The organizers of the Nokia Arena Jazz Festival are determined to offer quality performances, defying the lack of public funding for theirs and similar events.
By BARRY DAVISCami Quartet(photo credit: Courtesy)
One of the most puzzling anomalies of the Israeli cultural scene is the great regard in which our jazz musicians are considered around the globe and the simultaneous gradual but significant withdrawal of support for jazz events by public authorities here. Shortly after the 23rd edition of the annual Tel Aviv Jazz Festival took place, in February, the local municipality made noise about canceling the event. The proposal caused something of a ruckus among musicians and fans alike, and a transmutation was suggested so that the festival is now a biennial event. The situation went from bad to worse in April, when the Eilat Municipality informed Dubi Lenz and Eli Degibri, newly appointed joint-artistic directors of the annual Red Sea Jazz Festival, that the budget they’d been working with to bring in the crowds next month (July 30- August 2) had been summarily slashed by a whopping 30 percent.All of the above makes the initiative to hold the forthcoming Nokia Arena Jazz Festival, at the Nokia Arena in Tel Aviv from June 24 to 26 (7 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily), a highly surprising and very welcome development. The festival’s artistic director and co-founder, Moshe Shiri, makes no bones about his motives for devising the threedayer along with joint-founder Nati Leibowitz.“We talked to various people at the [Tel Aviv] Municipality about funding the festival,” says Shiri, “but they didn’t think it was a sufficiently PR-oriented event for their purposes. It’s not like the Gay Pride Parade, which is considered an attractive international event – not that I have anything against holding the Gay Parade – but this jazz festival is also a wonderful event. We have such talented jazz musicians, and they deserve a respectable stage for their skills.”Shiri says that he and Leibowitz were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the lack of official recognition of jazz in this country, and decided to do something about it.“As soon as we heard about what happened to the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival we got going with our own festival,” he declares, adding that they had not entertained too many hopes of getting financial support from the municipality. “We had no expectations of that. We are providing our own funding.”This is Leibowitz and Shiri’s first venture into the often perilous area of jazz event organization, although the pair say they have been close to the music for some time.“We are both great jazz fans, and we also ran all the bars at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat last year,” Shiri explains.“We are also fans of rock music, but there are so many rock events all year round, we need more jazz events, and that’s something we’re investing in, and we’ll continue to do so.”Shiri says he is willing to put his money where his mouth is. “We’ll put the festival on this year, and we’ll put on an even bigger one next year, with or without help from the municipality,” he states.The idea, at least for now, is to enable local acts to strut their stuff.“We’re only going to have Israeli bands,” Shiri continues. “We want people here to know that there are fantastically talented jazz musicians in this country.”Shiri is also painfully aware of the imbalance between Israeli jazz artists’ reputations in the world at large and their standing in official purse-stringpulling circles back home. Just over a month ago, the organizers of Jazzahead, a highly prestigious international jazz expo held every April in Bremen, Germany, announced that Israel will be the expo’s partner country in 2013.“That’s exactly the point,” exclaims Shiri. “Our jazz musicians are known the world over, people like Avishai Cohen the bass player, Avishai Cohen the trumpeter or [bass player] Omer Avital. There are so many of them out there, but in Israel nobody supports their shows because it’s not considered PR-oriented. How much Israeli jazz do you see on TV, on Channel 2, or Channel 10 or anywhere else? You get a bit of jazz on 88FM, but that’s it.”So, if jazz is not considered marketable, where does Shiri get his belief that the Nokia Jazz Festival will bring in the crowds? “We have done a lot of footwork,” he says. “We have been around to all the jazz schools, places like Rimon and Thelma Yallin, schools in Ra’anana and Kiryat Ono, we have spoken to friends, acquaintances, basically to anyone who will listen.We are doing our best to get the word out.”That is borne out by the festival lineup, which, like most large-scale jazz events the world over, offers a mix of pure jazz, acts on the fringes of the genre, and beyond. There are some big names in the program, plainly designed to draw in music fans from non-improvisational or quasi-improvisational spheres, in addition to the jazz cognoscenti.Although he certainly displays an affinity for jazz, it would be hard to call veteran singer-pianist Shlomo Gronich a jazz musician, but his name should help to get the word out about the festival. Then there’s vocalist Keren Friedman and her band, who will mix renditions of jazz standards with numbers from the Israeli Songbook, while pop-rock star Itai Perel should bring in the patrons with a solo blues guitar-vocals show. Other names on the Nokia Jazz Festival roster include bass player Alon Stern and his jazz octet, blues singer-harmonica player Dov Hammer, the Cami Quartet jazz act, Zevulun Dub System with a jazz-tinged reggae show and jazz guitarist Nadav Peled and his band.Shiri and Leibowitz have clearly taken an expansive approach to the event, aiming to get the word out there as far and wide as possible, and are pulling out all the stops to hit the ground running.“We are hoping to have live broadcasts from the festival on 88FM, and we have put up street posters all over Tel Aviv,” says Shiri. “We are not doing this to make a profit, we are doing all this out of the greatest love.”Tickets for the shows are very reasonably priced and Shiri says that this is in order to make the music accessible to all and sundry. “We are charging NIS 60 per day, or NIS 140 for all three days. We want kids and their parents to come. We want to get jazz out there.” For tickets and more information: 072- 265-7995 and 054-916-8610.
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