The Night’s Got Rhythm (With George Stips … or Robert Jan Gershwin)

The twelfth shape is the Morning Ferry

In the world of Nits, shapes of modes of transportation are aplenty. Nits love being on the road and it shows. But there’s one particular “on-the-road song” that stands out in its bizarreness. It is “Strangers Of The Night”. After listening to the dusky live version of this “In The Dutch Mountains” song, you might – just like me – decide that this obscure song deserves a place on your list of best Nits songs. Nits aren’t traveling by train or plane this time, they are catching the ferry, just like Bob Dylan was in 1966, waiting at the Aust terminal on his way to Cardiff, photographed by Barry Feinstein in an iconic Iceberg like moment.

When Nits gathered the inspiration for the song, probably during one of their tour travels, and brought it back to their laboratory in Amsterdam – to the building with no windows – it was transformed into a fascinating form of music. A shape of night brusquely and abruptly changing into morning. The interaction between impressions of world and the closed off space of De Werf has led to quite a few unusual outcomes over the years – I’m thinking of “Around The Fish” or “Under A Canoe” … And this song perhaps takes the cake in this respect. 

Some well paced, sparse, wait-and-see strums of the guitar open a space of dialogue for a few strangers of the night to get better acquainted. Henk Hofstede introduces this nighttime story in a few lines with the pure and candid reserve that is so typical of him – that immediately have you hang on every word he says, that have you prick your ears for what is to come. Which is nothing less than a most ingenious conversation between a guitarist, his voice, a bassist, a pianist and a drummer. “We’re strangers of the night – Looking at each other in the window light – You say: let’s go this way tonight”. And they’re off. In this dim nightlight the foursome feel and hear one another in this shapely song of darkness. Indeed soon the song takes on the meta-shape of an improvisation carried out on the spot by four jazz musicians meeting on the spur of the moment on an impromptu stage. Some careful propositions of the bass, piano and drums soon lead to an explosion of sounds in the darkness, sturdy and determined, un unexpected wave of a concentrated rhythmic scene ensues from the piano that takes over this jazzy-nightclub feel of a song and makes it follow in the footsteps of a fascinating rhythm in the spirit of Gershwin. All the instruments join in on the percussive temper of the song’s rhythm. And Robert Jan turns into a percussionist pur sang at the piano.

Everything about this song is fascinating. It sounds like a jazz improvisation that gets a little out of hand. The song is full of shapes that hide in the nightlight: “Body is braille”; “Your hand is cupping the light of a match”; “The foldings of clothings”; “Potato faces”.  Body is braille, feeling your way in the dark. The chaos of traveling. There’s a sense of claustrophobia that suddenly appears in the song: an outburst like a thumping headache. Confined in the back of a car, the lyricist’s head is exploding with impressions of the night, words and sentences become strangers of the mind, weird and unconnected, a sudden burst of inspiration, random thoughts seem to take over in this sort of dream state between waking and sleeping. In a low, pitch black voice of which the shape has been distorted by the shadows of the night, Henk Hofstede discontinues the improvisation in a dark curtain of … rain. These strangers of the night certainly met in an encounter of an unanticipated stroke of genius!
In the darkness of the mind’s confusion between night and day, the musicians are on their way to catch the morning ferry. 
Night was an unexpected, brief insight of brilliance. The morning ferry is waiting in a dark … curtain… of rain.
What a song!

Joke Roelandt, June 2024