New music and new friends at the German Windros Festival

To put it as it is: I had 4-5 really good days at the German Windros Festival in the days 5-9 September with new friends, lots of practice and some really fun concerts with talented people whom I met for the first time walk.

Accordion player Jesper Vinther (Phønix, Ostinat Ekspressen etc.) and I also had a few good concerts where people sat close and listened intently to the music and songs ('Roots Music auf Kjøbenhavn'), and to our stories and explanations. It was the first time we played together, even though we've known each other for many years, but Jesper is super professional, so it was a 'piece of cake', you can safely say. A mix of old songs and traditional dance tunes, spiced up with some of my compositions, all in new arrangements.

Jesper Vinther and I play our second concert at the Windros Festival. It's Sunday morning and people have turned up in large numbers to hear a hodgepodge of the bands that have played the previous days and are still at the festival at that time. Just as they do it on e.g. Halkær Festival.

I had always known that the big challenge would be working with the great Windros Festival Orchestra. There was a lot we had to learn from each other before we had to be in charge of the festival's big main concert. But 2-3 days of intense work resulted in an absolutely terrific performance on Saturday evening from 22:00 to 23:20, a concert with lots of new music, lots of little mistakes, and lots of happy singing, dancing and laughing - and also of and for very serious – audiences.

It was fun to be able to play along to the music of good German, English and Scottish colleagues, and at least as much fun when they played along to my music in numbers like 'Ingel's Waltz', 'I got a sadness so big' , 'Windmøller' and a crazy and super simple Cajun tune that I heard at an American festival once, and which we ended up using as a fun encore where everyone in the audience screamed along - it was one of the highlights for me. The concert was also recorded for German radio!

If everything goes as I hope, I will go there again next year with a good friend and playing partner, but more about that when the agreements are in place.

A big thank you to Jesper Vinther, to my international colleagues – and now also friends – and not least to mandolinist Wolfgang Meyering who arranged the whole thing. And to the audience – without you this lifestyle would not make sense

Here you can see a small Facebook video where, the day after the main concert, i.e. Sunday morning, we play Gavin Marwick's 'Firedance', a nice little suite with a very good movement in it, at the festival's closing concert.