Colours of Ostrava Returns July 13-16, 2022

The Colours of Ostrava International Music Festival is in its 19th edition for four days and four nights.

And after two years of cancelling the festival, Colours of Ostrava returns to form this summer. Since Colours places so much emphasis on inviting musical artists with an international flavor, and across genres, it was impossible to do it right with the ever-shifting travel restrictions and rules accordingly.

Some headliners for this year were promised for either the past one or two years, like The Killers, Twenty-One Pilots, Franz Ferdinand, LP and Martin Garrix.

There are also many newer additions this year for upgrading the appeal including Modest Mouse, Hiromi, Tindersticks and Princess Nokia. Most
impressively for this festival as always is the wide array of artists from mainstream to experimental from indie rock, electronica, jazz, punk, blues and eclectic world music choices from across the globe.

Hiromi is someone who best showcases the more eclectic side of Colours, as Hiromi Uehara is an irrepressible jazz pianist and composer from Japan, and while she is best known due to her collaborations with fusion jazz stars Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea, or for playing opening ceremony
of the Tokyo Olympics 2021, her performance at Colours will be a complete shift.

Hiromi’s newest group is a classical music string quartet, led by Tatsuo Nishie, a violinist and concertmaster of the New Japan Philharmonic orchestra. With this in mind, her upcoming concert at Colours of Ostrava is also a return of sorts, as she first played with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of fourteen.

Hiromi will be playing songs from her most recent album “Silver Lining Suite-Live from The Blue Note Tokyo,” with compositions for a full-length suite for piano, two violins, a viola and a cello with tracks entitled “Isolation,” “The Unknown,” “Drifters,” and “Fortitude” and all underlining her emotional state due to so much time spent under quarantine.

Songs are performed solo or as part of the quartet, and the idea to record it as a live-streaming in Autumn 2021, at the Blue Note Tokyo, was to
support the veritable club’s very existence, as so many live music clubs, especially for jazz, closed.

While Hiromi is a bit of an anomaly for this year’s festival, in past years, more headliners have been similarly as surprising and adventurous compared to this year’s biggest names, but it may also be due to the backlog of artists (as a few have been promised for the festival already for two years).

Hopefully, with no more cancellations, Colours will return to its most adventurous flair the next time around.

The Colours of Ostrava International Music Festival is among the most prestigious summer music festivals in the region, while it is also among the most family-friendly music festivals in Central Europe with large outdoor stages but also smaller indoor ones too.

Self-contained in an apocalyptic, industrial- era ruins of a vast coal-mining and iron works complex, Dolni Vitkovice, the environs at late night seems like a post-industrial Sci-Fi city with hurried pathways lined with countless food stands and for the more curious-minded, there are sections tucked in the back areas for film screenings, readings and discussions on social issues, as well as art exhibitions and many more possible surprises.