A relaxed jazz festival brought about 30,000 people into Downtown Tauranga over the Easter weekend.

'It was very relaxed crowd, lots of families quite a few tourists. I spoke to people from Hawkes Bay there seemed to be quite a few people from Wellington,” says festival general manager Mandy Ryan.

'So it's a really interesting mix of people, as well as all the locals that came out and really supported us; which was wonderful.”

Bay of Plenty residents are also strong supporters of the festival concert programme, buying 70 per cent of the tickets and buying early.

By region 11 per cent of the concert ticket buyers are from Auckland, nine per cent Waikato and five percent form Wellington, plus about three per cent from Canterbury.

'Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch have always had great jazz audiences and they produce great jazz players,” says Mandy.

'So you tend to find there's a real community interest. If you are interested in jazz you are going to be looking out for the concerts in other areas.

'These three festivals the National Jazz Festival, and Christchurch and Wellington, are the top festivals in terms of jazz, and that's where you are going to go to listen to where jazz is going next.”

The concerts were all well supported and there were a number of sell out concerts. Organisers are very happy with the weekend, says Mandy.

'It's wonderful, not like last year when we had the cyclone to deal with. All our schools were able to get here this year. The youth competitors all had a great time. We had a wonderful youth competition.

'There just bee so much good feedback and the growth in the youth concerts has been the most rewarding part of the festival, because that's where it feeds in from.

'A lot of the players that play at our jazz festival have come through from the National Youth Jazz Competition that we run. So we see the same faces. Some of them that were competing three years ago and were award winners, we saw them performing on the stages.”

Just about all the good horn players seen in New Zealand bands have come through the youth competitions and they feed through to the jazz degree programmes at Auckland, Canterbury Polytechnic, and the New Zealand School of Music University of Victoria, says Mandy.

'And they all provide judges for our competitions so we are all connected, and I guess all of a like mind to grow the opportunities for students to play jazz and grow in that genre,” says Mandy.

'It's like anything in life. You have to support the young ones coming though and then you have got to also provide a platform for them to perform. So that's what the festival does, it offers opportunities.”