Dutch cabaret star Herman van Veen recently turned 65: ‘What better present than a career award?’, the jury of the Edison Oeuvre Prize must have thought. Van Veen received the award, that is rarely given out, for his “enormous body of work and his extraordinary contribution to Dutch music”.
A translation from the English, ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen, was the first of Van Veen’s many appointments with commercial succes. He also sang a Dutch version of Ralph McTell’s ‘Little Girl on the Bicycle’. Later on, Van Veen recorded entire albums in English that brought him as far as Broadway and Carnegie Hall in New York. Prolific as always (Van Veen is a singer, a painter, a writer, a composer and a violinist), he also released cd’s in French and German, the latter being very succesful.
You can see Van Veen here on YouTube, performing ‘Laat me’ by the late Ramses Shaffy, who received the Edison Oeuvre Prize four years ago. In 2004, The Low Countries Yearbook presented an overview of Van Veen’s work.
Subscribe