We may not be used to seeing Tortoni ‘front and centre’ at the MIJF but he’s played a role consistently for over a decade now. At the festival launch, he revealed what drives him, saying (twice) that he’s interested in the ‘pairing of jazz royalty with the voices of a rising generation’.
With nightly programming, the festival also includes a free workshops and kids program at the Redfern Town Hall. In 2012, the festival includes for the first time an opening night Q&A to take place at the Old 505 Theatre with members of the jazz community debating ‘The Sydney Sound’.
Each year since 2005, in the month leading up to the jazz festival in Wangaratta, Miriam Zolin interviews the finalists in the National Jazz Awards. The awards are decided at Wangaratta in a series of heats culminating in a finals performance on the Sunday of the festival. Wangaratta Jazz festival this year runs from Friday 28 to …
James Morrison’s Generations in jazz was a pivotal experience for McKenzie. It’s where she had her first sense of jazz as a possble way of life. She heard Phil Stack, Blaine Whittaker and Troy Robinson and remembers realising that she could possibly find a way to choose a career around the music she loved.
Fran Swinn is walking a metaphorical tightrope as she prepares to present her APRA-commissioned piece at this year’s Melbourne Jazz Fringe Festival. Inform integrates live jazz with live circus and is performed by Swinn’s quartet with special guest aerial artist and acrobat Rockie Stone.
Bob Sedergreen has been involved with jazz in the City of Stonnington (in Melbourne) for a while. Stonnington Jazz—now in its third year—is becoming one of Victoria’s (and Australia’s) better known jazz festivals. It is the third major jazz event in a few short weeks in Melbourne this year: The Jazz Fringe, then Melbourne Jazz …
Welcome to Jazz Australia’s second series of Q&A interviews with finalists in the National Jazz Awards, which will be announced at the 2006 TAC Wangaratta Festival of Jazz. This year the National Jazz Awards feature piano, for the first time since 1999. At the finals, to be held in Wangaratta in the first weekend of …
When did you start singing and why? For example, was there a ‘moment’ when singing came to you as a calling or vocation? As hackneyed as this sounds, I was one of those kids who started singing around the same time they started talking. I remember telling anyone who would listen that I wanted to …
When did you start singing and why? For example, was there a ‘moment’ when singing came to you as a calling or vocation? I started singing in primary school and got the ‘bug’ for it when I was about 10 and I played Oliver in a school musical. During that show I had my first …
When did you start singing and why? For example, was there a ‘moment’ when singing came to you as a calling or vocation? I have always been really into music and singing, so there was never really a ‘moment’ as such. I think that deep down, everyone knows what they should be doing. Which musicians …