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Thread: AAJ Review: Jazzahead! 2014

  1. #1

    AAJ Review: Jazzahead! 2014



    My review of Jazzahead! 2014, in Tallinn, Estonia, today at All About Jazz.

    It's hard to imagine, with diminishing music sales, the emergence of streaming services as the musical version of the antichrist for musicians and the increasing challenge of putting rear ends into seats at North American jazz festivals, but as it heads into its ninth year, Jazzahead! continues to provide unassailable evidence that it may be struggling to be so, but jazz is, indeed, a business. A place where artists, labels, festival presenters, club owners, publicists, media and anyone else in any way connected to jazz can comingle in the contexts of daytime conference streams, performance showcases and booths, booths, booths—all manned (peopled?) by folks who want you to hear their latest release(s) and check out their band(s)—Jazzahead! has become the place to go if you're looking to find your way into an international network of jazz industry people that quite literally covers every continent but two: the Arctic and Antarctica...and if a jazz band ever emerged on one of those two isolated locations, they'd no doubt be added to the Jazzahead! roster, too.

    One of the most admirable and appealing aspects to Jazzahead! is that it is staffed by people who listen. The event has grown (a very good thing) to the point where it was becoming increasingly difficult to cover evening showcases in the nearby Kulturzentrum Schlachthof—literally an old slaughterhouse that has been converted into a performance space, bar and restaurant, where so many people were going that unless you were there early enough to find a seat, more often than not you had to listen from near the door (not always in the hall), trying to look over masses of peoples' shoulders to catch a glimpse of the act. While there are even more solutions planned for invited journalists who were having trouble getting their work done, the 2014 edition of Jazzahead! already made one very significant improvement: to open up one of the halls in the Congress Centre that houses the majority of the event's activities for evening showcases, so that there were now two venues to choose from. The result was relief in both venues and, while it might well have been possible to move back and forth between them, one of the other problems with becoming a regular at Jazzahead!—and one that nobody expects the organizers to resolve— is that most attempts to keep to a strict schedule are scuttled simply because, walking from one venue to another, or even from one end of a hall to another, someone—or, more often than not, someones—will yell out, "Hey! John!!" and the next thing you know, you're seeing someone you've not seen in months or perhaps even years, trying to catch up with them while still attempting to stick to that schedule.

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    Member since March 2004 mozo-pg's Avatar
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