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Jazz Buzz with grandMA in Singapore
Back for the third year, the Mosaic Music Festival was presented by Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay, Singapore. The festival offered a wide diversity of jazz, world music, soul, electroclash, hip-hop and more with international artists, established home-grown and regional artists and up-and-coming musicians. The festival lasted for ten days and took place in a variety of venues with the Concert Hall headlining. Per Marius Larsen was lighting designer for the Norwegian band ‘Jaga Jazzist’. With assistance of a grandMA full-size he also controlled the lighting.
Larsen explained his fondness for the grandMA: “The grandMA range of consoles are my definitive first choice whatever project I'm working on. The grandMA is so easy to use and has the most advanced and smartest functions available. The lighting design for Jaga Jazzist is based on both well planned cues and timing as well as the need to follow instant improvisations onstage very quickly. In particular there are a lot of different solo parts that need extra attention. I have used the same show for Jaga Jazzist for the last two years, editing the original show according to what's available on the different venues. We have never toured with a full lighting production, so being flexible with equipment and fixtures is of course important.
“For the concert in Singapore I decided to start fresh and make a whole new show, mainly because the whole rig was based on moving lights,” Larsen continued. “I preprogrammed everything on a grandMA while I was on another tour in Norway and drew the rig in the stage window of the console. That works perfectly as long as you have good and accurate presets. While on the topic I must say that the ’Smart window’ in the new software release is absolutely brilliant when working with a lot of different fixture types. It’s very easy to keep control over the different parameters.”
The Concert Hall's festival lighting design was the work of UK designer, Nick Jevons, of ElectricFly Productions. With more than 70 moving fixtures, including a dozen hired VL500s, this rig had the necessary power and flexibility to handle the wide variety of acts presented in this venue.
Milton Arnold, head of lighting, The Esplanade Co Ltd adds: “MA Lighting, through their local distributor, DeSisti Asia Pte Ltd, provided us with a grandMA full size console and the use of a media server for the duration of the festival. In the Concert Hall, Jaga Jazzist's own designer, Per Marius Larsen, used the grandMA to create a dramatic light show during this Norwegian jazz combo’s performance. At the Powerhouse Stage, one of Esplanade's own full-time lighting staff, Low Wee Cheng, used the console and server to add projected imagery to the shows in this space. Using a rear projection screen, angled over the stage, and a NEC 6K projector, we achieved very good results. Occasionally, when the stage lights were really bright, we wanted a few extra lumens from the projector, but overall the images looked good and we were very please with our first attempt at providing our own video programming.”
17th April 2007
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