News article

14 Oct 2018

Umeå Jazzfestival celebrates its 50th birthday

Umeå Jazz Festival celebrates 50 years

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SWINGING UMEÅ! 20-28 October 2018. The Umeå Jazz Festival is 50 years old. After an impressive and unbroken series of festivals, the jubilee has become part of the city's DNA. Already at the beginning of 1968, the concept of Swinging Umeå was coined and began an epoch where the city, among other things, helped jazz to attract new citizens and labor. How it matters today we can only speculate, but the festival is still one of Umeå's most important cultural bearers with international luminance. The Umeå Jazz Festival is today a vibrant and vital international playground for artistic development, where core values like tradition, creativity, curiosity, accessibility and gender equality guide. Here, musicians and groups are playing, pioneering new expressions and new opportunities. The festival is also a meeting place where everyone can find great experiences, unknown favorites and also make a swing.

Jazz is an admirable genre whose music has had a lot of influence on other art forms but has rarely received relevant recognition or public support. Jazz music has long been in modern times - perhaps so still - been the subject of distrust and prejudice. As late as 1977, publications circulated in social institutions such as. anxiously and ignorantly warned of the jazzen: "// ... This music is characterized by the melody and harmony taking a very modest place, while in return the rhythmic is exceptionally highly developed and central. Thus, for the music a strong bodily-sensual often ecstatic character ... // " "// ... It's a music that largely puts the body in motion and its drives in the center. Following the development of this music, it is seen that it has been the great accompaniment to spirits, whores, drug addiction, etc. It's a piece of paganism that has turned back // ... " (from the book Music - a gospel gear 1977)

You are amazed. Certainly, we hope that these writings no longer have a reading circle, but please note that in our contemporary we see signs that history repeats and dark men again get new followers. I hope that our jazz festival in Umeå will not only be seen as a free and amazing experience, but also as a modest yet important peace project open to all around the world, carrying important stories. And so the jazz heat of course!

Welcome! Lennart Strömbäck / artistic director