Heleen Schuttevaêr

Biography

Heleen Schuttevaêr came to jazz by an unusual road. Before she led bands, she worked as a music and fashion journalist in the Netherlands, writing for the Utrechts Nieuwsblad and the GPD press service and interviewing artists such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Charles Aznavour; she also presented the pop television program Twien and reported for VIVA. She later worked as a bandleader and took up serious jazz study, learning from Dutch pianists Bert van den Brink and Michiel Borstlap and from New York teachers including Barry Harris, Bruce Barth and Dena DeRose.

At the piano she sings a repertoire running from 1920s swing through the golden age of vocal jazz, with standards, blues, ballads and bossa nova, and names Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae and Monty Alexander among her influences. Her groups carry playful names that count the band: Three, Four or Five Times A Lady. In 2002 she started Club Jazz, a monthly series at Cultureel Centrum 't Hoogt in Utrecht, which produced the 2007 album Club Jazz.

She has been part of Holland Tunnel since the start. In 2000 she and her sister Paulien Lethen opened Holland Tunnel Gallery Paros in Greece, and she played the 2018 opening of the Newburgh gallery. In May 2022 she led the Holland Tunnel Jazz Quartet with Ron Jackson, Christopher Dean Sullivan and Aaron Latos for the gallery's 25th anniversary, and in November 2023 she led the same circle at Final Blast, the Newburgh closing party.

Practice. Piano and vocals; swing, vocal jazz standards, blues, ballads, bossa nova and Latin grooves, plus her own compositions in a soul-jazz vein.