Mawhorter Sabbatical 2013: Birthday Weekend: Swing Jazz, Sundial, Waterwheels, Cheesecake Competition, Portuguese Fireworks

Friday afternoon Isabella and I walked over to the plaza in front of the train station to hear a French swing jazz band. (Isabella is a French mathematician who lives upstairs; she plays flute in a jazz band back in Toulouse and we've been getting together to play recorder duets. Yesterday we played alto-tenor duets with our new tenors, switching parts so we could each play tenor.) Anyway, yesterday was SWING-Night, commemorating a jazz performance and jam session 65 years ago, the first public revival of jazz after the war. Of course, the mayor gave a speech, recounting how jazz fans wrote the numbers of records they wanted on their fingers to buy the records under the counter without saying anything and jazz bands switched timing mid-measure from swing to march time when police entered a club. Jazz was considered decadent by the Nazis and went underground. After the war, Hannover was in the British zone, but an American jazz band from Frankfurt came in 1948 for a concert and afterwards the jazz musicians of Hannover gathered for an all-night jam session broadcast by the local radio station, bringing jazz out in the open again.

The first band was a guitar-bass trio playing French swing from the 40s. A Lindy-Hop Club showed up, some dressed in period costume and put on a show. They danced from the first song till the last band. We danced a bit also. The plaza was surrounded by a French market, and Isabella helped us choose cheese and duck sausage. Rich and Isabella's husband, Philippe, showed up and they invited us home for wine, cheese, sausage, and olives. Afterwards, Rich and I walked back to hear some of the last band and the Lindy-hoppers were still going strong.

SWING-Night, Train Station Plaza

Lindy-Hop Club Dancing at SWING-Night

The weather report for Saturday was not encouraging, so we had made no plans, waiting to see what the day would bring. We decided to chance it and took the bikes on the regional train to Wennigsen to ride from there to a brook in the Deister hills where someone had built a series of waterwheels that run fanciful whirligig toys. Other than that, we had no plans and not even a decent map. When we got off the train, there was a billboard with a local map and a poster announcing a town cheesecake competition at 2:30! Since I usually ask for cheesecake for my birthday cake, we wanted to make sure that we got back in time to buy some. However, it was hard to get on our way, since the village was full of fun things to see: a 13th century monastery, an over-the-top sundial, a double helix kinetic statue, a watermill, a local craft exhibit, and wonderful brick and half-timbered houses.