Avalanche Quartet

Avalanche Quartet, a Dutch group, is renowned for their exquisite versions of Leonard Cohen songs. Henk Hofstede (Nits) meets Leonard Cohen in a TV-studio in Brussels in 1988. Henk has been a huge fan for many years and sums up his courage to talk to the man. They have dinner together at the cafeteria of the station. Cohen tells Henk about an upcoming world tour and how he doesn't have a band. And he asks whether the Nits would be willing to go out on tour as his band... Unfortunately the Nits are on their own extended tour after the success of their album In The Dutch Mountains, a tour which leads through Europe and on to Canada, New York and even Moscow. Henk has to refuse the golden offer. Years later he still wakes up at night as he was dreaming of that world tour they didn't play. A couple of years later, Henk put on a pilgrimage with movie-director Seppo Pietikainen, his friend from Finnland. They make a short film about their voyage to Hydra,the island where Cohen wrote his first songs. For the Dutch edition of a book by the Belgian writer Marc Hendrickx in 2005, Henk records the CD "Yesterday's Tomorrow" with nine songs of Cohen's and one of his own about the pilgrimage to Hydra. These sober and authentic arrangements are developped with Pim Kops (De Dijk) and Marjolein van der Klauw (Powderblue). Arwen Linnemann, the ex-bass player of the Nits, joins for some of these tracks. Thus the Avalanche Quartet is born. They do some TV and radio-gigs and the CD receives good reviews. In 2007 the Avalanche Quartet has done concerts in Holland, Switzerland and France, some with guest-guitarist Oli Hartung, with whom the quartet has recorded some more tracks for the release of the album "Leonard Cohen Songs". In the years that follow they perform for a growing audience that loves their exquisite versions of these beautiful songs. The second album "Rainy Night House" has been released in September 2013. It contains a mix of new studio-tracks and live-recordings.