The Seventh Penang Island Jazz Festival was spread over four days in early December 2010. It may not yet be “seventh heaven” but it is something of a small miracle that this festival started, survived and has begun to flourish.
PENANG'S JAZZ FESTIVAL is a small miracle. I say “small miracle” partly because “jazz” is not the most userfriendly word in the dictionary, let alone Penangites’ musical dictionary. Connotations come to mind of small, dingy, smoke-filled rooms, full of not many and probably rather odd people obsessed with a musical genre that no ordinary person could possibly understand. If you can hear anything at all over the insistent trumpet, the weird saxophonist and the cascading runs of the piano, you may catch vague mumblings of “Ellington”, “Miles”, “bop era” and “cool”.
