Two years ago, heavy rain inundated the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and volunteers had to use buckets to tip knee-deep water out of the blues marquee. Now a new, larger blues venue with open sides has been built on the bank of the Ovens river, bringing the number of festival venues to seven, plus the free sound stage in the main street.
Australia’s foremost jazz festival is in its 19th year. And while overcast, the festival’s opening day was warm, with no sign of rain. Once again the small Victorian town had geared up to host about 30,000 visitors and the festival’s budget had been expanded to $800,000. Local businesses moved into festival mode with decorations and special offers, and it seems everyone throws their support behind the town’s famous event, which used 150 volunteers.
This year’s program was again a varied selection of top overseas and Australian names across different genres: classic jazz, blues, mainstream and contemporary. Groups ranged in size from the solo pianos of Mike Nock and Andrea Keller to a 16-piece big band led by US pianist-arranger Jim McNeely, plus several vocalists.
The first overseas group on Friday night had flown in from Finland’s winter: the award-winning, youthful Ilmiliekki Quartet, with Verneri Pohjola leading on trumpet. They had an original take on the Tom Waits song Take It with Me, the trumpet adopting a Waits-like throat growl.
As with many Finnish groups, neoclassical influences were evident, especially from pianist Tuomo Prattala. The trumpet often used a breathy quality to counterbalance the more familiar brass sound and explored unusual tonal possibilities in original interpretations. Their music was quite melodic, with controlled use of space, most evident in a trumpet and drum sequence in which drummer Olavi Louhivuori was discreetly impassioned.
– John McBeath
Read the full review in The Australian
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THE Wangaratta Jazz Festival turned 19 this year, and — like any teenager — it has faced its share of challenges on the way to adulthood. Ironically, many of those challenges have been a byproduct of the festival’s success, as organisers wrestled with the logistics of accommodating growing audiences in limited-capacity venues.
This year was especially tough for the festival, with its main venue — the Wangaratta Town Hall — disappearing to make way for a performing arts centre, which is under construction. A 750-seat marquee was erected at a cost of $100,000, placing considerable strain on the budget (especially after the loss of the festival’s naming rights sponsor last year).
From an artistic point of view, however, the Wangaratta Jazz Festival is in robust health. The 2008 program assembled by artistic director Adrian Jackson reflected the startling breadth and depth of this country’s talent. If there is an Australian voice in jazz, it is a very expansive one — encompassing the salty alto saxophone sound of Bernie McGann (whose playing evokes a dry, spirit-filled landscape); the ebullient classic jazz of Allan Browne and Margie Lou Dyer’s Allfrey Street Band (whose festival set incorporated musical “Australiana” such as Magpie Stomp and Fat Wallaby Rag); and the boldly uncompromising explorations of the Antipodean Collective.
– Jessica Nicholas
Read the full review in The Age
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The Wangaratta Festival of Jazz is surely Australia’s Jazz heaven. Most events are of concert standard but some less formal even primitive performances are presented, such as Julie O’Hara, a vocalist with a fine swinging style who also played faux cornet through her nasal passage at the Pinsent Hotel.
With Joe Lovano’s Cologne concert in my headphones, it felt almost surreal gliding down the train line from Sydney passing the abandoned ram shackled sidings against the backdrop of tarnished Australian green pastures, some blanketed in lush lucern and daubed with granite boulder peaks, like whales breaching out of a purple sea. The further south though, the browner the landscape became, reminding me of these drought conditions still prevalent since my last visit in 06.
– Peter Wockner
Read the full review on Jazz and Beyond
