All that jazz featured at the Cayman Arts Festival concerts in the past won’t be like the jazz coming to Camana Bay Cinema on 22 February.
“This will be different,” says Cayman Arts Festival Executive Director Marius Gaina. “In the past, most of the jazz performers we’ve had have come from the United States, usually from Juilliard. The Lana Janjanin Trio is a very talented jazz group from Europe, so this is European jazz, which is a bit different.”
Led by Croatian singer-songwriter and pianist Lana Janjanin, the trio also includes Slovenian bass player Marko Ferlan and Austrian drummer Lukas Fellner. All three of the band members are classically trained musicians with great passion for many genres of music, including jazz, soul and rhythm and blues, which they combine in their music, creating their own individual sound and style.
The trio’s performance at Camana Bay Cinema, which starts at 7 p.m., is the final event of the 2020 Cayman Arts Festival.
Cayman Arts Festival
Launched in 2004, the Cayman Arts Festival was the inspiration of local pianist and University College Cayman Islands music lecturer Glen Inanga and Jennifer Micallef. The festival originally took place every two years, but over the years has expanded to include a smaller “eXtra” festival in the years in between. It has also added monthly “Music at the Library” concerts with locally based talent, and special concerts featuring overseas performers from time to time.
Although Micallef, who was once part of an acclaimed performing piano duo with Inanga, rarely comes to Grand Cayman anymore, she is still active in securing talent from Europe for the Cayman Arts Festival. It was Micallef who recruited the Lana Janjanin Trio, Gaina says.
“She knows them from Europe and thought the group was a good choice for us here.”
In addition to the Lana Janjanin Trio concert, other signature events of the 2020 Cayman Arts Festival include a violin and cello recital by Latvian sisters Kristine and Margarita Balanas on 13 February and a performance by the seven-member Rodney Marsalias Philadelphia Big Brass band on 15 February.
For more information, visit caymanartsfestival.com.
This article was originally published in the February 2020 print edition of Camana Bay Times with the headline “Jazzing at the cinema.”
About the author
Alan Markoff has worked with Dart as the editor for Camana Bay Times for three years and has been writing professionally since 1997. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Alan graduated from the State University of New York at Albany with a degree in English, and first moved to the Cayman Islands in 1982. He has 16 years of experience in the real estate industry and previously worked as a journalist for Cayman Compass before joining Dart to relaunch the Camana Bay Times monthly newspaper. An avid baseball fan, Alan loves travelling but also schedules trips back home around catching a summer game or two with his home team, Cleveland Indians. He is a movie buff who spends many an evening catching a film at Camana Bay Cinema. It was at one of these movies that he met his wife, Lynn!