Andrew Nunn remembers waiting for his dinner at Wangaratta Kebabs, when he read in the local paper that the town's long-running jazz and blues festival was calling it a day.
He swore loudly.
The sometime-double bass player wasn't the only one dismayed - when he organised to meet up with half a dozen other locals to discuss the news at the town's Railyard cafe, a crowd of 30 people turned up.
"No one started talking. So I just said, 'Righto, what are we doing here, everyone?' People sort of kept looking to me to run that meeting," he told AAP.
The 2023 festival was dubbed "The Last Hurrah" and its problems were all too familiar for Australia's live music scene: among them regulation, rising costs and falling ticket sales.
Before long, Nunn found himself committing to reviving the festival in 2024 - or perhaps more fittingly, waking it up.
He had exactly zero experience in music festivals - his day job is running a company that tests and treats sleep apnoea - but he did have small business know-how.
It's hard to overstate the importance of the 34-year-old festival for the town in Victoria's north-east, and for Australia's jazz and blues scene.
"You can be anywhere in Australia, and if you say Wangaratta, they'll say 'jazz festival', that's what it means to the town," said Nunn.
For musician Jake Mason from funk/soul/jazz outfit Cookin' on 3 Burners, it's the highlight of the jazz calendar, alongside the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
Since releasing their first 7" single in 2002, Cookin' on 3 Burners has seen events come and go, and like other musicians Mason is contending with big changes in the industry.
"It feels like the whole industry is a bit bruised, but you have to be creative and look at other ways - we've got to be ingenious in how we do it," he said.
Nunn, too, knew things had to change - the festival had to become self-sustaining, with a product people were prepared to pay for.
Locals loved the free gigs on the main street, but they cost about $200,000 to stage - and were so successful people weren't buying tickets to other performances.
Passes to the whole festival for $200 were also popular, but for headline gigs there were more passholders than venue space.
Both had to be nixed. Big calls like these weren't necessarily welcome, according to Nunn, but had to be made for the event to run smoothly.
With a new board of directors in place, 120 donors pitched in $65,000 - and that support then helped secure more than $100,000 in government grants.
"I've done my best to thank everyone that's donated and volunteered, but you can't express how grateful you are properly to people and how much it matters," said Nunn.
One example is the national jazz awards, which the festival has hosted for three decades - a single $20,000 donation pledged by a local business enabled the prestigious awards for up-and-coming artists to continue.
The founder of Melbourne's Paris Cat Jazz Club, Serge Carnovale, came on board to program the 2024 festival, with a lineup of about 30 acts in and around Wangaratta.
The event is a fortnight away and about 1600 tickets have been sold so far, more than half of those to people visiting from out of town.
It all goes against the seemingly endless bad news for Australia's live music scene, with a parliamentary inquiry recently told the industry is in crisis.
It also suggests that with enough support and the right business approach, grassroots festivals can have a future, despite the cancellation of bigger events such as Splendour in The Grass.
Nunn sees his efforts as a kind of thank you to the town he's called home for the past decade - but he's got another agenda too.
More local venues are investing in PA systems, which hopefully means more live music throughout the year - and more gigs for his band The Daisies.
Cookin' on 3 Burners will play the festival's closing party at the Brown Brothers Winery, and Mason is taking the long view on the live music scene.
"It does come in cycles, but we're in it for the long haul... you never know what's around the corner," he said.
The Wangaratta Jazz and Blues Festival runs from November 1-4.
