When the 2019 Wangaratta Jazz Festival was cancelled early last year, shockwaves rippled through the Australian jazz community. One of the country’s most beloved jazz events was due to celebrate its 30th anniversary last November. Instead – facing a diminished budget and administrative pressures – the festival board postponed the 30th-birthday edition for a major review.
“We took that hiatus in 2019 … to reassess our structure, ensure our economic viability and make sure we were able to continue into the future – hopefully for another 30 years,” says festival chair Dave Fuller.
Review done, the board and a refreshed artistic team set about programming their postponed 30th birthday for 2020, full of energy and optimism. Then COVID-19 hit.
Jazz pianist Zela Margossian will feature in the online-only festival.
Melbourne trumpeter Eugene Ball (who became co-artistic director of the festival in late 2019, joining directors Zoe Hauptmann and Scott Solimo) wryly admits his first year in the job has “not been without its challenges”. He has performed at almost every Wangaratta Jazz Festival since its inception, and says its adventurous and eclectic programming – focused mainly on Australian artists – has been essential to his musical activity and development.
He also cherishes the ritual known to musicians and festivalgoers as the “Wang hang”: artists from across the country sharing ideas and fostering new relationships.
It’s a “destination event”, says Ball, “where audiences and musicians can leave their daily lives behind and immerse themselves in the festival experience”.
That experience will be very different this year in an online-only affair. The organisers had hoped to combine online and live events for the 30th anniversary, but Victoria’s pandemic road map to recovery makes that impossible.
‘Wang is the meeting place for Australian jazz. It’s where you meet your musical heroes.’
Michelle Nicolle, vocalist and awards judge
The festival program – launched this week – features an all-Australian mix of commissioned works, streamed concerts from interstate and screenings of previously unseen archival footage. And the usual weekend-long program will expand to seven days, to avoid what Ball calls “screen fatigue”.
Commissioned pieces include solo and duo improvised vignettes by musicians in Tasmania and Victoria and a new filmed work by Sydney drummer Alex Hirlian. Co-presentations with interstate organisations and venues will involve jazz and blues concerts pre-recorded with live audiences in Adelaide and Sydney. The latter includes a performance from remarkable pianist Zela Margossian and her world-jazz quintet at the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival. A handful of the Adelaide gigs will be live-streamed – including one featuring Jo Lawry, a New York-based Australian singer stranded in her former home town.
And there will be a selection of free community concerts, curated by Solimo and recorded in Wangaratta. There won’t be an audience for these shows, but they will be filmed in the town’s Performing Arts Centre.
Jo Lawry will perform from Adelaide, where the New York-based singer is stranded during the pandemic.
The National Jazz Awards – held each year during the festival and designed to promote emerging talent – will be a vocal competition with 10 finalists pre-recording a set (in their own state) with a pianist.
Michelle Nicolle, vocalist and judge for this year’s awards, is thrilled the festival is back.
“Wang is the meeting place for Australian jazz,” she says. “It’s where you meet your musical heroes, get your arse kicked in both good and bad ways, gather lifelong memories, survive crazy weather, nearly die from hay fever, wait way too long for pizza while the jazz heavies and punters walk by or stop for a chat, run to your carefully chosen gigs, order your schnitzel early at the Pinsent Hotel so you can secure your spot for the jam [session], revel in the hive of well-lubricated jazz musos and punters alike till late at the same jam, then walk back to your little hotel room and sleep it all off till next year.”
Melbourne musician Barney McAll says the festival has been a “melting pot of diverse ideas for Australian musicians since its inception, and it seeds so many fresh collaborative ideas. It’s a symbol of creativity, community and spirit – attributes that are urgently important in these dark times.”
The Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues runs from October 26 to November 1. Tickets and program at wangarattajazz.com.
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