North Sea Jazz Festival 2014
Rotterdam, Netherlands
July, 11, 2014

The North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam is the biggest indoor festival in Europe. It is organized by Mojo Concerts and The Security Company, both part of Live Nation Entertainment, a worldwide operating live event mega-organizer (240,000 events annually in 33 countries).

The amount of parallel concerts and big names in three days and nights— starting in the late afternoon—is dizzying. It also evokes a constant desire to see everything, to be somewhere else and hence be on the run permanently. It is a festival that is overcrowded nearly everywhere. It is the biggest indoor festival in Europe but has the smallest, ugliest press room ever experienced in festivals around the world.

But you are not forced into a lot of less pleasant things at such mega festivals. You can decide to focus and concentrate on a few quality things if you can find them in the programming. A key factor is the hall, just, too. It just so happened that this year's edition had an attractive program in the Madeira hall on the first festival day. The Madeira hall is the best hall in the festival building: good view; not too big; never overcrowded; and acceptable acoustics.

Madeira had four concerts in a row on the first festival day, with an intermission of 30 minutes between each concert: the premiere performance of the festival's annual commissioned composition;