Cavell Leitch New Zealand International Jazz and Blues Festival 2018

Frosty mornings, the threat of snow, and midwinter blues might be a couple of months away yet, but Christchurch is about to be hit by a different type of blues when the Cavell Leitch New Zealand International Jazz & Blues Festival comes to town later this week (May 23-27).

• Visit the Cavell Leitch New Zealand International Jazz & Blues Festival  website
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Returning to the city for its twenty-third year, this festival is a treat for lovers of jazz and blues, and offers a range of experiences showcasing local and international talent, and up-and-coming stars to watch out for in the future. Here are a couple that really stand out to me.

Kurt Elling, Grammy Award-winner and 8-times winner of the Jazz Journalists Association’s ‘Male Singer of the Year’ title, is headlining the festival, playing with the Kurt Elling Quintet at the Piano on Saturday, May 26. His is a voice that is an absolute pleasure to listen to, and with the backing of a live quintet, this is sure to be a magical evening.

Listen to Kurt Elling’s music in our collection (includes streaming music as well as CDs)

Whenever I think of jazz and blues, Billie Holiday is one of the first names I think of. Although we won’t be graced by the great singer herself, we will be able to experience the power of her repertoire when Mary Coughlan sings Billie Holiday in two concerts at The Piano on Wednesday 23 May. This show was first performed in Christchurch at the Jazz & Blues Festival fifteen years ago, and I’m hoping I get to it this time around – I was trying to decide whether to go see it back then, and didn’t, and have been kicking myself ever since.

Listen to Mary Coughlan’s music in our collection. 
Listen to Billie Holiday’s music in our collection (includes streaming music as well as CDs)

Having played clarinet when I was younger, I have always enjoyed hearing what Kiwi Nathan Haines has been up to in the music world, and am excited to see him here in Christchurch with Jonathan Crayford. With violin accompaniment, this duo will be reinterpreting the works of well-known classical composers to fit the jazz and blues style of the festival. Both Haines and Crayford have won the Best Jazz Album of the Year award here in New Zealand, and with this amount of skill on the stage I am really excited to see what they create.

Listen to music by Nathan Haines in our collection.
Listen to music by Jonathan Crayford in our collection. 

Of course, all the big names need to start somewhere, and the Jazz & Blues Festival supports these young up-and-comers and Christchurch locals. Georgie Clifford and Alice Tanner are two such ‘noteable young women’, and Christchurch local Kate Taylor, front-woman of the All-Girl Big Band, is also one to watch. On the festival’s last day, five Christchurch high schools will show off their jazz skills in the Festival High School Jazz Band Concert at Christchurch Boys High School on Sunday 27 May.

For something a little different, join chef Richard Till and local band The Eastern for an evening of Southern Fried Chicken and music at the Lyttelton Arts Factory on Friday 25 May and Saturday 26 May.

As you see, with so many different artists on the programme, there really will be something for everyone. I recommend getting your tickets now so that you don’t miss out on this wonderful musical experience. And, once the festival’s over, check out our jazz and blues resources to stay in the swing of things.

Jazz and blues in our collection

• Jazz and blues CDs
• Books about jazz and blues
• Magazines about jazz and blues

Jazz and blues eResources

Naxos Music Library Jazz streams over 9000 jazz albums, from jazz legends to contemporary jazz. It covers a wide range of jazz music with recordings from over 32,000 artists. Labels include Blue Note, Warner Jazz, EMI, Enja, Fantasy and more. New albums are added weekly.

Jazz Music Library includes material from Concord Records, including New Zealand pianist Alan Broadbent, major jazz figures such as Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and more. There are also recent jazz figures such as Diana Krall, Esperanza Spalding, and even Michael Bolton singing Sinatra standards! The collection includes works licensed from legendary record labels, including Audiophile, Blue Note, Concord Jazz, Jazzology, Milestone, Nessa Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, and Prestige. Also included are Marian McPartland’s Peabody Award winning Piano Jazz Radio Broadcasts and never before released performances from the Monterey Jazz Festival and great jazz venues. Jazz Music Library is part of Music Online: Listening Plus.

