Over the past few months, Hugo and Chris have been busy working on the artistic program for the Echuca-Moama Winter Blues Festival, which has just been publicly released...
For those avid music fans out there, in November 2011, Hugo T Armstrong and Chris Longmore were announced as the new artistic programmers of the Echuca-Moama Winter Blues Festival.
Over the past few months, Hugo and Chris have been busy working on the artistic program, which has just been publicly released.
The Echuca-Moama Winter Blues Festival, to be held from Friday 27th to Sunday 29thJuly, will once again fill the Port heritage precinct with more than 30 blues and roots performers from across the country.
Now in its 13th year, the Winter Blues Festival is billed as one of the major ticket items on the local events calendar and attracts more than 15,000 people annually to Echuca-Moama.
Visitors to this much-loved festival are able to soak up the blues and roots atmosphere from every street corner, in restaurants and bars and even on board one of the town’s famous paddle steamers.
This year’s festival is the largest to date with blues music filling 21 venues across Echuca and Moama and including at Perricoota Vines Retreat and Morrison’s, for the first time and west, ‘out the road’ at Torrumbarry.
The fact that the vast majority of the blues and roots music is FREE is still a major drawcard of the festival, with an additional headline act on the Saturday night.
Following in the foot steps of last year’s hugely successful and sell out headline act, one of Australia’s most inspiring and strong-willed female artists, Dallas Frasca will take centre stage at this year’s festival.
Tickets for this event at Echuca’s OPT night club must be purchased via TICKETEK at a cost of $29.
Reputed as inhabiting all the sass and irreverence of Chrissie Amphlett and Suze Demarchi and labelled as Australia’s answer to Janice Joplin, Frasca won 2010 Artist of the Year at the Musicoz Awards and her album was voted in the top ten best roots releases on TripleJ radio in 2009. Frasca’s Winter Blues performance promises slabs of guitar riffage, skin slamming drums and heavy, soulful vocals – a treat for all blues and roots fans.Regular festival goers can again expect the cream of Australia’s blues artists including the Lloyd Spiegel Duo, Claude Hay, Anni Piper, Qynn Beardman, Chris Wilson, Blues Mountain Trio, to name a few.
Winter Blues’ organisers expect big things from festival newcomers, Japanese Blues Cowboy George Kamikawa with Noriko Tadano. The Winter Blues ‘Boot Camp’ has become a much anticipated feature of the festival where our ‘newest’ blues musicians, mentored by four major performers from the festival, get to display their new skills at a packed Friday night jam session at Radcliffe’s Restaurant. Organisers have again encouraged early bookings for this sell-out event.
Newly appointed music programmers Hugo Armstrong and Chris Longmore, of Queenscliff’s Blues Train fame, bring with them immeasurable festival and music management experience while Wayne Jury has moved across to head up the Boot Camp management team.