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A Rambling Personal Timeline
Hi. My name is Jan-Edward Vogels. I'll begin at the beginning. My birthplace in Amsterdam harbor. I was born at home, attended by a midwife. "Home" was a "company apartment dwelling," just a few feet from the waterfront. It was located on the property of a large merchant shipping company where my grandfather worked. In post-war Holland, housing was tight and my newly-wed parents were living in a spare room at my grandparents.
 On that day began a lifelong need for proximity to the sea. The sound of water was present from the very beginning. As were the ancient sounds and mystical aromas of international commerce. 1950's merchant ships still carried cargo in open cargo holds, on open pallets, packaged in burlap sacks and giant wicker baskets. The smells of cotton, rubber, bananas, cocoanut, hemp, spices, grains and foods permeated everything, night and day. A sensory feast to inspire a young imagination.
Many of the crew on Dutch freighters were from Indonesia. When ships docked in Amsterdam, the Indonesians were housed in large company dormitories next door to where I lived. Finding themselves like fish out of water, they kept to themselves and engaged in traditional pastimes, such as kite making. They made magnificent kites. Brightly colored dragons and serpents that filled the sky. Set against Amsterdam's dreary harbor district, with often gray, rainy weather, this was a feast for my eyes. The men spoke a language I did not understand. But I was fascinated by their gold-capped teeth, dark bloodshot eyes and their kitemaking. (While watching from a polite distance, of course.)
In time, I learned to build my own simple kite.
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My Grandparents were both influential in making music available to me. When I was 4 or 5, my Grandmother gave me access to her small, but precious classical record collection. The first recordings I fell in love with were Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor and his Piano Concerto #1 in G minor. I played them endlessly, until I could "conduct" them by heart. A few years later, after my family had moved to America, I began to study the violin. I eventually settled on the piano. As my studies became more serious, my Grandmother "influenced" my Grandfather to buy me a Steinway baby grand piano; an instrument that was to inspire me for many years.
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 Soon after graduating from high school, I left Southern California and bummed around Europe for a year. I soon discovered that not having a piano around was making me crazy. (The downside of the piano is that it is not exactly portable.) So it was then that I acquired my first guitar, a cheap, plywood, German made Framus.
While hitchhiking around the continent with this indestructable instrument and a simple beginner's guitar chord chart, I managed to teach myself how to play. Since I had only received training in classical music up to that point, I didn't know any "pop" tunes to speak of. So I started inventing my own.
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The Swimming Pool Story
When I was five or six years old, Robbie, my neighbor and friend of the same age, challenged me to an adventure that broke every rule in my parents' rule book. On a dare, I followed him across the street and out of the housing tract and into the adjoining farm lands. We rode our tricycles over roads that traced the surrounding pastures and farms. He showed me a trick of racing his tricycle down a steeply sloping river embankment, turning at the last minute to keep from skidding into the water. Without hesitating, I followed his example and promptly plunged headfirst into the murky river. The sides of the canal at the water’s edge were cut vertical and offered me nothing to hold on to as I struggled to keep myself above water. I was only able to grasp fists full of grass and weeds that pulled easily out of the wet embankment. I kept sinking backwards ever deeper into the water. My winter clothes, increasingly heavy with water, were slowly pulling me down. I was losing this sudden life-and-death battle for surface and for air.
 A hundred yards further down the road, a group of nuns out for a walk had witnessed my short ride into the water and were now running to come to my rescue. Owing to the steep incline of the riverbank, they had to link arms to form a human chain so that the last nun on the chain could stretch out horizontally over the water and pluck me out. I had lost consciousness by then and I came to, lying on my back, up on the road, encircled by these nuns looking down at me.
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A few years later, after my family had moved to Southern California, my mother enrolled me in a swimming class taught by Olympic Gold Medalist Greta Anderson. Mother knew that I needed an exceptional teacher to overcome my understandable fear of the water. These lessons were to accomplish this and much more. I soon learned to swim at a junior competitive level, effortlessly scooting through the water like an otter pup.
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Twenty years later, on a hot summer evening, with an orange, smog-induced sunset, I was relaxing in a warm backyard pool high up in the Santa Monica Mountains, where I was inspired to write “The Swimming Pool."
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I am now working on a new project with my friends Eduardo del Signore and Federico Ramos. Eduardo is producing and arranging the tracks. Federico is contributing his amazing guitar work. And Marcel Adjibi is bringing his percussion instruments along for the ride.
(More to come)
(Last Update: May 29, 2005)
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