The oldest festival of our country, one of the most significant blues festival in Central Europe, is the Gastroblues Festival, which is hold in every july. The traditional friendly and familiar festival consists of concerts, meetings for wine lovers, cooking competition and five-man football matches. Beside the home and foreign rock, blues and jazz musicians, winemakers from Hungary and the neighboring countries, also participate in this event. The base of the festival is the ESZI, the energetic vocational school of the Nuclear Power Plant of Paks. The twin cities meeting is also part of the event. A lots of famous foreign bands and more than twenty winemakers (among them winemakers from the most famous wineries) are coming to the most prestigious blues festival of our country. The feeling of the festival is complete with the cooking competition and the football match hold in the park of the ESZI. In addition to the music, gastronomy and music lovers are pampered by food and beverage specialities. The program home for Winelovers Country Meeting, to which the best wineries of Hungarian Historical Wine Regions and winemakers from Paks and the area arrive. The Gentilitial Gastronomy Days are also important part of the event.
On stage legends like Glenn Hughes, Spencer Davis, Manfred Mann, The Yardbirds, Chris Farlowe and his band, or the hungarian jazz-rock-blues musicians like Aladár Pege, Gyula Babos, the Hobo Blues Band, Attila László, the P. Mobil, the Deák Bill Blues Band, and the rockabilly band the Mystery Gang get on. The organizers of the festival think of fans in the intermediate periods and they publish, out of release, a limited number of CDs and a DVDs about the festival in every december, so fans can recall the feeling of this summer festival. They publish another disc about the famous foreign performers as Nina Van Horn, Chris Farlowe Band, Twin Dragons, Ripoff Raskolnikov and mainly about the concerts of inland blues performers in the Gastroblues Pub.
The festival of Paks, gathering of „blueshearted friends” stubbornly retained its magical feeling and the feeling of independency from generations with quality music, wine and food. The aim of today is no different than in 1993: compared to the financial opportunities show up, what is interesting in the past and present of this genre, which overarch generations and frontiers. Also confirming, which we have known for a long time: the Gastroblues festival is the bluesbarometer of Hungary.
Website: www.gastroblues.hu
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/Gastroblues-Fesztivál-Gastroblues-Festival-261720600567599/
