- CONFERENCE
What’s a conference for? Discussion, certainly. Decisions? Not essential. After the Jazz Promotion Network’s two-day bash in Bristol another feature, more nebulous but still positive, comes to mind. Now the meeting is established as a regular thing – it was stop-start with the pandemic but this was the third annual conference in a row – it’s a kind of existence proof.
It’s a reminder that there is, for want of a better word, a jazz industry. The scale is small, and it involves mainly tiny, artisanal outfits that are just getting by, but it covers the four nations of the UK. It isn’t in possession of any unified vision – the diversity of jazz and “jazz adjacent” music, as we now say, not to mention the character of people who make it as artisanal producers, means that ain’t going to happen. But there is a sense of community, even common purpose, which an annual gathering of 170 people or so reinforces.
The commonality, perhaps, is trying to ensure making art and making a living can sometimes go together. That goes for musicians, of course, as well as venues, producers, agents, publicists, and record labels. Making a living may just mean breaking even in a volunteer-run venue, but money always comes into it: which is why calling this an industry isn’t too much of a stretch. As Loz Collier from Cardiff stressed, “you’ve got to treat it like a business, even if it is a side hustle”.
All this means similar questions come up at each conference, often tied to issues common to all the arts, and the answers – whether optimistic or pessimistic – depend who you talk to. So what was special this, time, and seemed specific to jazz?
The most optimistic picture probably emerged from a keynote interview with Fred Bolza, a former VP for strategy at Sony Music who now presides over “artist services company”, New Soil. Running an artist management effort which now extends to a record label, he has a nice line in converting big company experience into small company precepts. “Find the music people want to soundtrack their lives to” sounded like Sony-style wisdom, but isn’t a bad credo for a company dedicated to choosing only music the people working on it really love. Succeed in that, even in a world in digital turmoil, and “the money will flow eventually”, Bolza declares.
How? Well, big companies can be dumb – they certainly do plenty of dumb things. But one thing the majors can offer at least some people is time to think, even if they don’t use it well. Running an independent outfit is frantic but taking a breath really helps: “Any time, however small, that can be spent reflecting on the actual person and their music pays massive dividends”.
New Soil have examples – Theon Cross, Corto Alto – that show how this works, and plenty more advice about how to navigate the labyrinth of modern distribution. Bolza underlined that streaming is both essential, and a bugbear. “Think of Spotify as a google for songs, not an artist development programme.” Streaming data is a blessing and a curse. Best not to ignore it, which would be like driving a car without a dashboard. But remember always that the platform’s business model drives the algorithm, which is built to deter clicking away. And developing appreciation of this music takes time – “our job is to create the things people want to listen to in 20 years time” – which the digital world does not like at all.
Points well taken, although other more diffuse comments, like the suggestion that jazz always needs a a connection to the past but at the same time the optimists among us are “people inventing the future they want to be living in” might be harder to turn into concrete action. And, let’s be realistic, the number of people who can sign with an organisation providing the quality of support for developing sustainable careers that New Soil, which is backed by the Marathon Music Group, offers its artists is going to be a tiny percentage of aspiring jazz practitioners.
For the rest, Bolza’s optimistic contribution was perhaps to adjust the dominant metaphor of the meeting. If you were thinking maybe it’s not really an industry, the other main idea on offer seemed to be the jazz ecosystem. That often crops up in arts talk nowadays, though is rarely, if ever expanded to check any of the features of real ecosystems. It generally seems to mean something locally based, and fuzzily interactive, in a good way (though this author, who, one panellist mentioned in passing, has some more developed ideas).
Bolza offered another, simpler, locality: a village, as in “it takes a village”. That seemed to resonate with quite a few people. It might mean a lot of people working collaboratively (instead of competing or sitting inside a clique) on artist development. It might just mean a city, or part of a city with a working jazz scene, or scenes. That gets complex very quickly. Tony Benjamin, who offers a monthly preview of all jazz things in Bristol, a medium-sized city, tells me he now queries 30 or more venues every time.
A scene can extend beyond a city, perhaps helped by co-ordination of touring in a region, but how to develop one? The conference covered the range of opinion from exhortations to nurture your scene to Bolza’s oblique dismissal of the word: “scene is a word that gets used by people who are already in it, or journalists who don’t know what the fuck it is”.
The truth is probably that you know one when you’ve got one, but the origins of every scene will be different. That means the kind of free-wheeling interaction and cross-fertilization the word implies is hard to contrive but will sometimes emerge unbidden. There’s no real recipe for ensuring that happens locally nor, perhaps, nationally. But the JPN is a determined move in the right direction, and the meeting offered plenty of other information about things that can underpin a healthy network of jazz venues, from advice about DIY touring, through social media strategies, to which funding schemes to target (hint: Arts Council England’s Grassroots Music Fund has not had nearly enough jazz applications, according to Council’s own executives).
