The Piano Man Jazz Club is back with its music festival, Giants of Jazz. Hosting the third edition with Lock & Key, the two performance spaces are set to make you swoon over unadulterated jazz all over again. Currently ongoing, the festival will go on till December 9, rounding off a total on 21 performances between the two venues.“These 10 days offer a curation of extremely high level of performances and musical knowledge on stage,” shares Arjun Sagar Gupta, owner of The Piano Man Jazz Club. As Indian and international artists take to the stage, he urges not just patrons but also musicians to come and have a listen, “We have a mix of musicians from the US, South Africa, Indonesia…it spans the globe. Hence, it’s a great way to sample what’s happening on the international circuit.”
Lucia
Promising to be a ‘a powerful celebration of music that’s democratic, inclusive, emotional and speaks to people across the board’, Giants of Jazz has assembled a crackerjack milieu of musicians for you, such as Sentirenla Lucia and Deviana. Speaking of Lucia, a R & B musician being on the roster, Gupta says, “The barriers between jazz and R & B are so thin, I didn’t want to box it and say one genre is this and the other is that. She’s an incredible performer and one of the few Indian musicians who work so hard to produce every single set.” His association with the Indonesian Deviana goes farther back, 2015 to be precise, “The first time she visited, Deviana came with the Mexican Ambassador, who told me she’s a musician. Now that’s a phrase I hear often, but once she started playing my jaw was on the floor – I had to physically pick up my jaw from the floor, she is that unbelievable!” It’s not just her expert skills that makes them work in tandem, Deviana happens to also share Arjun’s philosophy on music – “you cannot make music without compassion”.
Deviana
On what made him collaborate with the freshly minted Lock & Key, he says, “We wanted to have performances in Gurgaon, and Rituu (Owner, L&K) was most in line with our thinking. She’s very artist-friendly, and everyone who’s played at L&K has called me to say that they had a great experience performing there and Rituu was wonderful – which is saying a lot for a new space.” Rituu too shares that she was excited to be approached for Giants of Jazz, “This has never happened in Gurgaon before, it’s great to be a part of it. We’re an intimate space hence you never lose touch with the performance.”
Celebrating jazz, the festival brings forth ,“A hundred years of evolution and interaction that is jazz,” as Arjun puts it. Taking forward his artist-first ethic, these 10 days applaud both group and individualistic expressions of jazz. With the festival spanning across two cities now, we couldn’t be more chuffed about the increased accessibility, and twice the tipples, nibbles, and laughter to go with it.
