I personally don’t consider myself a jazz guitar player, I just possibly sound like one sometimes and that’s how people discovered me,’ legendary jazz guitar maestro Derek Julian tells Nishant Singh
When you feel an unavoidable desire to tap your feet and start grooving to music, you know you’re on a musical high. And that is precisely how we felt about the vibe of jazz from the moment we entered One Mile Ground where the 31st edition of Jazz Utsav 2016 was taking place.
It started with the young and vibrant jazz artistes of The Woodstock Jazz Band, students from Mussoorie’s Woodstock School performing groovy jazz songs, and went on to the legendary flag bearers of its unforgettable past — jazz maestro and legend Derek Julian’s classical tracks, who was part of the first wave of jazz in India in late 60s. The current toast of the jazz circuit — Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Gamak from USA — was also present to enthrall listeners.
Julian, who has been playing professionally for over 50 years describes his long musical journey as “very exciting, very stupendous, very enjoyable — all superlative, quite tough at times.” His journey started a long time ago with his band Mystic and he later went on to perform and collaborate with highly acclaimed jazz artistes around the world.
Even with his background in Western music, Julian has played a great deal with many Indian classical artistes, too. Stating that Indian classical musicians are a different league altogether, he added, “You see, in the end, music is music. How well you can fuse it with another style is a musicians’ own capability, their sensibilities and their tastes. I feel our Indian music is the richest music in the world.”
As someone who is a musician not associated with film music, Julian is very happy that indie music is coming back in a big way and he feels that it is here to stay. He said, “I think it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s about time it happened as it’s taken a long time to arrive. Finally this kind of music is starting to work. It is no more all about the big company, the big bosses and the big everything. Now the smaller people are getting chance to actually have a voice in the whole thing.”
For him, it has always been nice to work with new artistes as it always gives him something new to learn. He believes that the kind of exposure one gets, the more they generally pick-up. Although he added that the experience doesn’t have to be good all the time. “But it’s the good that we should keep and that bad that we should discard,” he said.
For this year’s festival, Capital Jazz has collaborated with Teamwork Arts, which also produces other big cultural meets and events like the Jaipur Literature Fest. Teamwork Arts managing director Sanjoy Roy shared, “With the best of musicians from India and across the world, this year’s Jazz Utsav will be an unparalleled celebration of all things jazz and over the next few years we hope to make this festival into one of Asia’s major music events.”
“We used to do something called ‘Friends of Music’, our oldest music platform, which we started back in1995 where we used to have all kinds of music genres and a lot of world music — dealing with groups like Indian Ocean, Mrigya and so on. They found their first music platform at Friends of Music. So, music has been a part of our thing. We have been looking at jazz for a while as we were very keen to bring back jazz into its premium position and not just in Delhi. The plan is to take Jazz Utsav to Mumbai, Goa and Bangalore for the next two years,” he added.
This year’s line-up was quite delightful in Delhi with a stellar performances from Joel Lyssarides from Sweden, representing the electrifying Future of Jazz, Karim Ellaboudi featuring Vasundhara and international Jazz rage Arthur Dutkiewicz Trio from Poland among others.
The article also got published in The Pioneer Newspaper – http://www.dailypioneer.com/vivacity/2015-12-06-112511.html
