Ernst Van 't Hoff and His Hot Wartime Dance Band

Dutch pianist and trumpeter Ernst Van 't Hoff (the last name is also sometimes spelled Van't Hoff and Van t'Hoff) led one of the most exciting and swinging German dance bands (Tanzorchester, in German) of the 1940s, which would ultimately cause him quite a bit of trouble during the years of WWII. Born in Zandvoort, Holland, in 1908, Van 't Hoff had been playing professionally since the 1920s, mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium, working with popular bandleaders such as Robert de Kers, among others. In the mid-1930s, Van 't Hoff decided it was time to lead his own band, but success eluded his organization in these initial years, and he was forced to work as a sideman off and on with de Kers's Cabaret Kings and various radio orchestras.

By the time the war broke out, Van 't Hoff was leading his own band again, and in 1940 he even signed a recording contract with the prestigious German label Deutsche Grammophon. At that point, Holland was occupied by Nazi forces, who sent Van 't Hoff to Dresden and then to Berlin, where the band appeared at the Delphi Filmpalast, and its music was soon met with public acclaim. Though the Nazis often used jazz and swing as a vehicle for propaganda (the infamous recordings by Charlie & His Orchestra included in the Proper Records box set Swing Tanzen Verboten are prime examples of this), they considered the style as "undesirable music" (unerwünschte Musik, in German) and as such, it was banned in all Nazi-occupied territories. The sound of Van 't Hoff's band, with its rousing versions of American tunes (Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" and "Pennsylvania 6-5000," for example) and its swinging original compositions, was strongly influenced by jazz, and this would eventually bring the bandleader to the attention of the Gestapo. This in turn led to Van 't Hoff's being sent back to the Netherlands in 1943, where he would keep working with radio orchestras until 1944, when he relocated to Belgium.

After the war, Van 't Hoff restricted his musical activity to Belgium and Holland, leading orchestras with varying degrees of success. By the early '50s he was living in Brussels, where his band had an engagement at the celebrated Ancienne Belgique concert hall, and where he would die from a heart attack in 1955, aged only 46. Though some of Van 't Hoff's recordings are available on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet, they are not easy to find on CD. Though the Nederlands Jazz Archief offers two compilations of his '40s sides, the most affordable collection of Van 't Hoff's music currently on the U.S. market is a volume of the series Die Grossen Deutschen Tanzorchester (Membran, 2005), which is woefully short at only thirteen tracks, all of them recorded in 1941-42. This was the heyday of Van 't Hoff's orchestra, a tightly-knit unit that played excellent arrangements full of hot passages and some very exciting solos. There are a couple of covers of American tunes ("Ciribiribin" and the Johnny Mercer-Hoagy Carmichael collaboration "Oh, What You Said") but also some fine original compositions credited to the bandleader, such as "Fünfuhrtee bei Rüthli" and "Tanz im Carlton." The band sounds powerful and swinging on these sides, which pleased dancers greatly at the time, and two of the songs spotlight Van 't Hoff's most talented vocalist, Jan de Vries, who sings "Day by Day" and "I Never Dream" in very good English. All but forgotten nowadays, Ernst Van 't Hoff remains one of the most interesting of all Tanzorchester leaders, and as these recordings clearly show, his lively, jazzy music should appeal to the most demanding of big band swing aficionados.