American Song provides online access to over 100,000 tracks from  every genre and music period of American history.

An Hour with Dame Fiona Kidman – WORD Christchurch

Fiona Kidman’s latest book All Day at the Movies explores what it means to be a woman in New Zealand. It’s an episodic novel  set over six decades. She explores where families were at and where they are going now.

Family is important to me as an only child I was often an observer looking in on families.

But she also says “I try not to put  my family into books”.

This novel was inspired by the sight of abandoned tobacco kilns.  Her father grew tobacco in KeriKeri and the memories of the Nicotiana scent drew her to setting her central character in the tobacco field of Motueka. The novel features a lot of pregnancies – as Owen Marshall observes, some more welcome than others.  One of her characters doesn’t know who her father is.

Fiona acknowledges pregnancy is a huge issue in women’s lives. She is an adoptive mother herself, and  acknowledges adoption was not handled well in the past.  Recently her novels are set around a central historical character – but in this novel she wanted to say something about politics, how decisions made in Wellington affect people’s lives.

Fiona has always been a political animal. She was part of the 1981 Springbok tour movement as explored in her novel Beside the Dark Pool. Exploring the social context her characters inhabit over the decades gives her a vehicle to say something about how Wellington decisions affect their lives.

Dame Fiona Kidman in interview with Owen Marshall

Looking at her characters as they deal with illegitimacy, estrangement, and abuse you may think she has a negative view of life and of men. But she says “I love men”. There are at least 5 positive men in the book, even though it may not seem that men come out well.

“I have had a lucky life” one of her characters says in the novel (and she observes it of her own life) which ends on an optimistic note. She looks at the circumstances of her characters and why things happen without making judgments. Authentic characters are important – how real people deal with things and how it affects them in 20, 30, 40 years time. Her characters become very real to her – they stand at the kitchen bench and come for rides with her in the car. By the time she sits down to write a novel they have their own voice which has to be listened to. Sometimes she is ready to let them go after a novel, and sometimes they don’t want to go away and reappear in another form like her character Jessie Sandal from Songs of the Violet Café.

Fiona has always been a feminist writer as is evident in  A breed of Women. She sees herself not as a woman’s writer but a writer writing for women. She first thought of herself as a writer as a 22-year-old in the 1960s. It was in an era when it was embarrassing to be pregnant. She had worked at Rotorua Library and moved to Rotorua High School library when she married her husband who also worked there. When she got pregnant, students remarked “Got her up the duff eh Sir!”, leading to a request for her to leave the school. Such were the expectations of the era.

She left and started writing – submitting a play for a competition. Her play evoked the comment that it must have been written by the dirtiest minded young woman in New Zealand.

I felt I did know stuff about being a woman that a middle-aged man in Wellington seemed not to know.

Fiona often struggled with expectations:

What am I doing sitting at the kitchen table, buying the kids clothes not preserving hundreds of jars and doing this.

She worked as a secretary of PEN and the NZ Book Council and hoped to help authors think of writing as working.

Her favourite genre is short stories but they don’t sell a lot of books and she loves poetry but working in other genres is necessary. She made as much money working in television in a month as writing in a couple of years.

• Through working in television, she learnt to see as you would through the camera
• through radio work she learn to listen especially to the silences
• through journalism she learnt to ask questions

All have been useful in her writing work.  Poetry is not so much thinking about the audience more spontaneous.

Signed after all these years

Read more about Fiona Kidman from her official website,  The Academy of New Zealand Literature, The New Zealand Book Council, and  Penguin Press.

Find books by Fiona Kidman in our collection.

WORD Christchurch

• WORD Christchurch website
• Our WORD Christchurch 2016 overview
• Our posts about WORD Christchurch 2016

Canadian Tales with Elizabeth Hay – WORD Christchurch

Here’s some audience questions from the session with author Elizabeth Hay at the WORD Christchurch Writers and Readers Festival.

On writing

Canadian Elizabeth Hay has to write about what means most to her. In her latest book  His whole life, she writes of the close mother-son bond. As the marriage comes apart, the mother-son bond deepens. In her earlier novel Late nights on air she revisits her years as “An old radio hack”.

