Clare Teal, British jazz legend and frequent performer at many years of the Marlborough International Jazz Festival revisited Priory Gardens, scene of many of her great performances in Marlborough to unveil a beautiful but simple Cumbrian Slate monolith created by local All Cannings artist Lisi Ashbridge. The stone is set into the ground in the Priory Gardens, lead venue of many great Jazz Festivals where a wide number of artists performed in the large marquee that housed the main stage for the festival every year.
The Festival finished as a multi-day event in 2016, having made Marlborough a mecca for Jazz aficionados every year for the previous three plus decades.
The Jazz Festival is missed, a gap now exists in the Marlborough annual calendar. MantonFest has gained every year since the inaugural event eleven years ago but it’s a different type of event to the former Jazz Festival which covered three days – Friday to Sunday – every July with multiple stages spread across the town.
“It was something to have created an event of national significance in a small market town. It would be thriving yet were it not for circumstances beyond our control, but we think back positively of the international stars we brought here, of the kids we gave a first break to, of the local business we generated and of the thousands of happy punters.” founder Nick Fogg told marlborough.news.
Carved by Lisi Ashbridge, the stone marks the first and last year’s of the Marlborough International Jazz Festival – 1986 – 2016 – and on the other side gives the poignant comment (courtesy of Don McLean) ‘The day the music died’.
Slightly reminiscent (in shape, if not in dimensions) of the monolith from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, maybe Lisi’s beautiful slate piece will have its own cultural evolutionary powers as did the erstwhile mysterious yet fictitious version discovered on the moon in Kubrick’s masterpiece. A new mecca in Marlborough for aspiring Jazz musicians?
There still is regular Jazz in Marlborough, ‘Jazz from The Merchant’s House’, next at St Peter’s Church on Sunday 24 April. Click here for details