I played here with some five, six years ago with the saxophone trio, with Sonora, with
van der Mark and Gustafsson, and then with Ozin, and something else I can't remember.
No, that's it, it's a good time. Yeah, I like the town very much, I must say. It's a little bit I've seen.
Nearly, I mean, 90% of my work I do in foreign countries anyway. Germany is the clubs or the places I play, I can count on five fingers.
It's not much less. It's a good, reasonable place in Cologne. Cologne is quite good for the music, I would say.
The arts, or the fine arts, that's another business. There's much more money involved always.
And even for the contemporary music, because it's much more serious, you get some foundation, you get some boards and companies, but for this kind of music, we are always the lowest of everything.
So it's very, very hard to survive. What I do is travel all the time, wherever there is a chance. So that means you're one day in Oslo, and the other day in Lisbon, and sometimes in Istanbul.
I hope I will be more often here, because I really like it.
Other countries like Holland, or especially Norway, they support the music quite a bit.
I mean, you see Norwegians all over the place, everywhere, because the government pays, and it doesn't have to do anything with quality, it's just the money is there.
And so they send people out, but in Germany we have the Goethe Instituts, but they are very, very difficult. It's a lot of bureaucracy, and it's not really a support for the music.
I go next month, I will be there just for a night in New York, and that gig is quite reasonable pay.
But usually the situation in the States is very bad. It's really very bad.
I mean, the music is quite an international thing, and it would be stupid to set up new borders and limits and regulations for that bullshit. That's really nonsense.
