The Paris Jazz Festival à La Defense has become one of the more interesting Jazz Festivals in Paris. It’s a free festival and takes place one week in the beginning of july. It’s an outdoor festival in the middle of a big business quarter outside of Paris, mainly a platform surrounded by scyscrapers, but with good vibes and seen that there are no cars rather quiet. A bigger part of the festival is dedicated to newcomers and not only in the jazzfield. There is for some years now one day dedicated to let’s say progressive rock tendencies. Last year Guillaume Perret played a fantastic set. The opening and closing nights are bigger events in the evening, this year it’s Chick Corea, but during the week there are two one hour concerts from noon to 2pm. This means that you have lots of people coming out of the towers to get lunch and create a bit of a picnic vibe and even lesser known bands can get an audience of about thousand and in general the vibes are really good.

So yesterday was actually the “prog day” with two bands The Heliocentrics (UK) and Birth of Joy (Netherlands) The Heliocentrics announced as Psych Jazz, with influences by Gong and Ozric Tentacles were good and delivered a pleasant set with lots of interesting grooves but a bit boring on the long run and without any memorable melodic material.

The real discovery for me was Birth Of Joy, a dutch  trio –drums, guitar (& vocals) organ, with a 70’s heavy Prog sound, somewhat close to Atomic Rooster with a great roaring vintage Hammond sound, blasting drums and a high speed singer-guitarist. The songs, great hooklines galore, are rather short and very dynamic with short very good solos and lots of dynamic interplay and nice screaming and/or bluesy  vocals. A very good liveband and even so  not a “real” progband I recommend everybody (and especially heavy prog fans )to see Birth of Joy live. (tourlist on bottom)

http://www.birthofjoy.com/shows/" rel="nofollow -