Eric Vloeimans is an award-winning jazz trumpeter, songwriter, and record producer. With his crisp attack and rich tone, he is arguably the most famous jazz trumpeter in the Netherlands. Throughout his long career, Vloeimans has consistently colored outside defined genre lines. He continually melds jazz with influences ranging from classical, pop music, folk, and even electronica by using a wide array of effects on his horn.
V-Flow is a limited distribution box that compiles some of the trumpeter's best work as a leader, alongside significant sideman sessions. Even those who have his twelve Challenge releases, from 1994's First Floor through to 2009's Heavens Above! will likely find a few previously unheard gems on V-Flow, most significantly the more than half of his debut as a leader, No Realistics (Art in Jazz/Via, 1992), previously out of print and now remastered for a chock-full collection that's clocks in at just under six hours.
Since graduating from the Rotterdam Conservatorium with honors in the late 1980s, in addition to time spent at the prestigious New School in New York, Vloeimans has gradually but inexorably and inevitably become one of the best-known of Holland's next generation of jazz musicians, a small but potent collective that also includes guitarists Jesse van Ruller and Anton Goudsmit, saxophonists Benjamin Herman and Yuri Honing, and keyboardist Michiel Borstlap. Vloeimans has comfortably married a clear knowledge and reverence of the American jazz tradition to hints of European classicism, occasional shots of futuristic electronic, and no shortage of the absurdity endemic to the New Dutch Swing of musicians like internationally known drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg, both part of the first wave of their homeland's jazz in the 1960s, when it began to shake off its largely imitative approach and assert its own distinctive personality and aesthetic.
