The Adelaide Jazz Festival is a weekend-long program of live performances leading up to UNESCO’s International Jazz Day on 30 April. Presenting a broad range of jazz genres across city venues, its aim is to surprise, inspire and delight audiences by discovering new musical experiences.
It’s time to enjoy live intimate jazz from home and abroad at the 2020 Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival.
Diversifying jazz and improvisation appears to be a non-issue in Australian culture. But addressing the exclusionary and harmful practices ingrained in jazz can inform the social change puzzle for other aspects of Australian culture where prejudice also prevails.
Elly Hoyt has harnessed the power and beauty of music, not simply for its own sake, but to give voice to those we have heard far too little from.
“My singing has helped me to create more lyrical stories when I’m playing the piano. Instrumentalists cancertainly get comfortable running changes, and singing has really taught me to slow down and be more aware of melody.”
One thing I’ve learned, while I was doing my homework, was that Australia’s first jazz band – literaly trading as ‘Australia’s First Jazz Band’ was formed in Sydney in 1918 by Belle Sylvia. So this year, we’re not only celebrating the centennial of Australian jazz, but also 100 years of female leadership in Australian Jazz. Not a bad legacy for a scene.
