Famous music festival is ready to jazz up metropolis

More than 300 musicians from 20 countries and regions will jazz up the city with over 120 concerts when the 21st JZ Festival kicks off in the Qiantan area of Shanghai's Pudong New Area from Oct 16 to 26.

The JZ Festival was founded in 2005 and has since become one of China's largest musical fetes. "We had maybe 1,500 people who attended the festival's first installment," says Ren Yuqing, founder of JZ Music and the co-organizer of the JZ Festival. This year, with live performances across the Qiantan area, "we are expecting to welcome up to 600,000 attendees".

This year's festival will be co-organized by Lujiazui Group and JZ Music, as well as the World Expo management bureau, an institution under the government of the Pudong New Area, which was responsible for the planning and construction of the World Expo 2010 area.

Two veteran singers, Laura Fygi from the Netherlands and Lisa Ono, a Japanese-Brazilian singer nicknamed the "queen of Bossa Nova", will present their Double L Concert at Bocom New Bund 31 Performing Arts Center on Oct 24.

"It's double L, double love," Ren says at the recent festival lineup announcement. Fygi and Ono have both performed in Shanghai multiple times. "Lisa's soothing songs and Laura's powerful voice will be accompanied by a full orchestra comprising China's top-notch instrumentalists," Ren says.

The duo will perform a program consisting of classical numbers with new arrangements that will "bring back beautiful memories that sound familiar and refreshing at the same time".

The lineup also includes Caravan Palace, an electro-swing band from Paris that has regularly performed at some of the biggest events worldwide; Ghost-Note, a funk group led by Grammy Award-winner Robert "Sput" Searight, and his bandmates Nate Werth and Pablo Martin Caminero, a renowned double bassist, composer, and producer; as well as the Dutch Swing College Band, one of the world's oldest jazz bands.