The Adelaide Guitar Festival has extended their Guitars In Bars programme to run for the entire month of July, with 2019 shaping to be the event's biggest year yet.
Guitars In Bars is the open-access component to the Adelaide Guitar Festival and works by connecting musicians with venues. As an open-access festival, anyone can register their gig in South Australia’s most diverse celebration of guitar music.
“It's a completely open-access programme for any players and venues,” Adelaide Guitar Festival's Artistic Director Slava Grigoryan says.
“It's a wonderful way of providing an opportunity for musicians and shining the light back to the [Adelaide] Guitar Festival with everything we're trying to do with that.”
If you are a seasoned professional, emerging artist or back-shed jammer, this is the opportunity to make yourself heard. A handful of Guitars In Bars artists will also be selected to feature in curated and paid promotional opportunities across South Australia, and join the 2020 Adelaide Guitar Festival programme sharing the stage with some of the world’s best guitarists.
“It's a new, exciting period for us because traditionally speaking it's a year in-between festivals, we had the 2018 festival and then we've got the next proper festival in 2020,” Slava says.
“But we've been doing more and more every year, and this is the first time we're curating and presenting proper concerts ourselves in the years in-between.”
In 2018, over 780 artists performed in 100 venues across South Australia as part of Guitars In Bar. From city pubs to wineries, markets to houseboats, the month-long event continues to expand every year, and this year there are 1,293 artists performing in 124 venues.
This year, the focus to bring more events to surrounding suburbs as well as increase the regional involvement will see over 25 regional events organised at venues including Port Pirie, Port Lincoln, Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour, activating a host of unique performance spaces.
“It has been our biggest quest to expand regionally this year,” Slava says. “We really want to encourage players and audiences to come together in more remote areas.
“The main idea is their is so much different talent across the state and a lot of people don't get many opportunities to perform in front of an audience and in the world that we live in; it's such an incredibly important thing for us to do, an incredible thing to communicate in order to co-exist as a healthy society.”
As well as traditional live music spaces such as pubs and bars, an eclectic range of venues are part of Guitars In Bars including a guitar store in Port Lincoln, a Yorke Peninsula brewery, and a distillery in the Riverland.
“This is the fourth year it's been running; a lot of people in the industry know about this event by now, a lot of venues as well.
“[But] we have always had a little tagline on the bottom of Guitars In Bars to include other places. Over the years we have had gigs in florists, restaurants, shops that never present music, anything at all. Any space or outdoor area can be a performance space, and people really get onboard and recognise anything is possible.”
