North Sea Jazz Festival, 1981

The next of the old photos I dug up in my parents house bring together photos with my passion for Jazz music. In the early 80s I visited the yearly North Sea Jazz Festivals in The Hague. The pictures I recovered were from the first time I went to the festival and I used a Kodak 400ASA film in my Pentax ME camera with a 70-150mm zoom lens f3.5. As long as you didn't use flash photography to disturb the artists or blocked the view of other guests, taking photographs was allowed. For the first photos I took, from the Monty Alexander Quintet featuring Ernestine Anderson, I just sat down in the public and raised my camera occasionally.
For the next session I quickly figured out that it would be much more interesting to take the photo from the side, capturing the profile of the artists with much less distraction in the background. I'm quite happy with the photo of Archie Shepp with his Quartet together with Johnny Meijer on accordion. From what I have read on the Internet, this must have been a bit of a special session as the next year Archie Shepp had "discovered" Johnny Meijer as a Jazz accordionist and they were featured together. The following years I used faster films, the last time I visited I had a 1600ASA colour film. Unfortunately after years of searching my parents house, I must conclude that those negatives have been lost :-(

Camera: Pentax ME, lens: 70-150mm - f3.5, Kodak Gold 400 ASA