|
|
 |
Adelaide International Guitar Festival
In late November this year the inaugural Adelaide International Guitar Festival will take place. This extraordinary event will feature over seventy Australian and international performers from an enormously diverse number of styles and backgrounds, including Vernon Reid, Ed Kuepper, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Slava Grigoryan. In addition to performances there will be workshops, forums and master-classes.
In a real coup, the Adelaide International Guitar Festival has secured American David Spelman as Artistic Adviser. Spelman is the co-founder of renowned New York Guitar Festival, and an outstanding guitarist in his own right. While in Adelaide recently for the official launch of the Adelaide festival he spoke to dB Magazine about how he came to be involved.
"There were a couple of threads to it. There was an Australian group in the seventies called The Dingos. I got to know their guitar player who was one of the founding members and got to play with him in New York, which led to me getting exposed to Australian music and ultimately led to meeting people in the culture and business community, such as Arts SA."
But the real catalyst was apparently an unexpected phone call. "It was my 40th birthday, I was in New York. I got a call and was invited to go out for breakfast with the Premier of SA! So I thought 'What do I do here, what am I supposed say, do I call him Mike or Mr Premier?' So it's my 40th birthday and here I am talking to Mike Rann about many things including guitars and guitar festivals. Before I knew it he had reached across the table and shook my hand and said 'Lets do this thing'. In the end he took his leave and I thought 'Well, what does that mean?'. But after a short period of time we got notification that the government of South Australia wanted to support this festival.
"So I was thrilled, it was amazing. I hoped it would happen but I was a little sceptical. But here we are!"
Spelman firmly believes that Adelaide is an ideal city to be holding such an event, despite our own cultural cringe. "I mean here's a place that not only has WOMADelaide, it has Writers Week, it has the world's largest Fringe Festival. This is a place that has the Adelaide Festival Of Arts, which is one of the great arts festivals in the world. This is not a provincial place although some locals seem to have an apologetic sort of inferiority complex. But I've travelled a bit and Adelaide is a very, very sophisticated place with extremely open-minded people so I'm hoping that people will respond to this admittedly very eclectic programming."
The Adelaide festival brings together a hugely diverse range of performers and styles, including blues, classical, jazz, flamenco and world. This diversity is very much a deliberate ploy. "I think it's a very diverse festival," agrees Spelman. "One of the things that I'm really excited about with this festival is that there are a lot of different artists slated to appear on programs together. When people are together under the virtual umbrella of a festival you never know what's going to happen. Those sort of surprises you can't really predict but as a festival curator you just have to create the opportunity for the organic synergy and then sit back and hope!"
Among the higher profile names there are also many performers with whom Adelaide audiences might be less familiar, but about whom Spelman is equally enthusiastic. "Kaki King is starting to already develop a following in Australia. Kaki is a spectacular artist, very dynamic young woman... just a real individual, a composer and a very tasteful player. There's an element of theatre involved and while she never compromises her music for the sake of theatrics there is something very theatrical about her percussive, technical and very tasteful approach to the instrument.
"There's so many great women players. Cindy Cashdollar is a fantastic player, with influences coming from Willy Nelson, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Ryan Adams. Not a household name, but she is one of the great, great steel guitar players in the world."
David Spelman is a man with an enormous passion for the guitar, its rich history and above all the music in its many forms. We are fortunate to be able to see and share this passion come to fruition in what promises to be yet another fantastic and hopefully regular arts event in our fair city.
James McKenzie
The inaugural Adelaide International Guitar Festival runs from Fri 23 Nov to Sun 2 Dec, in and around the Festival Centre, proudly supported by dB Magazine
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
