[Dixielandjazz] Ted Gioia's Blog

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi All,

While there are undoubtedly loads of jazz festivals across Europe, Ted's musings suggest that they are in rude health. If only. Montreux has imported so much pop and World Music that there's hardly any room left for real jazz in its programme. Closer to my home, the Glasgow Jazz Festival, for which I was the midwife in its inaugural year of 1987, has Neil Sedaka as one of its main attractions this year.  Jazz has long-since drifted away from mainstream popular entertainment and I'd suggest that this sort of programming only further marginalises it. A week-long jazz festival might be seen as a means of attracting people who hadn't hitherto gone to a jazz concert, but putting pop stars in the programme inevitably results in them choosing NOT to go to a jazz event.

I understand all the bums-on-seats arguments, but festivals have to consider what their function is. Are they there to make money for stakeholders, or are they there to promote and present quality music in their chosen genre? After the 1987 Glasgow International Jazz Festival, I wrote a paper for the Board arguing that it was better for the festival and the city to present a small but high-quality festival, which would attract visitors to the city, satisfy jazz lovers of all tastes and hopefully, if a non-jazz fan stumbled into a concert, he or she would be hearing music of undoubted quality in ideal surroundings, and so new fans might be found. Not surpisingly, following the great artistic success of the 1987 festival (how could you go wrong with Dizzy Gillespie, the MJQ, Sarah Vaughan, Chick Corea and Gary Burton, Benny Carter and the cream of UK performers), the Board went for a strategy of trying to make the festival the biggest in Europe at a time when we were already losing the greatest of our jazz stars.

My stategy was to establish smallish quality rooms dedicated to different genres (piano jazz of all styles, a traditional jazz room, a small-group bop room, a blues room etc) and run them nightly for the whole 10-day run of the festival, bringing in the finest performers available for 1 or 2 nights each. These rooms would present the bulk of the programme and bigger venues would only be used for a small number of big-band concerts and big-name events. In 1987 there were plenty of outstanding soloists, singers and groups available, but it was apparent that it would become increasingly difficult to fill large auditoreums as people of the stature of Ella, Dizzy, Oscar Peterson etc died or stopped working. When the Board opted for a populist strategy, I decided all the fun in the music business was in playing, I packed in the Festival job and went back to playing. It's a move I've never regretted, although the downward trend of the local jazz Festival upsets me. Last year there was only one concert that interested me enough to attend, and that was largely spoiled by the sound crew treating it like a stadium rock gig.

Incidentally, the small-is-beautiful-if-the-quality-is-there strategy has been used successfully by Ken Ramage's Nairn Jazz Festival for the last 25 or so years and has been instrumental in attracting large numbers of visitors to an otherwise quiet seaside town in the north of Scotland.

Cheers,

Ken Mathieson.