Every year on 30 April, International Jazz Day is celebrated around the world, honouring the sound of artistic freedom.
Samoa, International Jazz Day has been celebrated annually since 2014 (less a couple of Covid years).
That was the year when the Samoana Jazz and Arts Festival was created.
This year, the celebration in Samoa titled Sā-Moana Jazz: Jazz of the Sacred (blue) Ocean will be held at the Tiapapata Art Centre as a Little Gallery Concert. “Sā-Moana Jazz” brings together a group of talented musicians and music enthusiasts.
One of these musicians will demonstrate the haunting and evocative sounds of the fagufagu (nose flute).
The revival of old instruments, like the fagufagu and fa’aili ofe (pan pipes) that once reverberated with emotion in pre-European contact Samoa, adds richness and a unique character to the sounds of modern Samoan society, enriching both musical and cultural landscapes.
Revitalizing these once iconic instruments can provide new avenues for musical innovation and creative expression, a typical construct in the jazz genre, as well as offer a connection to the past and a chance to explore different musical traditions. Another musician in Sā-Moana Jazz will share recordings of nature’s many voices, juxtaposed to create unusual sounds and rhythms.
And there will be songs attributed to the more commonly recognized jazz classics.
With such an eclectic range of musical sounds, the conversation will also be turning to the rich ethnomusicology of pre-European contact Samoa which, as early as the mid-1920s, embraced the jazz genre born only a decade or so earlier in New Orleans and the lower Mississippi Delta of the United States of America.