Penza, 19 May 2015. PenzaNews. The musical agenda of this year’s Jazz May festival held in Penza on May 15-17 was the largest since its foundation, the producer of the event Oleg Rubtsov told PenzaNews agency.

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“In terms of how many musicians: about 150 people. If you take the main official agenda without the open-airs, we had 10 full-fledged concerts: two on the first day, then three and three more, and performances of two pipe organ jazz musicians. The agenda was greatly more diverse than a year ago,” he added.

He pointed out that the festival attracted high-end bands from Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov and Saransk, and they were playing either for minimal reward or just for a compensation of their travel expenses.

“They also helped us diversify this festival component. The result was a vivid event, a big melting pot for musicians to chat and exchange experience. What happened was the very thing the people on jazz festivals expect. There always was some live contact between the pipe organ players, and the Moscow headline musicians were never seen alone: the guys were always trying to exchange some experience with them,” the producer said.

The only disadvantage of the 2015 Jazz May festival was the absence of musicians from abroad, Oleg Rubtsov explained, but this did not have any negative effect on the quality of jazz.

“I think the Penza audience received the agenda very warmly. The halls were full of people. Igor Butman’s concert didn’t have a single empty seat left. He was intentionally preceded by the musicians whom we should show to people but who wouldn’t get a full audience on their own. This is a classic festival case when a strong headliner follows the guys that the audience should see,” the speaker added.

According to him, this year’s festival had no lack of visitor.

The additional art areas in the festival were diverse, Oleg Rubtsov pointed out.

“We had some musical instrument figures based on sketches by the architect Sergei Pivikov. Guys from Bit.Games also nicely integrated their sponsorship advertising: no ad campaigns, just installed those figures that attracted attention to them and still looked in place. They had full-sized dolls of musicians, actually protagonists of a game of theirs whom they redesigned to look like jazz musicians. They also set up a video game area for one of their projects modified for offline play, and it was quite popular,” the producer said.

Another memorable object was a bench painted like a piano made and presented to the festival by the designer studio “Good.”

“Truth be told, we gave the space issue a serious thought this year, and came to a conclusion we will be dealing with the sponsors in this area in the next year, if the next year’s festival will take place, and we hope it will, like that. There will be, so to say, a head architect of a committee, and a recruited designer that will work on the visuals of the objects. The sponsorship cooperation will work like this: those sponsors who want to be represented in the festival space will be offered to provide objects that won’t look out of place and will be based on their activities. They will be directed to a recruited person or a company. That wouldn’t be a case of monopoly: this way, we will ensure the whole area will have a uniform style,” Oleg Rubtsov explained.

He praised the ad area of the company “Rostum” where an image of a bass instrument was shown coming together as a real-time puzzle, achieving a pretty and unusual effect.

Discussing the trash separation and collection program during the festival, Oleg Rubtsov explained they achieved an agreement with Penzavtorsyryo which collected the discarded waste daily.

“We had a really grand festival this year,” the speaker summed up.