Photo: Brit jazz hit Empirical.
If Cecil B. De Mille had been a jazz fan, then he would have probably invented the North Sea Jazz festival. In fact, it's hard to believe he didn't since in scale and ambition, there's nothing else to compare to it.
Halfway through I wished I'd taken up the local rugby team's offer to train with them during the closed season. Circuit training and five kilometre jogs three times a week would have been the perfect preparation to get around Rotterdam's massive Ahoy complex with its 15 simultaneous performance stages spread over four floors. Over 200 concerts took place over the course of three days - the cast numbered, if not thousands, then at least 900 musicians. It was impossible not to feel that wherever you were, whoever you were watching, something better was going on elsewhere. So it was something of a tactical error when one young vocalist I dipped in to see decided to sing the standard 'Goodbye' halfway through her set and sent most of her audience off in search of the next concert. Looking below the usual list of suspects headlining the festival - your Chick Corea's, Wynton Marsalis', Ornette Coleman's, Dave Holland's and Randy Brecker's - a seismic shift was also noticeable. European jazz was the major theme - with the finals of the European Broadcasting Union's European Jazz Competition for musicians under 30 (won handsomely by the tradition-based British band Empirical); and superb performances elsewhere from Ketil Bjørnstadt, Eric Vloeimans, Michael Schiefel, Britain's Zoe Rahman and Ernest Reijseger and Louis Sclavis. I was thinking about this during a brilliant set by the Italian piano legend Enrico Pieranunzi, when a thought that I had been turning over in my mind surfaced again: since American jazz musicians rely on Europe for up to 80 per cent of their income stream, what will happen to American jazz, whose economy cannot support its own musicians, if Europeans continue to increase their representation on the European festival circuit? Or maybe it was exhaustion kicking in. It was, after all, one of the last concerts of the festival. When I got up to go 10 minutes from the end, even this audience was wearing that glazed expression marathon runners adopt when the finishing line is in sight.
Stuart Nicholson writes about jazz for the Observer Music Monthly.
