Every year, this 'free' assignment is issued to a promising Dutch composer, who is then given the chance to perform his or her composition in a lineup as desired. The composition assignment is a joint project of the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Nederlandse Jazzdienst (Dutch Jazz Service), the knowledge and information center for jazz and improv music. 2003's chosen one is the composer/saxophonist Jasper Blom (1965). As a composer, Jasper Blom is very active. Apart from the fact that his own projects often consist largely of his own music, more and more, his compositions are being performed by musicians of various plumage, recently including David Kweksilber and Guus Jansen, Marc van Roon, Miguel Martinez and Juraj Stanic. As a saxophonist with an intensely personal style, Jasper Blom has been a striking figure in both jazz and improvised music for years now. After having won the European Jazz Award twice and graduating cum laude, he spent six years in New York, where he took lessons with Dave Liebman and Bob Brookmeyer. In 1993, he and Joost Patocka founded the group Five up High, with whom he made two CDs, writing most of the material himself. In addition, he is the head of the transatlantic quartet Jasper Blom's Dialect, with pianist David Berkman and drummer Matt Wilson. Red, Yellow & Blue is the trio made up of the three very talented Dutch musicians Blom, bass player Frans van der Hoeven and drummer Martijn Vink. This group frequently experiments with electronics, as could be heard at last year's edition of the festival. For the festival performance of his composition assignment, Blom chose to expand the Red, Yellow & Blue trio with, among others, the reed players David Kweksilber and Maarten Ornstein (who himself received the composition assignment in 2001) and, on laptop, Wouter Snoei.
