Jazz Fest

To get away from HMRC, job applications, house projects, and a rather onerous research project for my final act at Preventable Surprises, I got on a train to Derry yesterday with five of my Swing Belfast friends. This weekend is Derry’s Jazz Festival, with something like between 70 and 100 performances per day at venues all over the city (say each venue has three to six performers per day and the programme lists 53 venues--madness). I find event guides for things like this so overwhelming that I delegate to Swing Belfast friends the choice over where to go when. If you scroll through the event listings you’ll see what I mean.
So we hopped around from the Guildhall to the City Hotel to the Craft Village (outdoor stage) to Bishops Gate Hotel to pubs like the Blackbird and the Dungloe.

Above are Curtis and Raquel and David and Shanis. Raquel is Spanish and Shanis Italian, so we are very international, don’t ya know. I had some very good dances, where I was proud of my ability to follow the lead’s lead. And I had some not so good dances where I suddenly had two left feet. If I’ve been going from 3pm to 11 pm or midnight, it is the later dances where things fall apart. Here is a ska band I went to hear by myself b/c I love ska.

Last year I came to this event alone, wandering lonely as a cloud, and this year I had about a dozen Swing Belfast people to hang with. So that was a big win. It’s so much more fun to have people to hang out and chat with, never mind getting in the odd dance. I tried to take a photo at Bishops Gate Hotel--where the fantastic Italian band Jumpin’ Up played. But, in a typical techno fail, I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the flash on my digital camera.
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