On the publishing scene

New Zealand authors will sympathize with her comments that publishers aren’t always aware how much Canadians interested in Canadian tales. Publishers want books to be set outside Canada with an eye to foreign sales.

Elizabeth Hay, Image supplied.

On Trudeau

“He knows he’s not the smartest guy in the world” unlike Harper. He’s done some things like the Montreal Gay Pride march, does he overdo it? – Sometimes. Under former president Harper, Canada was very tar oil sands orientated. Under Trudeau it is different – landscape and environment is at the heart of the country now.

On the landscape

You can’t live in Canada without having a sense of it because there is so much of it and a need of landscape which is at the heart of our writing”.

Read a biography of Elizabeth Hay on her official website.
Have you read her books what would you like to ask her?

Elizabeth Hay appears in:
Canadian Tales: Elizabeth Hay, Fri 26 Aug, 12.30pm
About a Boy, Sat 27 Aug, 1.45pm

Find books by Elizabeth Hay in our collection.

WORD Christchurch

• WORD Christchurch website
• Our WORD Christchurch 2016 overview
• Our posts about WORD Christchurch 2016

8 reasons to visit Writers Festivals

It is hard to believe that my three days of booky awesomeness are over. Being part of the library team visiting Auckland Writers Festival, it felt like living in a bubble of joy and excitement for a few days. When I felt it couldn’t get better, it did!

Here is a list of reasons why you – I believe you must be a passionate reader, if you have come across this blog – should not miss out on the next booky event: 

1. An inspiring amount of people come to the same place to listen and talk about books, reading and writing. It is amazing to be part of such passionate and versatile crowd that vibrates in chords of harmony.
2. A day at the festival exists of librarian’s favourite things: listening to authors, reading, writing, sleeping and eating. OK, I admit – buying books as well.
3. Patient queues. Never in my life have I experienced such patient and polite queue-ers! Queues start to form 45 minutes before the event. It is great to see people connecting and conversing about books and sessions they’ve seen. Queuing is a great way to catch up with the content of sessions you were not able to attend or just to meet lovely people (It is also a perfect time to tweet or post on Facebook as audience is not allowed to use the devices during some of the sessions).
4. Kids. Excited kids. Kids excited about books. Tons of them! As a librarian I started to feel hopeful about this planet’s future when I saw hundreds and hundreds of kids and their parents pouring into the festival venue to listen to their favourite authors and patiently queueing for more than 2 hours (!) to get their books signed. Never mind parents spending their wages to buy their little ones more books! Certainly a memory to hold on to, it will come handy next time I have my dark day.
5. Extremely patient and helpful staff. Working in public service myself, I deeply admire these people’s patience and friendliness. I imagine there were moments, when – if being one of them – I would have happily hid in the toilets and pretended I’m not there.
6. Paper bags! Paper bags at the book sellers. My level of serotonin increased by double, when I realized those paper bags people are carrying around contain newly bought books. That’s the way to go, people!
7. Law of attraction. Being in the same place as so many other people you admire and are there to listen too, seems to attract some sort of good energy. One moment, they are on the stage, next moment, they are in the crowd and you can be sitting right next to them. Law of attraction surely does the magic during the festival. I must have been destined to meet Xinran. First, I was sitting next to her on the plane to Auckland and also bumped into her after the festival in the restaurant. She left me speechless – her genuineness and humbleness are admirable. She hugged me before saying goodbye. It felt so natural.
8. Last but most obvious reason – authors. Amazing humble giants! You don’t have to read all of their books to see how amazing they are. You can just listen and let yourself be charmed. Again. And again. And again …

It’s Chocolate, Bunnies and All Things Easter

It’s a weird old Easter this year. It’s late,  and jammed up snugly against school holidays and Anzac weekend. There’s long weekends aplenty and time to get those last gardeny things sorted or maybe take a break out of the city before the winter truly sets in.

Easter chocolate excesses have been in the shops since January and Hot Cross Buns seem to be available year round.  I always plonk my curmudgeon hat firmly on my head when it comes to these yummy fruity, spicy buns. How  can you sell buns filled with chocolate without a single currant in sight as a Hot Cross Bun? Humpf!!

