Featured Artist - Laila Biali
Welcome to the 39th Annual BC Interior Jazz Festival!
Current Updates: Performance Schedules were posted on February 29. Revisions were posted on March 06 and April 05. Workshop schedules are now posted. Information on the jam sessions, daytime performances, and concerts offered this year can be found on the Concerts page. Last chance! Order your group's discount tickets for the Jazz Masters' Concert by this Friday, April 8th. All Forms have now been updated for 2016. Special Events: Please join us for the BC Interior Jazz Festival Jazz Jams at the Streaming Café on Wednesday, April 13th at 7pm and Thursday, April 14th at 6:00 pm! The jams are open to all festival participants and to the general public. The BC Interior Jazz Festival would like to give special thanks to Capilano University for hosting the Wednesday night jam! On Thursday, April 14th at 8pm at the Streaming Café (immediately following the jam session), there will be a special concert with limited seating. Clarinetist James Danderfer from Vancouver will be bring his Cross-Border Quintet to Kelowna for one night only. The group features James and Joe Poole (drums) from Vancouver, and John Stetch (piano), Joel Ross (vibraphone; Christian McBride and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra), and Vicente Archer (bass, Nicholas Payton and Robert Glasper) from New York City. They'll be performing music from James' new album "Time and Tide". Contact the Streaming Café for ticketing information ($25 adults/$20 students). Festival Coordinator's Message: This year’s event falls on April 14th - 16th, 2016. We are pleased to announce Laila Biali as our featured artist and the following as artists/adjudicators: Dr. Gregory W. Yasinitsky, Jazz Band; Bob Rebagliati, Jazz Band; Rejean Marois, Jazz Band and Vocal; Janet Warren, Vocal; Kinga Heming, Vocal; Neville Bowman, Jazz Combo; Bernie Addington, Jazz Combo; Loni Moger, Jazz Combo. The BC Interior Jazz Festival hosts Jazz Bands, Jazz Choirs, and Jazz Combos (vocal and instrumental) over the three-day event. As an affiliate of MusicFest Canada, the BC Interior Jazz Festival is able to issue invitations to MusicFest Canada for select Gold-ranked groups. In addition to its focus as a educational performance event, the BC Interior Jazz Festival features the Jazz Masters’ Concert, a show featuring a special guest artist along with the talents of many of the festival’s adjudicators and the finest professional players from around the Okanagan valley. This Friday evening event is often sold out, and is always one of the city’s premier Jazz concerts. This year's event is on Friday, April 15th at 7:30 pm at the Kelowna Community Theatre. Last year, the festival introduced a very successful Thursday night jam session. This event is open to all participants, adjudicators, and artists, and is open to the general public. If you'd like to get a sense of what these phenomenal young musicians are capable of, come out and see them make music with each other without a rehearsal! Update: Capilano University is also hosting a jam session at the Streaming Café on Wednesday, April 13th at 7pm. The BC Interior Jazz Festival has made a few fundamental changes to its operations. Many of our festival attendees are repeat customers who come to the festival year after year. After much consideration to the feedback given over the nine years I've been running the festival, the festival committee has decided to move away from the competitive festival model. We will be moving to a standards-based evaluation method (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Participant) and will no longer be declaring "winners" in any given category. Deserving individual students will still be recognized with awards as they have been in the past, but much of the terminology will have changed; gone are the days when only one senior rhythm section player will receive recognition. If our adjudicators feel that a student has done a great job, then they are free to distinguish that student without restriction. We feel that this change represents what we'd like to see in the world of arts education. Even though the world remains a pretty competitive place, that won't change if we train students to compete with each other. I still believe that there is merit in comparison, but we don't need direct competition in the arts in order to achieve that. Exposure to multiple artistic perspectives will help our students find their voices and identities, and the more educated perspectives they experience, the more likely they are to accept their own perspective as being unique, valid, and important. Our festival is still affiliated with MusicFest Canada and issues invitations to the Nationals to meritorious groups. As such, we use MusicFest's rules when it comes to a number of details. All groups must perform a swing piece, a ballad, and one other musical selection. We also classify performing groups by the age of the performers: Jr. V is Grade 8 or younger, Jr. IV is Grade 9, Jr. III is Grade 10, Intermediate II is Grade 11, and Senior I is Grade 12. If you feel your group falls somewhere in between these classifications, feel free to contact me so I can help to determine the right fit for your ensemble. The festival has always featured a Saturday night Showcase Concert and awards ceremony. This event will remain a part of the BC Interior Jazz Festival, but the procedure by which groups are invited has been changed to reflect our new vision of the festival. In order to encourage as many different musical perspectives as possible, our adjudicators will select a variety of excellent ensembles from a wide range of attending schools. The concert will highlight the many talented individuals and groups who participate in the festival. Awards will still be given out to students, but they will be given to directors for distribution and will no longer be a part of the Saturday Showcase Concert. In many ways, the BC Interior Jazz Festival will remain the same. The festival will still run like clockwork, elevate students to the next level of performance, and will feature devoted and passionate educators and performers in workshops and performance. We hope that these changes will be positive for everyone involved. The festival is (and always has been) open to the public, with performances running daily at both the Kelowna Community Theatre and the Rotary Centre for the Arts. Free instrumental and vocal workshops also run at the Rotary Centre for the Arts on Friday, April 15th, and Saturday, April 16th. A schedule for the workshops will be published in early Spring of 2016. We look forward to seeing you in April of 2016! Festival Coordinator Contact: craig.thomson@sd23.bc.ca |
 Masters' Concert 2015 videos have been posted on our Youtube Channel. Click the first icon below.
Thank you to our sponsors:
    
    |
