Results tagged “jzfestival”

Dee Dee Bridgewater, the illustrious Jazz singer, has been one of the premier artists in Jazz for the past forty years. From her early days performing with major Jazz legends and winning Tony Awards on Broadway to her more recent work on Billy Holiday, NPR and beyond, Dee Dee has been shaping and defining the way people all over the world understand and appreciate Jazz. To kick off this weekend's JZ Jazz festival, Dee Dee will be gracing Shanghai with a performance this Friday at the Yunfeng theater, sharing the stage with a big band of both local and international musicians. We had the chance to chat about her accomplishments both on and off the stage, her views on Jazz from the past to the present, and her unbeknown love of Chinese art.

By Adam Skuse

Saturday was a very successful day for the festival, drawing medium-sized crowds again in the afternoon and selling out completely the evening portion. The day started with E-Groove, a Shanghainese funk-fusion band who play a popular brand of original instrumental music a la '80s Michael Brecker. These guys play a regular concert series at the Jin Mao concert hall, and can occasionally be seen featured at JZ Club. Following them was Islaja, a Finnish duo who used lots of loop-based soundscapes to support the female folk vocals. She played guitar, and there was a man who played bass, and he played lots more chordal stuff than traditional bass lines. It was a slightly psychedelic, soothing sort of Finnish folk.

The second day of the JZ Festival went well, with another bout of perfect weather and slightly cooler temperatures. The afternoon crowd was about the same as the first day, nearly filling up the relatively small amount of space in between the buildings at the New Factories where the concerts are being held. The musical pattern set on day one seemed to hold through the second day as well, which was: begin the day with some solid, swinging straight-ahead jazz; from there move into an eclectic mix of Scandinavian groups for the rest of the afternoon; then start the evening set with a local blockbuster group and finish it with some popular Chinese pop-rock.

The first day of the JZ Festival saw excellent weather, an interesting new venue for a music festival, and a wide range of music styles. It's already made lots of improvements on last year's festival at Fuxing park (except for the being held in a nice park with trees part) like slightly more food and drink selection and a great mass of artists selling cool stuff made themselves, like bags, jewelry, and kitschy animal-shaped gifts. Also the weather being nice is already a massive improvement over last years threatening storm clouds. Opening the festival at 3pm was Lawrence Ku's septet, playing his own compositions and arrangements from the group's recent release "Process". The group has a well-developed modern jazz sound that unfortunately doesn't get featured locally very often, even though all the players are locally based. After Lawrence's band finished on the main stage, Susanna and her magic orchestra played on the second stage. She has a dreamy, floating sort of sound to her music, and her orchestra was a one-man synthesizer orchestra but quite effective all the same. She was the first group of three that were brought into the festival through NOTCH, the festival of Scandinavian music that has merged with the JZ festival this year. She and the group that followed her, Supersilent, both hail from Norway. Supersilent played on the main stage, and made a pretty amazing show that started out with industrial-sounding sample-based free improvisation. Then they moved into some dark realms of free experimental music that was like a continuous segue. Very creative and different from everything else at the festival. The fourth band, the Skull Defects, were also making some quite interesting music with some electronic sampling and improvisation. However, they were a bit more rock-based, using more continuous rhythmic elements and interesting instruments like a big plastic water jug with a mic stuffed in the hole to get a nice deep drum sound.

The latest news from the former Fuxing Jazz Festival is that it is going to take place up in Jing'an district at the New Factories on Yuyao Lu (余姚路), and will be called the JZ Festival (爵士同乐 in Chinese). It will feature many of Shanghai's locally-based jazz groups including Coco and his band Possicobilities, Alec Haavik's Friction Five, and the JZ All-star big band. Also featured will be major Chinese rock stars Cui Jian and Xu Wei among others, as well as a number of Northern European groups (jazz and otherwise). The festival, put on by the JZ group, Jing'an government, the Jing'an tourism bureau, and the organizers of the NOTCH music festival, will take place over four full days, October 4-7.