niagarajazzfestival.com
What A Jam-up! By Martine Mackenzie
The great jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This was the challenge I ran into while trying to put together how to best write about the TD Niagara Jazz Festival. It’s very hard to put into words and properly express the essence of jazz music. I grew up with jazz music. It’s the first genre that I have any memories of. My father, in his youth, along with his brothers, formed a jazz quintet that was renowned throughout the region. To this day, he still enjoys strumming his vintage Gibson acoustic guitar. The sounds of Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, just to mention a few, were always playing somewhere in the background of my life. In turn, I developed a love of jazz and have enjoyed the enduring melodies of Billie Holiday and Wynton Marsalis as well as the more modern jazzy sounds of Chicago and Van Morrison. Niagara’s music scene has historically not had a huge jazz influence. Enter Juliet Dunn and her husband and musical collaborator, Peter Shea. This dynamic jazz duo truly has a passion for music and life! Peter himself has always believed that Niagara has the potential to be the ‘New Orleans of the North’. Juliet also believes that the festival could one day be as important to the world jazz scene as the Montreal Jazz Festival is. It all started with an outdoor event that the duo put together in August of 2013. It was here, down by Lake Erie on Crystal Beach, that “Twilight Jazz on the Beach” was born. From there, the idea of putting together an actual jazz festival came to their minds. Peter and Juliet did their research to find that neither the organization nor the domain name, Niagara Jazz Festival, belonged to anyone so it was theirs for the taking. They also found out that jazz events in the Niagara Region were typically Photos courtesy of TD Niagara Jazz Festival
