Between gray-brown and light blue: The Blue Bird Festival 2025

When music begins to soar: in keeping with the spring-like twittering of birds, the exciting annual indie festival Blue Bird gives us a first musical preview of what to expect at Porgy & Bess this fall. But what color is the bird really? The first four acts approach this question - and get to the heart of it musically.

There's this old blues classic from the sixties called “Is a Blue Bird Blue” - perhaps best known is the version by British rockabilly singer Shakin' Stevens. While the song does not answer the question of the actual color of the bird, the biology book about the bluebird reveals the following exciting fact: they are not blue, they just appear blue! The “blue” in their plumage is not caused by pigments, but by the microscopic structure of the feathers, which scatters the light in a special way. In reality, the feathers are gray-brown - and this is a wonderful link to the Blue Bird Festival, which is being held for the 21st time this autumn at the renowned Viennese jazz club Porgy & Bess.

Blue Bird Festival: between light and dark

The program of the Blue Bird Festival has always alternated between sad - i.e. grey-brown - and upbeat - i.e. light-blue - singers who traverse the vastness of the indie folk singer-songwriter genre. And as always, this year's festival offers a discovery program that mixes well-known and lesser-known names in a careful and balanced way - they are all united only by the high quality with which the singer-songwriters celebrate their understanding of art. “These are artists who want to create their own music and for whom lyrics are important”, festival curator Klaus Totzler once said about the programmatic orientation - and there can be influences ranging from Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, Bob Dylan or Neil Young, but also Amanda Palmer and Adam Green, or even Clara Luzia, Wallis Bird and Mira Lu Kovacs. The Blue Bird Festival's program is tailored to a niche audience that has grown quite large in the meantime and wants more than just bop-along hits and easy listening, confetti rain and bombastic LED video walls. From gentle folk to finely chiseled pop to furious rock, a lot is possible here - you can hear songs of “sophisticated pop culture” that are intensely moving but not exhausting.

https://www.songwriting.at/