Frans de Kok

This article describes the Dutch conductor, composer and musician Frans de Kok ; for the Dutch goalkeeper, see Frans Kok .

Frans de Kok (born January 18, 1924 in Tilburg , Netherlands ; † May 4, 2011 in Mol , Belgium ) was a Dutch conductor , arranger , composer and musician . At the Eurovision Song Contest in Madrid in 1969 , when four different nations won the competition, he led the orchestra of the Dutch winner Lenny Kuhr .

Live and act

Frans de Kok (left) with Lenny Kuhr after winning the Eurovision Song Contest 1969 on their return at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

Coming from a family of merchants from Tilburg , de Kok broke off his secondary education at the age of 16 and began an apprenticeship as a businessman. In 1943 he was brought to Germany where he had to do forced labor. After the bombing of Cologne , he managed to escape; during this time he taught himself to play the accordion . Other instruments that he taught himself as an autodidact were the piano , guitar and bass .

In the 1940s and 1950s he played and arranged for the " Joe Andy Orchester", a jazz orchestra with which he toured the Netherlands and what was then West Germany (mainly playing for US troops stationed there) and Switzerland. In 1957 he came to De Zaaiers , a radio orchestra of the AVRO , which was founded in April 1952 under the direction of Jos Cleber . Subsequently, he worked for years on various music projects on Dutch television and was asked by Rudi Carrell in 1962 to take part in his shows with his own orchestra as a conductor. From this time on in particular, de Kok wrote the arrangements for the Carrell shows and numerous other television programs. During this time he also worked with various Dutch artists, including Boudewijn de Groot , on whose debut album he was involved.

In 1964 he won the Silver Rose of Montreaux with the De Robinson Crusoë Show , created especially for this competition by Rudi Carrell , with which Carrell gained international fame beyond the borders of his home country . A year later he directed the orchestra of the show Grand Gala du Disque . In 1969 de Kok jumped in for Dolf van der Linden after the Dutch refused to participate in the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest in Madrid . In the later competition, in which four nations emerged as winners, de Kok won as orchestra conductor with the Dutch singer Lenny Kuhr .

Around this time he stopped working for public radio and concentrated on expanding Dutch record stores. In 1967 he opened his first record store in his hometown of Tilburg. After building a profitable chain of record stores over a short period of time, he sold it in 1980 and specialized primarily in software distribution. Frans de Kok retired in 1998 at the age of 74 and living in Balen-Wezel in the province of Antwerp . De Kok, who was nicknamed "Father of Weeping Singers" because of his friendly character, died on May 4th 2011 at the age of 87 in the municipality of Mol in Belgium .

Web links

Commons : Frans de Kok  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Frans de Kok on andtheconductoris.eu (English)