Latin jazz, disco funk, some blues parts, conga solo –  everything was there to have fun, and the audience soon stood up to dance. Tourists, dock workers and top lawyers attended the concert at the Fogadó. First they shook their heads and moved to the side clumsily, then everyone was taken by the craze flowing from the stage. Some took their coffees to drink rhythmically on the bar gallery.

The vision was already fascinating and only slightly discordant with their ties when the sedated yet nice Dutch begins to play. A funny short feature. The music is entertaining and complex, and is based on so many music worlds. They play African and South American rhythms, even some seventies soundtrack atmosphere is evoked, together with the ambiance of acid jazz clubs and reggae fun. They seem to be familiar, and many came tonight because they have seen NCC at Sziget Festival, aboard A38, at the Dutch-Hungarian Jazz Festival at Fonó, or Mediawave in Győr.

Sax player Benjamin Herman is a clown, and guitarist Anton Goudsmit laughs to himself – both have proved, in other bands, that they master their instruments, and are precise and calculated. They are the driving force of the ensemble, they set the trends, although the conga player and drummer Jos de Haas, trained in Guinea, also seemed to be energetic and authentic. Perfect harmony rules the stage, although I would have preferred some chaos as well.

After a while, the atmosphere gets stuck at a certain point, only to exceed that when they play a new song after Herman’s words, a fast song, paying hommage to the fastest one on Earth, Chinese pianist Lang Lang. The song was a happy one, and the rest was not sad either, so the week had a promising start for those who danced to the music of New Cool Collective. Never take me to a worse concert before another working week. I can clearly see that office workers, wearing slightly brighter suits, are drumming the rhythm by heart under the table in the meeting room.