Jazz

Here an old draft, I forgot to post it :-) + the draft was already about the jazz festival from quite a while back, so this is really OLD :P

>>>

Ok, I was supposed to write about this a long long time ago. Right after the jazz festival would have been good, for example. However, I wanted to write about one specific jazz encounter and I left the flyer with the name of the band and the quest pianist at home :-) Every time again :P

Every year there's the Maastricht Jazzfestival and since I'm a great fan of people playing live good music I didn't want to miss it!

It always hard to pick your bands from one sentence in a little booklet, so after the first nice performance of the kora player Zoumana Diarra, Aba (Anne's djembé teacher) and the nice singer (I wouldn't call it jazz though ;-)) we went to a few less interesting bands.

However, Gerard found out that there was a guest performance of a very good piano player, Peter Beets. So after hanging out for a while (jazz players tend to be a bit late :P) they started playing after a short intro in which it became clear that the piano player and the rest of the band didn't know each other at all. The piano player saying to the bassist: sorry what's your name? and stating how he was "just a band member", while showing the opposite behavior. However, when they started playing my jaw dropped open and my feet started tapping, my god it was good!! I was completely fascinated. Music is interesting to me when it evokes some kind of emotion (like all art) and this sure did. I did think it was too bad that the pianist was showing how great he was all the time (he was really good i must admit), thereby overruling the other band members a bit. He was the center of the show, but the show was very entertaining.

Besides books there are not many things that can fascinate me for a couple of hours (no patience :P) but this performance was absolutely great! In the break we tried to see some gypsy jazz, but it had already finished, so we went back for more ;-). I went home completely high on music :-)

The day after I saw also an interesting Belgian band, but their music didn't sweep me off my feet like the night before. In the afternoon I went to the Zondag to chill out at Zoumana and Aba's music again, wonderful! In the evening there was also a very nice performance at the Thembi.

One of these guys was the bassist of the night before. They showed how jazz should be done or how playing together should be done. Watching each other, responding, giving each other space for their own improvs. It's a nicer way of playing together. And they were really good. (although I must admit that I still liked the piano-play of the night before still a bit more :P Damn that egocentric bastard! :P)

For those of you who missed it: dumb, dumb, dumb.. :P

In the spring there's the non-free part of the jazzfestival, so there's another chance! ;-)