Vancouver's jazz festival is among the best in the world

[SpongeG]

Vancouver's jazz festival is among the best in the world


Vancouver is widely recognized for the beauty of its natural surroundings and variety of outdoor recreational attractions but its cultural riches are less well-known. In its 10-year cultural plan, the City of Vancouver set as its goals making citizens aware of the value arts and culture bring to the city and promoting Vancouver as an international cultural tourism and entertainment destination.

Those objectives could have come straight from the mission statement of the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society, which has been doing exactly what the plan prescribes since 1986 when a group of local jazz aficionados founded the non-profit, charitable organization to share their passion for the music with the community.

Although Coastal Jazz works tirelessly through the year to bring concerts -- more than 60 last year -- to Vancouver and to educate anyone who wants to learn about the music at workshops and lectures, it's principal production is an annual jazz festival that engulfs the city in joyful sound.

This year, the TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival from June 26 to July 5 features 1,800 musicians in 400 performances at 40 indoor and outdoor venues. The festival is for everyone.

Money is no barrier to access: There are 150 free performances. Jazz will infuse the city from David Lam Park, to the Roundhouse Community Centre, to Granville Island, to Gastown's Water Street, all the way to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, as well as at the Centre for Performing Arts, the Orpheum and many nightclubs around town.

Festival media director John Orysik says the event animates, energizes and inspires the city, engaging us all -- as the cultural plan puts it -- in a dynamic conversation, an ongoing dialogue and an exploration of cultural enterprise and opportunity, connecting people and communities, sharing innovative ideas.

That might sound like too much gravitas for a music event but this is no ordinary festival. For two years running, it has been named the best jazz festival in Canada, and it is increasingly attracting international attention. The festival is being covered by influential music magazines -- Tokyo's Swing Journal, Chicago's DownBeat and Washington, D.C.'s PopMatters -- and journalists have been accredited from all over the globe. Many come because Vancouver has been blessed by visionary programming and has introduced many of the European innovators, especially the Scandinavian improvisers, to North America.

And this is a two-way street. Through Coastal Jazz, B.C. performers have gained exposure in international markets.

Just ask Diana Krall, who started out playing Vancouver's festival stages in the early 1990s. "Nurturing," said Orysik, "is at the heart of what we do."

Last year, the festival drew an estimated audience of 510,000 people, of which roughly 100,000 were from out of town. To put that into perspective, the 10-day jazz festival has a budget of $3.8 million, so each out-of-town visitor costs $38. Considering what visitors will spend in accommodation, food and shopping, the jazz festival is clearly a sound investment. Organizers hope to raise the number of foreign visitors and have been aggressively promoting the event along the U.S. west coast.

Vancouver's jazz festival is one of the best in the world and something the city can be proud of.

The stars of the show are too numerous to mention but they include the greats in jazz. Check out the schedule at www.coastaljazz.ca.

http://www.vancouversun.com/Entertai...705/story.html

[DrT]

I bumped into this website the other day:
http://vancouverjazz.com/

[LeftCoaster]

The jazz fesitval kicks ass.

If you haven't gone I highly recommend you go. I'm not even that big a jazz fan but I had a great time.

[biketrouble]

Unfortunately, Vancouver is something of a jazz desert for the rest of year, at least in terms of big names coming to town. Pretty much the only thing that makes me nostalgic for living in London, it has to be said. While I enjoy the festival and wish it all the best, it is no great shakes when compared to something like Montreal's - which is spectacular (I went last year.)

[ozonemania]

Jazz Festival has been over for a while now, yet saw this article pop up just recently. This 4 page article is an interesting read. I've only quoted the first page.

The full article can be found here.

Great City, a Great City’s Music: The Vancouver International Jazz Festival

Our jazz critic Will Layman spent a full week soaking up the music -- and the city -- offered by what may be North America's finest jazz festival. By Will Layman

Vancouver shoots into the waters of the Northwest, both bold and carefully protected. Vancouver Island, to the west, is a massive shield from the Pacific. Yet Downtown Vancouver—a small peninsula that leaks northwest from the bulk of Burrard Penninsula—has a hint of impudence about it. The heart of the city, a place of palm trees in the southeast corner of Canada, is surrounded by waves lapping against the shores of Stanley Park.

