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Hue Blanes

Born in 1984, Melbourne, Hue grew up in the small Victorian town of Healesville, where he began his musical life playing local fetes, concerts and festivals. He received a scholarship to study at the Victorian College of The Arts Secondary School (VCASS), and graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Music Performance and the prestigious Billy Hyde Music Prize for outstanding achievement. Hue's teachers have included some of Australia's finest musicians - Bob and Steven Sedergreen, Andrea Keller, Tim Stevens, Tony Gould, and most recently with Fred Hersch and Jason Moran.

His career has been characterised as not fitting into a box. He has been involved in a myriad of genres and musical projects, all with the ultimate purpose of improving his playing and understanding of music. He writes jazz and classical music, tragicomic songs about love, dying, and world conspiracies, and plays jazz standards, classical scores and spiritual hymns he finds at second-hand bookstores.

Hue has played at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (MIJF) for four consecutive years, from running his own projects to collaborating with other artists. He premiered 'Things that have been said' at the MIJF, as part of being awarded the 2017 Young Elder of Jazz Award.

In 2016, he received a commission from Melbourne ensemble PLEXUS to compose a piece for piano, violin and clarinet. This new work 'The Sun, the Moon and the Planets (2016)' premiered in PLEXUS: Propulsion on 6 December 2016 at the Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre.

He received multiple 2016 Green Room nominations for his comedy show 'Hue Blanes and the Moon' directed by Travis Cotton, the show premiered at the 2016 Melbourne International Comedy Festival and went on the road to the 2016 Adelaide Cabaret festival.

In 2017, Hue premiered 'Blow the man down', a work for baritone and piano commissioned by the Boroondara Arts Council. This song cycle was written in the traditional Lieder opera style to explore themes of loneliness, longing and the miraculous mundanity of being human. Hue was the winner of the 2018 Lucerne School of Music International Jazz Piano competition. Currently based in the Netherlands, Hue is expanding on his previous work around the musicality of language.