I was in the midst of producing a cable program back in 1990 that highlighted an extremely talented actress and I needed some original music for the soundtrack. That was how I met Jan Halsema. Jan (pronounced "Yon") is originally from Holland but followed his love of Jazz to the States. Jan met with us - saxophone in hand. We described the purpose of the project and played a few sample styles of what we needed and within a few minutes Jan had produced the core of the soundtrack that we needed. We fast became friends and have done many projects in different realms of the Fine Arts over the years.

Jan is a career Jazzman starting at the young age of 15. However, his talents and genius have covered a lot of ground in the music and technical world. Jan’s instrument is an alto saxophone - there’s none better! - often compared to Charlie Parker "BIRD".
Mainstream Jazz is his his bread and butter, but hi-tech has allowed him to branch out successfully into other veins of Jazz, such as New Age, Musimagery, and "soundtrack compositions" for the theatrical stage.

With COMPUTERS and MIDI and AUDIO , Jan is able to create whatever backup band is necessary for the best sound of a musical number. Jan’s studio is filled with computers, wires, instruments, sheet music, and hundreds of floppies - with the purpose of creating the highest quality and best instrumentals to accompany his Jazz improvisations on sax and EWI. The EWI or Electronic Woodwind Instrument would best be described as a MIDI- sax tied to a computer, which lets him play the EWI as a sax but resulting in different  instrument sounds, such as Trumpet, Trombone, Organ etc.

Past the Mainstream improvisations and the club scenes of Europe and the US, Jan is an accomplished composer. With his musical parentage and education as a background, Jan is just as comfortable creating/composing new music. Earlier I mentioned his hundreds of floppies, most of then containing compositions that have never been heard by anyone outside the studio - mainstream style compositions, New Age, and Musimagery compositions.

- Jay D. James Pennington