- Festival International de Jazz de Montréal
The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal (FIJM), (Eng: Montreal International Jazz Festival) also called "the Jazz Fest", is the largest
jazz festival in the world.The Festival
It is held annually in
Montreal ,Quebec during the summer season (usually at the end of June and the beginning of July) and gathers artists from around the world. It is typically attended by over 2 million people who are attracted by the electric atmosphere, diversity of shows and by the city itself. The festival reported on its website (below) in April 2008 that the attendance of the 2007 festival reached 2.1 million. Many parts of the city's downtown core are closed to traffic for ten days as outdoor shows are free to the public and on many stages at the same time, from noon till midnight. Attendance to some shows is over 100,000 and sometimes over 200,000.Shows are held in a wide variety of venues, from relatively small jazz clubs to the large halls of
Place des Arts . Some of the outdoor shows are held on cordoned-off streets while others are on terraced parks. Typically there are well over 500 concerts offered during the span of 10 days, from noon to midnight, about 350 of which are outdoors and free to the public.History
The Montreal Jazz Festival was conceived by Alain Simard, who had spent much of the 1970s working with Productions Kosmos bringing artists such as
Chick Corea ,Dave Brubeck ,Muddy Waters ,Chuck Berry ,Bo Diddley ,John Lee Hooker and others to Montreal to perform. In 1977, Simard teamed up with André Ménard and Denys McCann to form an agency named "Spectra Scène" (now known as "L'Équipe Spectra"), with the idea of creating a summer festival in Montreal that would bring a number of artists together at the same time.They planned their first festival for the summer of 1979, but, unable to secure sufficient funding, their plans were scuttled, but they still were able to produce two nights of shows at Théâtre-St-Denis, with
Keith Jarrett and a then-unknownPat Metheny .The first Montreal jazz festival was in
1980 , with funding from Alain de Grosbois ofCBC Stereo andTélé-Québec . WithRay Charles ,Vic Vogel , Chick Corea andGary Burton on the bill, and an attendance of 12,000, the event was deemed a success, and has continued to grow since then.References
* Montreal Jazz Festival 25th Anniversary Album Souvenir, 2004
External links
* [http://www.montrealjazzfest.com Official Website]
* [http://www.restomontreal.ca/attractions/montreal-jazz-festival.php?lang=en Restaurants nearby Montreal Jazz Festival]
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