The Jazz Night Den Haag Doesn’t Advertise

I almost didn’t go last Thursday. Late week at the ICC, the kind where you don’t really stop until someone turns the office lights off, and by nine o’clock the idea of sitting somewhere quiet with a drink felt more appealing than any live venue. But I’d been saying I was going to Paard van Troje for the monthly jazz night for about three months, and at some point that starts to feel like a promise you’re making to yourself.

So I went. Alone, which is how I usually go — easier to concentrate on the music, and you don’t have to explain anything to anyone. I cycled from Bezuidenhout, locked up on Prinsegracht, walked in during the second song. The room was maybe sixty percent full. Not packed, not empty. The right size.

Paard van Troje (paard.nl — Prinsegracht 12, Den Haag) is a music venue that most people associate with its bigger nights — touring bands, dance events, the kind of thing that ends up on posters around the city. The jazz night is quieter and better for it. Monthly, mixed programme, usually Dutch artists with occasional international guests. The room they use for it holds maybe two hundred people and still feels intimate.

The quartet that night was Den Haag-based, the saxophonist the clear centre of gravity — the kind of player who makes you feel slightly uncomfortable about all the other music you’ve been listening to. Post-bop, some modal stretching, not difficult to listen to but not background music either. You had to pay attention or you were in the wrong place.

I’m from Lagos, lived in London, came here via Brussels. I’ve been to jazz clubs in all three cities — Ronnie Scott’s once, a few times at smaller places in Shoreditch, various things across Brussels. Den Haag’s scene doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as any of them, and I don’t fully understand why. The level of musicianship I’ve seen here is as high as anything I heard in London. The difference is the marketing, or the lack of it.

Den Haag has a habit of not advertising itself. The city sits next to Amsterdam in the conversation about Dutch culture and mostly lets Amsterdam win, even when it shouldn’t. The international institutions are here, the Mauritshuis is here, the North Sea is here. And apparently the jazz scene is here too, in a mid-sized venue on a Thursday night, to a room of sixty percent capacity, playing at a level that deserved a full house.

I had a beer at the bar after, talked briefly to someone who turned out to be a regular — comes every month, has done for two years, works at one of the other international courts. Same city, same orbit, never crossed paths. Den Haag is like that. The international community is large enough that you can live inside it entirely, or you can step outside it and find that the city has things going on that the expat circuit never reaches.

The jazz night is the second Thursday of each month. Check the Paard website for the programme and ticket prices — usually around €10–15, sometimes less for early bird. Worth setting a reminder and actually going, unlike me and my three months of good intentions.