last night cathy and i were walking home from the dresden tent festival… it’s a bit like the Garden Of Unearthly Delights at the adelaide festival, or the Festival Garden at the festival of sydney, but younger, more creative, dirtier, cheaper, heaps more entertainment, open later, more fun, better art, later parties.
Mic has played three or four half hour shows each night in his little tent, to really great audiences.  they gasp, they clap, they cheer.
there are a dozen little tents with a show in each, you buy three tickets on your way in and choose which three shows you will see. the last one ends at midnight.  then a band plays in the main bar for an hour or so.  then everybody hangs around the art installations making it totally impossible to go home because there’s always a puppeteer or a record store guy you really wanted to talk to.

so last night we were walking home around 3am, and as i stopped to take some midnight photos of the best painted bar in dresden we heard singing.  i thought, since the pub was closed, that a few locals had locked themselves in with some of the staff, and they were singing traditional german pop songs from the 90s.  but then i realised it was coming from further down the street, which is where we were walking anyway.  so we walked towards it.  then the singing stopped, and a saxophone started playing.  it was pretty good.  then more, a bit new orleansy, horn lines weaving around each other from the darkness.
dresden doesn’t have many streetlights.
and the newtown part of town is pretty dark and grey at night with all that stone.
so we walked towards the railway underpass, which is pretty much exactly like the train bridge over eddie avenue if it only had one street light and belmore park was a cemetary.  and eddie avenue was paved with cobble stones and you could walk down the middle of the street and only a bicycle would run you down.
so we got to the bridge and turned under it, and there they were. in almost complete blackness, two boys with a saxophone and a trombone, at 3:30am, playing their little hearts out.  i stopped to listen, and a man walked up to me and said a long sentence in German which included the phrase “free jazz trio”.  so when he finished talking i said in english (my first and last language) “yes but it’s only a duet”.  and he said in English “they are a free jazz trio, they just finished a rehearsal, the third guy has gone to his bed and they have had enough drink now that they want to play again”.

it was totally great.
and after another 5 hours sleep, i’m heading out for another day.

i’ll put a photo here eventually

but first i’ll put it on flickr
but it isn’t there yet
https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewlorien/