Marina warming up the crowd

Wow friends, amazing show, we really went wild and gave our best to Tallinn Jazzkaar Festival, one of our highest level, highest presure concerts so far on this tour. Big adventure to get our drummer to the concert on time. He arrived from Barcelona 5 minutes before going on stage and so we really where crazy excited and full of adrenaline because he made it – an hour before we were not so sure he could get there.

He had a problem in Prague, the plane arrived late and the conection flight for Tallinn didn’t wait, buff!!! it was a crazy story to find a combination. When we found it he had 45 minutes to get the ticket and to the plane to Stockholm, from there to Helsinki and then it was a 35 minute transit for the Tallinn plane (nearly impossible) and so the last connection didn’t happen, the finish flight delay was too much… so… what to do, he was there, 80 kms from Tallinn, 8:15 at night, and it was sea, not land, and no ferries left, no planes, no helicopters anymore… in the middle of this we were thinking of what songs we could do without drums, really difficult when you are used to a drumkit’s power…

Ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki

Then we find one last option, a chartered small plane and yes!! the festival people got it, eureka!!! Check this… Sergio had to go to another small airport in Helsinki and when he got there it was completely desert, and the instructions we gave him were to go into a round building and sit in a round metal chair area and wait until somebody, the pilot, would colect him, ja, ja… Weird, like a scary film gag (we were crazy laughing joking about his situation, ja, ja, ja) and so the guy arrived (looking like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, ja, ja, ja) Sergio got on this tiny small aeroplane full of nerves and arrived just on time…. and so we really blew the stage out with our tremendous rhythm and crazy music.

The crowd was a bit soft at the beginning — it’s usual, the first songs are with traditional hard old flamenco rhythms mixed with modern off-beat rhythms (Seguiriya-reggae-funk and bulería-funk-afro) but the people slowly started to get in to the trip and from the middle to the end got crazy together with us. We really enjoyed it so much and must thank a lot the festival organizers, they really where so patient with our drummer’s flight problems all the day and our Spanish timing, ja, ja (not so much, just joking…). But now we all know how worth it all this pressure was, really…

Special thanks to Lashka in Prague airport, Sergio speaks no other languages than Spanish, so after I explained to her the concert situation on the phone phone, she did the first big step in Prague when she literally grabbed Sergio and threw him into that Stockholm plane.

Tallinn from the ferry

…and what big contradictions in this life, at the same time we were playing this amazingly nice concert, the city of Tallinn was burning with demonstrators protesting against the removal of a statue, a memorial for the Russian militars who died in the 2nd world war… Really weird… Estonia has recovered their independence since not so long ago, after belonging to the Soviet Union for more than 40 years and with a third of their population now being Russian… imposible to understand what’s going on just with a few hours there… really complex… but the city was full of police and demonstrators breaking shop and bank windows and setting fires… too much to assimilate in one day.

Hey, thanks Estonia, Jazzkaar, it was a fantastic experience to share with you all.

                                                                                                                                                                        — Kresten