Montreux Jazz Academy and Gala
MONTREUX JAZZ ACADEMY: FIRST CROP
Encounters, performance, and sharing: these are the keywords for the first ever Montreux Jazz Academy, a project combining nurturing for the young talents of tomorrow with free activities for the public. It will all take place this autumn in Montreux and Villeneuve from 30 October to 5 November 2014, culminating in a major gala closing event on November 6th at the Auditorium Stravinski.
The Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation, the pedagogical wing of the Montreux Jazz Festival, is launching its first Academy with the aim of sharing its strength and know-how with the young artists selected during the famous competitions it has been organizing since 1999. The Academy is at once a public and a private event, designed as a hot-house burgeoning with encounters, discoveries, and the transmission of knowledge, all at the service of supporting and bringing along a new generation of artists at a key moment in their musical careers.
PRIVATE SESSIONS
Hailing from all over the world, twelve guitarists, vocalists, and pianists will live and work at the Centre Musical Sylvia Waddilove in Villeneuve, a space entirely dedicated to music in our region. Daily work sessions with artist mentors and master classes by professionals from the music industry have been organized over an intensive week. These will cover a wide range of topics of interest to the young artists, who will simultaneously hone their skills and enlarge their networks. Some of the topics include crafting their on-line image, Do-it-yourself management techniques, and legal issues relevant to the music business. The participants will be directly plugged into the international network that has been woven together through a half century of the Montreux Jazz Festival. Also with the guiding principle of sharing know-how, the private sessions will prominently feature performance, as the artistic lines of the final gala event come together.
Centre Musical Sylvia Waddilove © Roxane Horisberger
FREE PUBLIC SESSIONS
Sébastien Schuller – Live Session, Funky Claude’s bar 01.11.2014 © Tonje Tilesen
Late in the day and into the wee hours, the Montreux Jazz Academy will open its doors to the public in the luxurious Montreux Palace. The Hall on the first floor has been transformed for the occasion into an immersive space welcoming guests from 5pm. Using technologies developed by the EPFL in Lausanne, interactive tools provide new ways to access the Festival’s precious audiovisual archive collection, included by UNESCO to the Memory of the World Register in 2013. One of the innovative programs on display is called Steal the Show, and as its name suggests it provides an opportunity for the musicians to virtually challenge their idols on the legendary stages of the Festival each evening at 6:30pm.
At 7:30 each night there will be lectures, encounters, and workshops at the Petit Théâtre featuring invited artists. Ravi Coltrane will stop by for a chat, Yaron Herman will compose music before our eyes, and Oh! Tiger Mountain and Anna Aaron will discuss strategies for keeping your soul intact in this tricky milieu.
Finally, at 9:30 music will take over Funky Claude’s Bar in a very intimate setting within the newly-opened Montreux Jazz Café. Anna Aaron, Sébastien Schuller, Billie Bird, and Bugge Wesseltoft with Erik Truffaz will perform, sometimes in never-before-seen duo acts. From 10:30 on, jam sessions will be the watchword, and the surprises will be endless!
Together within the cocoon of the Academy the twelve young talents and their mentors will have shared their know-how and played together for days on end. They will have also collaboratively created a gala concert which will fill the Auditorium Stravinski on 6 November. This will be one of those eclectic concerts that the Festival has always encouraged, bringing together on stage musicians who have shaped the music landscape, today’s biggest names, and the next generation of musical talent. This special project will be directed by Lee Ritenour, who will be supported by a deluxe band made up of Sonny Emory, Tom Kennedy and Makoto Ozone and joined by mentors and invited artists such as Charles Lloyd, Patti Austin, Joe Sanders, Yaron Herman, Erik Truffaz, Eric Harland, Jack Savoretti, Bugge Wesseltoft …
ALL PROCEEDS OF THIS EVENT WILL GO TOWARDS THE MONTREUX JAZZ ARTISTS FOUNDATION FOR SUPPORT OF YOUNG ARTISTS. THIS CONCERT IS PART OF THE MONTREUX CULTURAL SEASON.
PROGRAM, INFORMATION, AND GALA TICKETING AT
WWW.MJAF.CH
SEATS FROM CHF 65
30% REDUCTION FOR STUDENTS ACROSS THE BOARD