A (small) taste of jazz

Copenhagen is currently in the grip of its world famous jazz festival: http://www.jazzfestival.dk/Start.aspx. Since we missed it last year--we'd just arrived in Denmark and were a bit tired and disoriented--we decided that it was time to get a taste of jazz, Danish-style. During the week of the festival, the city is literally bursting with jazz: from tiny backstreet pubs all the way up to well-known performers playing in the city's glamorous opera house, the air is thick with saxophone and shuffling rhythms.

After work on Friday we made our way to the city center to meet up with Dorothee, one of my colleagues at the Center. The plan was to grab some pizza and beer, sit in the sun in Kongens Have (Copenhagen's oldest park, right in the middle of downtown) and soak up some free jazz. The first two parts of our plan were actualized; the last part, not so much. It turns out that the free outdoor concert series we were expecting to find in Kongens Have didn't kick off until Saturday morning.

So a bit later, swollen with pizza and Carlsberg, we decided to wander around and enjoy the lovely weather and late sunlight. Eventually we did happen upon an outdoor concert not too far away, down near the water in Nyhavn ("New Harbor")--which lasted all of half a song. Or rather, the concert likely consisted of more than half a song but that's all we caught before it ended. At least it was an improvement over last year. And I managed to get a picture of both the band (including some barely conscious drunken reveler leaning on the stage, rockin' his straight from the '80's denim) and the audience. It really looks like were right in the thick of things, enjoying the jazz fest in all its improvisational glory. Oh, well. At least we tried.

Though we didn't hear much jazz, we did later get to see a guy juggling fire whilst teetering around on an extra-tall unicycle. Here are some shots of the evening: http://picasaweb.google.com/JoelWKrueger/FridayNightWDorotheeJuly