The real Jazz Festival is back

Just the other day, I met my friend Adrian Mamo, Chairman of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts. I asked about this year's Malta Arts Festival and complained about the way the Malta Jazz Festival had lost its soul before it actually had the opportunity to mature. Well, this year, I was informed, the real Jazz Festival is back with a vengeance.

One of the musicians playing this year is Oliver Degabriele. He writes on the Jazz Festival blog about how he got to be working in Paris .

Whenever I’m back in Malta,I get a lot of people telling me how lucky I am that I am a full- time musician in Paris, and though most of the times I simply nod in agreement, sometimes I can’t help but wonder where the luck came into it!

I remember very clearly how set I was on leaving the island to study music when I was still at university. I had been playing the bass for a while, and I had started to tour abroad regularly with Malta’s world music band, Etnika, as well as playing jazz gigs in Malta, mostly with Joe Debono and Charles ‘City’ Gatt. I learnt a lot from performing, especially with Joe and City. I started becoming familiar with the language, as well as with my instrument.

I had finished university, started working, and was still in Malta. I had no fixed plan, no budget and very little patience! Still, even though the decision to go to Paris had been brewing in my mind for a while, things with Etnika were doing very well, and I was playing most nights in Malta. The weird thing is that all this activity was just making me all the more eager to leave the island.

There is a paradoxical danger with comfort in art: the more comfortable you are, the less you are likely to progress in your discipline, whatever it may be. I was getting very comfortable, and at the same time feeling like I had reached a point where I couldn’t move forward as long as I didn’t pull myself out of the comfort zone I was in. So I quit my job and bought a ticket to Paris.

So till that point, there was little luck involved with me ending up in the French capital, even though if I sure needed plenty of it to live through the first couple of months in the city! I had auditions to do, an apartment to find, a language to learn, and a lot of musicians to meet before I could even think of making a living from music. I had no clue whether I would be on my way back to Malta after a few months, or whether things would work out for me.