutch jazz organisation. In 1972, Hazevoet received the VPRO/Boy Edgar Award, considered the most prestigious jazz award in the Netherlands. He was also one of the founders of the Amsterdam jazz club Bimhuis in 1973.

While other pioneers of the Dutch free jazz scene have become well known in the Netherlands and abroad, including Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink and Willem Breuker, Hazevoet had mostly been forgotten as a musician. This was largely because so few of his records were sold during his career. Pleasure, for example, only had 250 copies issued. In 2004, this album and Unlawful Noise were reissued by Atavistic Records as part of its "Unheard Music Series", bringing it and Hazevoet himself back into attention. Writing on All About Jazz in 2004, Andrey Henkin said the album had acquired a reputation as a mythical record which one would be privileged to hear, and described it as a work that stood out from the other recordings of the period but that perhaps did not deserve its reputation. Henkin compared Hazevoet to the famous American saxophonist Marzette Watts, saying they both "came and went in jazz relatively quickly" and worked with other musicians who had much longer careers. He served as editor of the journal Atlantic Seabirds (later Seabird), published by the Seabird Group, a British ornithological organisation dedicated to the study of seabirds. In addition to ornithology, he is also active in cetology, and coauthored the review article "Whales and Dolphins of the Cape Verde Islands", published in Contributions to Zoology in 2000.

Personal life Hazevoet is married and has a daughter. He and his family live in Lisbon most of the year, and in São Vicente, Cape Verde for another part of the year. While he mostly has stopped playing music, he wrote a biography of saxophonist Don Byas (whom he knew during the 1960s) in 2010–2011.