Tom Dissevelt

Tom Dissevelt (1921 - 1989) was a Dutch jazz musician and electronic music pioneer. His mixture of jazz and experimental electronics is most widely-known in the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning short film "Glas" (1958). During the war years Dissevelt studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In 1955 he was hired as a bass player and arranger for the Dutch jazz orchestra The Skymasters. During this time he became interested in 12-tone serialism and listened often to the German radio, where he heard the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Anton Webern. He was invited by Philips to create electronic music in their Natlab studio in Eindhoven. It was here that he started collaborating with Dick Raaijmakers. Because Raaijmakers was under contract as a mere technician, he was not allowed to record music under his own name. Instead he used the pseudonym Kid Baltan ("Dik Natlab" in reverse). Together they released the ground-breaking album "The Fascinating World Of Electronic Music By Kid Baltan And Tom Dissevelt" in 1959. This album was re-released with different track titles in 1962 as "Electronic Music" by The Electrosoniks in 1962 and as "Song Of The Second Moon: The Sonic Vibrations Of Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan" in 1968. Dissevelt replaced Raaijmakers with another technician when he recorded his 1963 solo album "Fantasy In Orbit: Round The World With Electronic Music By Tom Dissevelt". Besides composing electronic music, Dissevelt had his own jazz orchestra, the Tom Dissevelt Orchestra, with which he recorded with his sister-in-law, the Dutch jazz singer Rita Reys. The emergence of pop music in the 1960s meant that there would be no more work for his orchestra, which he eventually disbanded. Dissevelt's compositions have been appearing on various compilations in recent years on labels such as Basta, Trunk Records and QDK Media. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.