By Callum Ludwig
A Seville East musician is set to bring his skills to the lineup of a festival he has helped to grow and evolve this weekend.
Harry Coulson’s Blue Dogs are the closing act of the Castlemaine Jazz Festival, which is running from Friday 9 June to Sunday 11 June in the Central Victorian regional town.
Mr Coulson said it used to be a little community event run by a few locals when he joined after often playing gigs in the region.
“I got speaking to the owner Callan of the cave at the Old Castlemaine Gaol who did a lot of live sound stuff and I saw this festival was good, but it might have been a bit insular. The model used to be that artists paid a registration fee and if the festival made money, the artists got a profit share of that,” he said.
“He knew that that’s not how most other festivals operated and that if you want talent, good, high quality, musicians to come out, you need to actually pay them and that’s when I came on board with my knowledge of the Melbourne music scene and what musicians would be looking for.”
Mr Coulson graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2010 with a Bachelor of Music Performance, achieving honours at Monash University two years later and releasing his debut album in 2014.
Mr Coulson said since the changes, the event has gone from strength to strength.
“We had two cancelled festivals through no one’s fault, but coming out of lockdown last year, considering how everything was going, we did really well and put on a really good festival with really good stuff,” he said.
“It’s a very big band-oriented festival, which is always terrific and with all the traditional jazz coming in, but also had a few more contemporary and emerging artists which is something I am really excited about now that I’m moving from being one of the younguns to the old farts.”
Harry Coulson’s group started out as a jazz trio of himself and a regular drummer and bass player, with a ‘decent Rolodex of horn players, sax players, trumpet players and keyboard players that come and play with them ad hoc.
Mr Coulson said he finds the band a bit hard to categorise now.
“It goes everywhere from blues to rock to jazz to reggae, I’m terrible in that I love every style of music and so I will try and do every style of music, probably not as well as it could be done, but that’s just how I enjoy spending my time,” he said.
“It allows us to play the room a bit better, the good thing and the bad thing is that because we straddle so many different genres, we can read the room and go ‘these guys are keen on this, let’s give them a bit more of that’ and change it up,”
“I’m going to start trying to pull some gigs around the area and I reckon more festivals out here would be fantastic, there are lots of awesome wineries and they are always great places to put music festivals on, so I reckon it’d be a real asset to the area.”
Anyone interested in the Castlemaine Jazz Festival this weekend can find out more here: www.castlemainejazzfestival.com.au/.
