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. 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-unknown Pat Metheny.
The first Montreal jazz festival was in 1980, with funding from Alain de Grosbois of CBC Stereo and Radio-Québec. With Ray Charles, Vic Vogel, Chick Corea and Gary Burton on the bill, and an attendance of 12,000, the event was deemed a success, and has continued to grow since then.
In 2000, the Festival teamed up with Distribution Select to release its 4-CD box set called « Over 20 years of music - Plus de 20 ans de musique ». The box includes a 13-page booklet with the biographies of the artists and complete liner notes about the music.
Read more about this topic: Montreal International Jazz Festival
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“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
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