Aarhus Jazz Festival
Various Venues
Aarhus, Denmark
July 9-16, 2022

With around 283,000 citizens, Aarhus is the second-largest city in Denmark, and the role of playing second fiddle doesn't suit a city that tends to be overshadowed by its big brother, the capital Copenhagen. Or so you would think. In fact, the vibe in Aarhus is laid back and relaxed. It's not without reason that the city is known as the "City of Smiles." However, in recent years Aarhus has become more aware of its status as a big city.

In 2017, Aarhus was the cultural capital of the European Union and the art museum ARoS, one of the biggest in Europe, is literally a monument for art with its towering building and Olafur Eliasson's Your Rainbow Panorama, a gigantic circular walkway in glass in all colors of the spectrum. Situated at the top of the ARoS building, it has become a brand for the city, signaling diversity and playfulness.

These are also words that could be used to characterize the jazz scene in the city, and it all comes together during the jazz festival with more than 300 concerts. Aarhus Jazz Festival started in 1989 and since then it has become inextricably linked to the identity and infrastructure of the city. This is underlined in this year's jazz poster that shows the tracks from the light rail that opened in 2017, but with a twist: the tracks are rendered as the strings of a bass. To put it another way, jazz is the soundtrack of the city and during festival time, it can be heard all over the city from traditional venues to open-air scenes and the art museum. There's even a venue in the old city, the world's first museum for the history and culture of market towns, where you get to travel back in time and experience Aarhus as the city used to be.

One of the most charming places to hear music is the jazz raft situated at Flemming Bamse J?rgensens Plads near the yachting harbor. The musicians here are playing on a raft and it's not unlikely that people will drift by on the water while the music is playing.

Kiosk, a young Aarhus band, was one of the acts performing on the raft. Poet and rapper, Maj ?rskov, said that their music was hard to explain and instead of trying to do this, they would play the music. And so they did. They started out with "Primadonna," the opening track from the album T?t nok p? (Gateway Music, 2021). Supported by a groovy bass line, ?rskov rapped words that are too dirty to be quoted here, but as she explained, the point of the song was exactly to provide a kind of poetic relief where words and thoughts that would otherwise be taboo are allowed to be expressed.

Clearly, Kiosk is a band that goes its own way. In a time of political mistrust, "Privatliv" (private life) was a quirky homage to the Danish system and all the things that do work in the Danish society. On other hand, the text "Hvidovre" (the name of a Danish city) was about being pregnant and "Uro i systemet" (unease in the system) was a Latinate piece that transmitted a joy that transplanted itself to the audience. An artist was making live drawings, people danced, and free beers were handed out. It was a feeling of joy that Kiosk matched perfectly.

Kiosk managed to portray a special Aarhus feeling and the spirit of the city was also the subject of saxophonist and composer Nana Pi's major work "The Sound of Aarhus," commissioned especially for the festival. Pi led her own Extemporize Orchestra that uses a compositional sign language she has developed, which gives plenty of room for improvisation in the moment. They played one long composition that merged field recordings with the sound of instruments that sometimes imitated the horns of cars in traffic and other times came closer to the sounds of nature.

The seagull became a motif. As Pi explained, this bird is an emblem of Aarhus, but there were also sounds of city hall bells and train announcements mixed in with the music. In fact, the music moved like a slow train, an organic, moving landscape of sound with rain and birds, but also drilling, scat song and multiple voices. At one point, Eric Clapton's song "Tears in Heaven" was quoted, but otherwise this was a very local piece that was tied specifically to a place.

To underline Pi's point about the sea gulls, a formation of sea gulls could be seen during the concert by