Festival year 2010
Kokemäki river delta was transformed once again into a high tempo meeting point for rhythm music lovers for the 45th Pori Jazz Festival between the 17th-25th of July.
A new team consisting of Tuomas Kallio, Markus Partanen and Teppo Mäkynen were responsible for compiling the festival programme this year. The team brought new emphasis to the festival mix. For example they gave Finnish jazz a more substantial role, buffed up Sunday’s Kirjurinluoto Arena concert as well as gave more distinct profiles to the two biggest evening concerts. These plans proved successful and especially the Otava Factory found its ground and audience in its third year. Also, Kirjurinluoto Arena schedule was put through a test as Saturday’s main performer, Massive Attack wanted to play in as dark of conditions as possible so that their spectacular light show could be seen in all its glory. The concept proved to work and final sounds were heard as late as after 11 pm that night.
Festival programme shone with such glimmering stars as rap legend Gil Scott-Heron, soul and funk bands Mayer Hawthorne & The County as well as Sharon Jones &The Dap-Kings who proved to be in top form. Biggest jazz names included Melody Gardot, Tomasz Stanko Quintet, José James and Lee Konitz, featured pop/rock legends were Toto, John Fogerty, Jeff Beck and singer/songwriter Tori Amos as well as hip hop producer N.E.R.D. There were altogether 129 performing groups. Programme included mostly jazz; two thirds of all music was classed as jazz.
Jazz Street is a festival feature that is under continuous efforts of improvement. In the summer of 2010 the street was brought up to date with jazzed up food and product offering with special effort given to visual aspects of the street. Pori Jazz outsourced the sale of merchandise to a new partner, Innoflame, who revived the concept successfully. Also the already established group of partners saw some new additions after a couple of more difficult years of sponsoring.
Ticket sales exceeded expectations slightly. There were in total 155 000 visitors to the festival of which 95 000 took part in free of charge events and 60 000 were paying concert goers. All in all there were 116 concerts, of which nearly 70% (80 concerts) were free of charge and the rest 36 you needed to buy tickets for. Concerts were held at 12 recognisable locations from Kirjurinluoto Arena, LP45!, Otava Factory, Pori Theatre, Ultra Music Nights, Klubi-Klubben and Garden to Cafe Jazz, Radio Nova Stage and the new Apollo Stage. In addition Lokki-stage, located in the old park of Kirjurinluoto and Pelle Hermanni’s park were new venues for the Kids Festival.
This year’s theme for Pori Jazz Kids Festival was exotic rhythms and instruments. Kids Festival saw a record number of events which again proved that the festival is important for local kids and youths as well as in bringing other rhythm music enthusiasts from all over Finland and abroad to Pori. From over 90 events, 25 were concerts and the rest were music and instrument workshops and play schools. Kids Festival was part of EU’s culture capital Istabul’s “Istanbul – Pori Music Networking 2010” -project.
Vibraphonist Panu Savolainen (20) was chosen as artist of the year. Festival poster was designed by Kustaa Saksi.