The festival dedicated to rock and guitar begins this Wednesday in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, in neighboring France. It welcomes big names like Deep Purple, Ben Harper or Jeff Beck alongside Johnny Depp the day before they come to the Montreux Jazz Festival.
Originally, it was an event founded by a group of guitar-loving friends. Today is a festival that celebrates its fifteenth edition just a stone’s throw from the Swiss border, and which awaits the next five days of big names in rock: Deep Purple, Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp, Ben Harper, Scorpions, Airbourne , Black Label Society, to name a few.
Jacques Falda, director of Guitare en scène, remembers the beginnings of the festival: “The idea was to make a dream come true: to bring in all these groups that made us dream all our adolescence. How to do it? Create something a little different from this which is done, make them want to come. Little by little, we started to have famous artists (…). They talked about us in their entourage and that helped us a lot.” Asked about the festival’s recipe for success, Jacques Falda evokes the family side as well as the personalized and friendly welcome. “Playing on a very professional stage in front of 5,000 people allows you to create a very strong bond between the artist and the public, and between the public and the artist, he believes. This magic is very complicated to bring it into being in much larger gauges, which become factories.”
Another hallmark of the festival are the spontaneous jam sessions that usually take place on the Village and Chapiteau stages.
Find new artists
In addition to the big guest stars, the festival is also keen to promote new artists, in particular with the “Tremplin” programme: the three finalist groups perform at the opening of the evening and are welcomed in the same way as the confirmed artists. “We are also looking to promote artists who are starting to work, adds Jacques Falda, like Last Train who is playing this Wednesday evening.”
Masterclasses are also planned every day, given by various renowned guitarists (Gus G, Pascal Vigné, Jack Gardiner, Alex Cordo, Christophe Godin). A Masterclass for bass is given by Patrice Guers this Sunday, the last day of the festival.
Few female guitarists
If big names in rock and guitar are in the program, the number of women is less. The director of Guitare en Scène, Jacques Falda, explains it by a weak female presence in the medium itself: “We all remember Joan Jett, for example, but there were not millions of them at this that time, and yet, it was the great, great time! There are not a lot of women guitarists or ‘guitar hero’ (…). There are fewer women than men in this profession -the.”
The public wishing to discover female guitarists will still be able to listen to the Franco-English Laura Cox this Sunday, July 17.
Interview by Anne Laure Gannac
Web adaptation: Charlotte Frossard
The Guitare en Scène festival takes place from July 13 to 17, 2022 in St-Julien-en-Genevois, in neighboring France.