If you want to learn about the origins of Easter, when the libraries will be open or other information about this religious and increasingly secular celebration, then look no further than the Christchurch City Library Easter pages .

What to do, what to do?

At the Transitional Cathedral, known more affectionately as The Cardboard Cathedral, there is an art exhibit  “Station’s of the Cross” by John Badcock . There will be traditional church services throughout the town, and more farmers and craft markets than you can shake a foil covered stick at.

For the egg lovers, there is the Whittakers Big Egg Hunt. New Zealand Artists have created 100 giant eggs and scattered them around New Zealand, some of them are hidden in our fair city. While not a traditionally Easter activity, Zombie: Red Zone  Gaming will be an adrenalin pumper for the fitter among us. A great way to work of that chocolate perhaps?

Open in time for Easter and the school holidays, is the Washington Way Skate Park, revamped and awesome, it is now one of the biggest and most challenging parks in the country.

I’m hoping the weather will be kind and allow me to get some gardening done, so I can hibernate over the up coming winter, and look at it, tidy, from the inside.

Whatever you plan to do this Easter, I hope you can relax, enjoy some time with family and friends and maybe hunt for a few eggs or scuff through the leaves in Hagley Park.

What are your plans for your days off? Got any great events you’d like to share?

Culture Galore – Just Glorious

UPDATE: Culture Galore has been cancelled. A Community Recreation Advisor reports the park is too sodden to allow vehicle access and vehicles could also cause major damage to the fields which are used for soccer over the winter.

Culture Galore is almost here again, with the annual festival being held on Saturday March 8, 12-4pm. I love this free Christchurch City Council event. It has grown over the years from a few food stalls to a great afternoon out for the family.

It’s a wonderful bringing together of the large variety of cultural groups in our fair city, and you can listen to music, watch dances from over twenty groups and eat tasty food from around the world. There are also crafts and other items to buy from around the globe.

There are also workshops throughout the afternoon, where you can learn anything from dancing from Macedonia, TaiChi and Morris Dancing – bells and hankies  included. These photographs of past Culture Galore events from our Flickr will give you more than a taste of what could be on offer.

I also love that is a suburban event, nestled in Ray Blank Park, the well ‘treed’ Ilam park on Maidstone Road. Most of the year it’s home to dog walkers, soccer teams and a good many cricket games (I know, I’ve watched a few), but for an afternoon in March it explodes with the colours, sights and sounds and smells of the United Nations.

As an aside, and shameless plug, be there before 12.40pm, and you’ll also get to see a great world music choir, Women in Harmony perform some songs on the stage, and there will be at least two Christchurch City Librarians in amongst the group – I wonder if you will be able to pick them? No, we won’t be wearing a twinset and pearls!

Halloween – what’s not to like?

I think I’m going to put on my crusty curmudgeon hat and say “I hate Halloween”. I’m the sort of person who when kids come trick or treating says “your costumes look neat but we don’t do Halloween here”.

Why? Well let’s start with:

• When did we start celebrating Halloween? Only in the last 10 or 15 years when the chain stores realised there was a buck to be made. Then they started promoting it like it had always been a Kiwi thing.
• Allegedly it’s a time for kids to have fun but really it seems more like a thing for adults. They are either having Halloween parties and dressing up, or they are dressing up their kids.
• It represents the triumph of American culture – Halloween is very much an American tradition which we have seen in films and television.
• In many parts of the world All Saints Day is a time to remember the dead – not scary ghouls but real people you loved and who have died. The commercial takeover seems crass.
• Halloween rituals make sense in the northern hemisphere where bonfires and lanterns are light against the encroaching darkness of the long Northern winter. Not so much in springtime New Zealand where the days are lighter and longer.

How do you feel about Halloween?

An alternative to Halloween which is green and rooted in Aotearoa’s cycle of seasons and cultural influences is suggested: National Green Day. Perfect for high spring: planting rituals like getting your tomatoes in, planting and enjoying fragrant native plants, harvesting the ti (tea tree), the return of pipiwharauroa (the shining cuckoo), enjoying the song of the riroriro (grey warbler).