This mixture of comfort and adventure, protection and daring, is coded into the DNA of the TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival. For ten days in late June and early July, the city hosts a music party that runs from mild to fiery, peaceful to mad, careful to reckless, terrific to purely sublime. For jazz lovers, it’s bliss. But it’s hard to imagine any music fan coming away less than dazzled.

Stunning Local Views, Breathtaking Local Music

Take a lazy afternoon walk down to Granville Island, for example, which sits just across False Creek from downtown. To get there I walked from my hotel (where most of the festival musicians were also staying) down Granville Street, dubbed for the original name of the city. The stroll takes you past the old vaudeville house, the Orpheum (1927) with its vintage vertical neon sign, the Vogue (to host The Decemberists and Neko Case later in the summer) and the Yale Hotel, with its deco awning and massive neon saxophone, then over the Granville Street Bridge. From the bridge, the marinas and beaches to the northwest along English Bay sparkle.

In no time you’re curling under the bridge to enter a small preserve that used to house various factories and machine shops but today hosts restaurants, galleries, an art school, a public market, a tiny brewery (and pub)—and several performance spaces. If you wandered down on the Monday afternoon of the festival, the outdoor Market Stage was featuring a bouquet of bouncy sambas, perfect for a gossamer summer day. The quartet is led by guitarist Yujiro Nakajima, originally from Nagano, Japan, and in Vancouver for four years, playing at the festival for the first time. Grab something to eat and pull up a chair in the sunshine. It is pleasantly crowded and loose.


Two days later, on Canada Day (July 1st), the Market Stage is humming again, this time with an even better group you’ve never heard of. The Quaint Hearted consist of three local guys from the city’s public Capilano University, and—incredibly—this is their first-ever gig. Which is almost impossible to believe because they sound like they utterly know what they are about, making “jazz” that strikes more like rock but bends like Miles Davis. “We started writing this music just a few months ago for this gig”, the drummer, Alexander Klassen, explains. Challenging, distorted, angular—yet the music has no trouble holding the interest of a large crowd.

Slide along the island to Ron Basford Park and a hillside of folks, many waving the Canadian flag, are enjoying a multicultural trio of Vancouverians: Ron Samworth on guitar, Lan Tung on erhu (a two-stringed Chinese violin), and Neelamjit Dhillon on tablas and alto saxophone. Their uncategorizable sound gives way to straight up blues several blocks away in Railspur Park, where Dalannah Gail Bowen is putting decades of experience into her bent tones and minor thirds.

The killer thing is: all this music is free. The Canadian dollar is currently worth less than the U.S. dollar, but free is a whole ‘nother kind of exchange rate.


Walking back toward the bridge at the close of one afternoon of this music, I was arrested by the skill and touch of one of the buskers that populate Granville Island. This is a lone jazz guitarist playing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” at a shady spot right along the water. But he is no ordinary street musician. He is playing the melody with easy swing while interspersing accompanying chords like the legendary Joe Pass. (Hearing him from a distance, I half-expected Ella Fitzgerald’s voice to surge into my ears.) Like so many other folks in this truly international city, he turns out to be from another country—in this case, Germany. And he’s not just any guitarist but he is Guenter Schulz, formerly the primary guitarist and songwriter for the industrial rock band KMFDM. Known for crunching sound and all-out assaults, who would have imagined his Telecaster to be a delicate vehicle? “But, sure, I love to play jazz”, he says, handing me his card.

Vancouver and the jazz festival it hosts are full of surprises even during the daytime.

What's interesting about this article is that the writer/critic talks about the festival as a musician, a student, a tourist, a music fan.. all equally. Anyway, enjoy the read.

[touraccuracy]

I went this past year and saw the Heavy and the year before and saw the Budos Band.

Both were incredible shows and I now have two new favourite bands because of it.