Hitting the Right Notes at Noosa Jazz Festival
From the speakeasies of New Orleans to the shorelines of Noosa, Georgia Beard follows the experimental spirit of jazz emerging during this year’s Noosa Jazz Festival.
Jazz is a lightning strike; an infection; an accelerating heartbeat of sound.
As improvised melodies, dissonant tones and off-beat notes erupt from the pulse of underlying rhythms, the audience can’t help but respond.
During the Roaring Twenties, this spellbinding genre infiltrated underground bars and dance halls in New Orleans and Harlem before travelling to Paris and Berlin.
In a decade defined by rebellion and rule-breaking, jazz became a rallying cry. Artists like Jelly Roll Morton, King (Joe) Oliver and Bessie Smith revolutionised the sound, offending classical musicians, pearl-clutching community groups and puritanical lawmakers.
Despite the threat of censorship and fleeting fads, jazz took root in Western culture – an ever-evolving artform that continues to captivate our local community today.
When the Noosa Jazz Festival fills our streets, stages and dining venues from 27 August to 3 September 2023, local, national and international performers will reawaken that spirit of collective improvisation.
The founder of the Noosa Heads Jazz Club, Richard Stevens, and the late Frank Johnson staged the first Noosa Jazz Party in 1991. Over thirty years of history, rebranding efforts and management changes saw the Noosa Jazz Party became the centrepiece event of the overarching festival at The J Theatre.
Now countless jazz enthusiasts from Australia and New Zealand converge on Noosa to hear top-ranking jazz musicians from Australia’s capital cities and beyond.
The J Theatre and The Majestic Theatre will play host to a variety of performances alongside Noosa’s restaurants, bars and river cruises, which will feature jazz sessions to accompany curated lunches and dinners.
This year, the Noosa Jazz Festival will debut new evening venues as well as a matinee session on Friday for Jazz at The J – a relief for local fans who dread the late-night drive home.
As president of Noosa Heads Jazz Club, Richard Stevens said the festival’s unique format lent itself to creative interpretations of jazz compositions.
“Part of the magic is bringing the musicians together in ensembles without prior rehearsal, only a backstage discussion, allowing their creativity to come to life on stage,” he said.
“Because of the musicians’ versatility, many aspects of jazz are displayed with an emphasis on earlier forms of jazz.
“When talented people get together, anything can happen!”
This year, the toe-tapping syncopation, improvisation and rhythm of Dixieland, Gypsy, swing, musette waltzes, boogie-woogie blues and more will transport audiences to the concert halls and clubs of the past.
“A lot of modern jazz at live venues today are small ensembles of two or three instrumentalists with a vocalist, but our jazz festival includes much larger bands, typically of seven or eight instrumentalists,” Richard said.
Expect recreations of renowned jazz styles, from the Parisian vibrato of Sidney Bechet’s clarinet and saxophone to the New Orleans trumpets, trombones and piano of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five and Hot Seven; to the West Coast’s cool tones with trumpets and cornets in the frontline.
“We have also invited members of the internationally respected Syncopators Jazz Band as well as most members of the world-famous Red Onion Jazz Band, who as teenage players, took Melbourne by storm in the 1960s and toured internationally,” Richard said.
“They will recreate their music of the sixties in 2023 as The Grey (or Silver) Onions at this year’s festival.”
As the fluid, flamboyant sound of jazz rises from theatres and public performance spaces across Noosa, audiences will reignite an industry still recovering after the pandemic snuffed out live gigs.
In 2020, The Usefulness of Art surveyed the Australian jazz industry during COVID-19 and found 93% of respondents lost work in music-related activities.
Now musicians scramble to gain funding and new gig opportunities – and it’s up to us to answer the call.
The live stage is the cornerstone of jazz. It’s a space of spontaneity where performers call and respond not through words but through music, composing melodies and harmonies in the heat of the moment.
With audiences to receive this audible magic, musicians can elevate the mastery of the past to a higher standard, sustaining the heartbeat of jazz for generations to come.
To explore the official program and book tickets for Noosa Jazz Festival, visit www.noosajazzclub.com
