It was a case of late-night bar crowd meets jazz festival early Sunday morning in front of the courthouse on Carden Street.

After Toronto’s Shuffle Demons performed a 9:30 p.m. free show in the Guelph Jazz Festival’s jazz tent at Market Square, they wandered through the downtown for a long time playing their music.

The 19th annual Guelph Jazz Festival offered a lot of free entertainment from Wednesday through Sunday, along with several ticketed concerts at the River Run Centre and other venues.

University of Guelph English prof Ajay Heble, who founded the festival and is its artistic director, said the jazz tent at Market Square in front of city hall almost had to be cancelled. Between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. Saturday, faced with heavy rain and forecasts of lots more to come, festival organizers scrambled to decide what to do and where the more than 12 hours of free shows might be relocated indoors. With only partial shelter available at the Market Square site and a lot of electronic equipment involved, it didn’t seem advisable at that point to push ahead with the Market Square entertainment, Heble said in an interview Monday.

However, the weather got better, he said, and in the end the jazz tent shows started almost on schedule shortly before noon and continued until around midnight.