Cheltenham Stage Services - Your Production, Our Experience.

Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2007

      

CSS provided sound and lighting services for a fair proportion of this highly regarded and internationally aclaimed week this year. With sound systems in the Town Hall's Main Hall and Drawing Room, St. Andrew's Church, The Daffodil Restaurant and the Imperial Gardens' outdoor marquee, and lighting systems in Main Hall, Pillar Room, Drawing Room, Daffodil and Marquee, the planning and equipment logistics were understandably complex, and the operations taxing.

MAIN HALL - Fortunately, many of the main hall acts included their own sound engineers, allowing Lee Dreezer spells off the FOH board himself. Seb Knowles in his usual role on the monitor board on the other hand bravely dealt with the demands of the musicians. Added to which he was also faced with constantly changing stage sizes, which meant moving "monitor world" equally often to suit. In a couple of instances when the stage was so totally given over to the BBC live orchestral events, he even had to mix from a position out in the corridor, and tried to maintain eye contact with his musicians through a set of double doors. This was a Meyer Sound event, as in previous years with Heritage 3000 boards at the end of each multicore.

Jem Maynard-Watts made a welcome return to the Jazz Festival to look after the Main Hall lighting, and brought a refreshing new mix of ideas to the shows. Given the constantly changing stage sizes as previously mentioned, the lighting focus was another constantly changing issue event by event.

PILLAR ROOM - The usual box truss on legs was rigged over the stage in this venue, and lighting kept simply to generic washes. There was no incumbent operator here, but our friend Dave Bellwood, who was operating sound in this venue and at the Everyman Theatre, did the lighting honours on our behalf.

DRAWING ROOM - This venue was only required to deal with a few events, but nevertheless was kitted out with full PA and lighting systems and operated by Neville Mitchell. The FOH was Electro-Voice Sx500, monitoring by Martin and the board, an Allen and Heath Mix wizard 16.

ST. ANDREW'S CHURCH - This year this venue was elevated in festival importance, and hosted some greatly varied acts including one BBC live broadcast. Veteran Rob Elmore and Luke Furr, our University placement student handled this venue across some extremely long hours, and very demanding setups. The school jazz band events always tend to go down well with audience and participants alike, and this year was no exception. The bands are large, enthusiastic and great fun, often so loud as to leave the sound engineer with nothing to do but listen. The FOH was MeyerSound UPAs over Shermann Subs, Shermann monitors, Allen and Heath ML3000 - 32 board.

THE DAFFODIL RESTAURANT - is always a favourite venue during Jazz Festival, and provides an intimate setting for some stunning acts along with equally stunning cuisine. It is a venue that is favoured by our pool of engineers as they get to eat, courtesy of the restaurant, alongside everyone else. It is a difficult venue to cover from a sound point of view, as the audience is right there next to the makeshift servery/stage, and wraps right around to the side. A combination of Sherman M750 and Electro-Voice GSS Subs with Sherman GX250 outfills was used, with EV monitoring and Allen and Heath Mix Wizard 16 board. Neville Mitchell ran The Daffodil this year before moving over to the Drawing Room.

THE IMPERIAL GARDENS MARQUEE - A new venue this year, was a great success, taking the festival to an as-yet unpaying public, and stimulating an interest in Jazz for future years. Andy Jackson ran this venue for the festival and managed to attract a good audience sitting outside the tent in the sun, whilst the nearby bar did a roaring trade. The Shermann CA4 rig provided the FOH sound here, with Shermann 12" monitors out of a Crest Century 24 channel board.

COURTNEY PINE MUSIC RECORDINGS - Throughout the Festival, Steve Roskilly could be seen trundling between venues with his rack of equipment, recording 10 specific acts for inclusion in Courtney Pine's BBC Radio 2 Jazz feature on the Festival. The PA feeds were used generally but augmented with spot mics, where necessary, on various instruments missing from the mix. Recordings were made onto minidisc and CD simultaneously.

Jazz Festival Is always crammed with stunning musicianship and great atmosphere, so the long hours and attention to detail is always worth all the effort.

CSS is proud to be counted as one of The Cheltenham Jazz Festival Sponsors, and will strive to maintain this position in the years to come, by continuously improving the services it is able to provide.