THU, 16. june 2010
Press conference
Club CD
Although this year's, already the 51st Ljubljana Jazz Festival, officially begins on 29 June, a press conference was organised on Thursday at which the Festival Director, Bogdan Benigar, supplied members of the press with relevant information on the festival itself as well as the guidelines which were implemented by the festival selectors.
A good starting point for the conference was an article by Jure Potokar published in the last edition of Pogledi, where he critically reviewed the current concept of festival organisation. Benigar was pleased with the challenge, saying that Slovenia has for some time not seen a weighty jazz polemic, and urging the media to follow up on the “matter”. Having the said article in mind, he initially admitted that this year’s program is not so innovative, but differs from last year’s in the fact that the concerts will take place in diverse venues and at diverse times of the day, whereby the organisers wish to create a certain cohesion between the concerts and invest the socialising time in between the concerts with the festival spirit.
There will be fewer events than last year, it being a jubilee year, but – in the words of Bogdan Benigar – they will be organised similarly: last year everything gravitated towards the triple concert by John Zorn, and this year the spotlight will be mostly on concert by Pat Metheny, who will perform on the Festival’s opening night, as the guitarist on The Songbook Tour is only available that very day. In addition, Benigar furnished some information on the musicians also to perform at the Križanke open-air theatre. Among others Joe Lovano and Chucho Valdes were chosen as the established artists who will appeal to wider, not strictly jazz audiences.
This year the pickings will be rich –Valdes is this year’s representative of Latin jazz, members of the Bristol quartet Get the Blessing also play with Portishead, while the CD Club will host the versatile Anthony Joseph from Trinidad, also a poet, a writer and a teacher, as well as Vijay Iyer Trio, winner of some of the most prestigious jazz journalists’ awards. It is also important to maintain ties with Metelkova as well as the subversive jazz arena, which is why the Festival joined forces with Miha Zadnikar’s Defonija.
The Artistic Director also adjusted the schedule of concerts in accordance with this year’s football championship and equipped some premises with a film screen, believing it unnecessary to miss a concert on account of a football match. In similar fashion, the Festival management also devised special meals bearing jazzy names, “so that nobody will have to wander through the Miklošičeva Street at midnight”.
Andraž Jež