Anyway grumps over – if Halloween is your bag we have lots of stuff to help celebrate the day:

• About Halloween for adults and kids
• Books on spooky stuff and spooky stories
• Horror tales and movies, horror genre authors
• spooky food and costumes
• Halloween crafts and decorations

Lighting up the midwinter darkness

The Lyttelton Harbour Festival of Lights is a well established mid winter treat for Christchurch folk. Houses around the port get creative with strings of lights, there is a great street party and of course fireworks. The festival runs over four days from 20 to 23 June, 2013.

The programme features heaps of music, dance,  kapa haka, workshops, circus, food and wine, documentary and feature film and art exhibitions. This year, Lyttelton Harbour Festival of Lights joins with Lyttelton Community House and Rapaki Marae to celebrate Matariki,  the Māori New Year.

Some of the events:

• Street party , the Lyttelton Port of Christchurch Fireworks display and circus featuring the Harris and Turner London Street Carnivale – Friday, 21 June, evening
• Lyttel Book Fair and the Farmers Market Midwinter Xmas – Saturday 22 June 10am
• Wood fired pizza at the Community Garden – Sunday 23 June, 2pm
• Free outdoor screening of Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners – Sunday 23 June, 7pm, London Street. Bring your own chair.

It’s all about the writers

There is lots to look forward to in the The Press Christchurch Writers Festival and if you haven’t already booked some sessions I’d recommend you pop into one of our libraries and grab a programme. For me it’s a wonderful chance to listen to  a really standout bunch of local and international writers. I like that its based in a good central location – the GeoDome in Hagley Park, YMCA in Hereford Street and The George on Peterborough Street. Easy to walk from one venue to another.

Hearing  Joanne Drayton, Kate Grenville and John Lanchester will be highlights for me. The Ngaio Marsh award night with a debate  featuring lawyers and crime writers  sounds like fun. I haven’t been to a debate in years. Lawyers always fancy themselves in debates but I’d like to see the crime writers give them a run for their money.

Writers festivals give you a chance to challenge yourself – hearing a writer whose work you don’t know or trying a different kind of event.  This year’s festival has a film, some interesting exhibitions, youth events, drama and poetry and writer readings.

My challenge this time is to hear Chris Turney, a British geologist who particular interest is in past and future climates, how people have responded to change and recent human evolution and migration. He also features in a session on Antarctica with Veronika Meduna and Rebecca Priestly.

I’ve already seen the Anne Perry; interiors documentary and I’d recommend it as an interesting counterpoint to An hour with Joanne Drayton.

Finally I’m looking forward to two outings to interesting exhibitions. Pressed letters at Peterborough Library features some of the best examples of letterpress printing produced in New Zealand in recent times. This trip can be combined with a good look at the artwork on the exterior of the library and a visit to the coffee cart which is just across the road.

The other exhibition Biblia abiblia; books that are not books is a display of non-traditional techniques of bookmaking, creating altered books from volumes no longer in use at the CPIT library. Alongside the invited artists are student works from the Bachelor of Design course at CPIT and works from private collections and the CPIT Artwork Collection. You can combine this with an exploration of this interesting part of town – the Ng Gallery and some good cafes.

What a great whānau day!

Last Saturday was a busy day in the Christchurch eastern suburbs, with the traditional Christmas parade in New Brighton and AFFIRM  in Aranui, you could not be bored.

AFFIRM is a fantastic community event for all ages  – my favourite this side of Christmas –  and in this tenth edition it was clear that there still is a strongly united neighbourhood in Aranui.

Everybody enjoyed the “Aranui Top Team” competition, some of the tasks the teams had to do were hard but made all the supporters and spectators laugh, have you ever watched a multi-person sack race? It is quite amusing!

At the Christchurch City Libraries’ tent people had the opportunity to record their earthquake memories in the Plains FM recording POD, they will be added to the CCL’s permanent collection as it is such a special part of our city’s history. Have you donated your earthquake story yet?

The Pasifika performances from local groups got us all dancing and Ladi6 paid homage to her origins by giving it all on stage.

Kia kaha vibrations were in the air.

• Find out more about AFFIRM
• Check out our pics