Letters

Rip It Up, Issue 11, 1 May 1978, Page 18

Letters

John McCready

Now that the Easter 'jazz bonanza’ is behind us for another year, many musicians and enthusiasts must be asking themselves ‘what now?’

On looking back to the festival at Trillos, it serves as a painful reminder of N.Z.’s lack of confidence in its own artists. Those local musicians performing, or at least improvising, can be counted on one hand. Granted, the accusation that the Jazz Festival committee were excluding not only local musicians but all contemporary forms of the music was alleviated by the late addition to the line-up of Mike Nock. Mike, however, was given a paltry twenty minutes at the start of each programme and returned to the States very dissatisfied with the slapdash organisation. Still let’s not have those weird avant-garde chappies going on far too long before we get down to the real old-fashioned bebop everyone’s come to hear!

One good thing came out of it though the decision of some of NZ.'s top jazz rock groups to combine in their own festival later this year. Let’s hope readers of Rip It Up will give us their full support and come and hear where jazz is today, not where it was twenty years ago. Phil Broadhurst

We refer to your review of the Earth, Wind & Fire album "All 'n All" in your very fine March issue. The second to last paragraph states that only the first shipment of this album received the original deluxe double cover. We would like to advise your readers that this statement is not factual, and that all copies sold in New Zealand of this album are in the deluxe cover.

We take your reviewer’s comments as a compliment to our New Zealand produced sleeve and we are pleased that he could not tell that it was a locally printed version. You have probably noticed that since CBS Records New Zealand opened (this January), all our sleeves have been four colour front and back, and where the overseas version features a deluxe fold-out, this has been retained for New Zealand.

CBS Records