It's Easter now. The Jazz Festival is here and for the next few days the streets will be alive with the sound of music.
It's a special thing, and we're lucky to have it here, so all I can suggest is that you enjoy as much of it as you can – open your ears to new sounds and possibilities and buy CDs from as many bands as you can afford.

Of course, the veritable deluge of music springing up in every nook and cranny around town over the Easter weekend isn't really any indication of the general health of Tauranga's music scene which, in general, isn't really all that good.
Sure, the Jazz Society has a monthly get-together at the RSA in Greerton, and they feature some top class local bands; and the blues nights at Driver's Bar in the 11th Avenue Plaza are getting more popular by the month. (There's one of those coming up in two weeks – the second Wednesday of every month – and recent nights have yielded some cool surprises. Last month two harmonica players from New York happened to be in town and blew the room away.) The weekly country nights at the Crown and Badger are also well attended.
But those are specialist nights, not really gigs for bands, and certainly not showcases for original bands to present their wares.
What is becoming obvious is that the loss of the Plug & Play nights, which most recently, used to happen at the Colosseum, have dealt a huge blow to the momentum of original music in town.
Those were nights where up-and-coming original acts, be they bands or soloist, would front up for a half hour set, with five or six different outfits each month. Some of the bands were well-established, some were even out-of-town bands who happened to be on the road passing through Tauranga, while some of them were new combinations of musicians trying out fresh material for the first time.
And eventually the nights were cancelled because they never quite attracted the numbers that the bar deemed necessary, or at least that was my understanding of their final disappearance.
And it's true – there never were the couple of hundred people you might have expected, it was always about 50 or 60, most of whom were curious musicians checking out their mates and seeing whoever else was on the scene.
That was kind of disappointing, but as I've mentioned before in this column, I put the blame squarely on Tauranga's lack of a university and the double blow that deals the town in that so many young people here between the ages of 18 and 24 spend most of the year at a university elsewhere. This is exactly the audience who would be expected to flock to nights such as Plug & Play and, sadly, they're in other towns.
But, even if the Plug & Play nights were under-attended, I don't think any of us really realised quite how important they were for the Tauranga music scene, in that they provided an easy way to keep an eye on which bands were around playing original music, which musicians were hooking up with other musicians and, most importantly, they provided a social hub where you could catch up with other players that you might otherwise see only rarely and talk about music or make plans or swap ideas: many collaborative gigs sprang from conversations out in the garden bar at the Colosseum, and not a few new band line-ups were formed over a beer there.
That, however, has gone now and there's a hole in the music scene that is becoming ever more noticeable. The truth of it is there is very little original music happening in Tauranga, or at least very little happening live. Brewers Bar and The Colosseum are the only real venues for rock acts and there are sizeable amounts of the population here that don't especially like going to those locations. And the dearth of university-aged punters makes it hard for them to stay afloat.
As to other options for playing original music, there isn't much light except for the occasional gig at No.1 The Strand, which is a little on the small side for many acts.
The more I think of it, the more I miss those Plug & Play nights and all the obvious as well as unseen benefits they brought. Anyone out there up for starting them again?