And, while scenes don’t grow to order, having everyone in the same room is a start. Pretty well everyone I spoke to valued the meeting at the elementary level of meeting all the other people involved in the effort to turn surviving in jazz promotion into thriving. Perhaps Ian Storror, who had put together an exhibition at the Bristol Beacon marking a startling 40 years as an independent jazz promoter in the city, put it best. The JPN meeting, he reckoned, was a bit like a COVID vaccine booster. Every year, when resistance to the pressures of mounting regular gigs might be wearing a bit thin, spending a couple of days picking the brains of others in the same game provides a necessary lift. Anyone who needs that can head to Cardiff for another dose in 2025.
And the showcase…
After listening in to the jazz promoters’ gathering for two days, I should mention the music the delegates also enjoyed, from all four parts of the UK. So, let’s see if I’ve got the hang of this: how hard can it be? I’ll assume the budget is there, and I have power over programming. Who of the players we heard would I book. And for what kind of audience?
2. SHOWCASES
First up were the Secret Path Trio down from Scotland, playing in the freezing wastes of the Beacon’s foyer (still suffering from a design fail on the street doors). Fraser Fifield led on the very distinctive low whistle (and one tune on the pipes), with master drummer Tom Bancroft and Paul Harrison on keys. Hard not to sense a folkish, pastoral tinge in the pieces Fifield writes for the trio, but there’s plenty of rhythmic energy too. A lovely set with an unusual sonic flavour. Would be great in a medium-sized club, somewhere you can get close up to appreciate the detail, perhaps even a folk club with an adventurous audience.
Keynote interviewee Yazz Ahmed’s set wasn’t strictly showcase, but kicked off the Monday evening sequence in the 300-seat Lantern Hall. That proved too small for the volume her set-up delivered, particularly the skull-resonating synth bass lines she has developed to accompany a set of her pleasing trumpet compositions. I’d only sign up for more of this in a stadium, or some other venue where you can get a long way away.
Pleasant relief came in the form of Bristol-residents Sara Colman and Rebecca Nash with their Ribbons project, with Henrik Jensen on bass and, for the first time, Jonathan Silk on drums. I happened to hear the trio, sans Silk, at a different venue the week before, when the overall (unamplified) sound was better, but the drums did wonders in knitting together their performance of Colman’s reflective songs. Jensen’s bass sound was spoilt by the Lantern rig but he still played beautifully, and Nash’s piano is a fine complement to Colman’s vocal. They definitely deserve another lunchtime concert in the world-beating acoustic of St George’s Bristol, this time with their very fine drummer.
Then something completely different in the form of Vipertime, a two-drumset, sax and electric bass quartet from Leeds. Described in the programme as “aggro-jazz”, they were again hard on the ears volume-wise, and the declamatory horn playing would probably get people moving at house parties, which are a thing in Leeds. If you believe two drumsets are never not a good idea, and I do, then the basic sound has promise, but the sax lines get repetitive pretty quickly and I think I’d show my face at the party but then slip out the back for a quiet drink after a couple of numbers.
Vocal-led Azamiah, from Glasgow rounded off the evening with an altogether dreamier set, India Blue’s voice benefits from some processing, and settings that feature further electronics from the keys. A lightly grooving affair that would suit an open-air festival, perhaps first thing or late at night.
Tuesday’s showcase started Welsh where Monday had been Scottish, with harp virtuoso Amanda Whiting’s quartet gracing the foyer stage straight after lunch. The harp and sax combination of the front line proved an excellent postprandial mix and the quartet trade in a pleasing combination of original tunes and straight ahead jazz, with the harp’s lilt distinctive enough to keep the attention. A band who deserve a medium-sized concert hall with (yes, they were amplified) skilled ears at the sound desk.
The same space came alive at conference end on Tuesday evening with a crackling half hour from tap dancer Petra Haller and John Pope’s upright bass. Haller is compelling, and you feel she might put her tap square down on any street corner and draw a crowd. She and Pope only met the previous day but their constantly invntive joint improvisation could have been the work of old partners – conveying that delightful sense of shared creative discovery you can get on a jazz stage at its best. They should be openers for any other quality jazz act, but only ones confident they could match the impact of this engaging duo.
After dinner proceedings in the Lantern began with Tullis Rennie’s Safe Operating Space, in which the leader’s electronics seed elaborations that are picked up by two saxophones (Dee Byrne and Cath Roberts) and drums. It’s a sometimes austere but heartfelt set of improvisations that would hold the attention of a club crowd in an open-minded venue where people might be used to something more raucous but are prepared to give anything a try. We have such venues, yes?
The showcase proper finished with two rather different bands from across the Irish Sea. The Córas Trio have a nice line in deconstructing Irish traditional tunes, the melodies sometimes stated clearly, sometimes merely hinted at by Kevin McCullagh’s fiddle, the rhythms also broken up and a dose of electronics taking the sound further away from what you might hear from the corner table in a pub. A persuasive attempt to link jazz practice with local musical strains that would travel well, and could catch urban ears or blow away some cobwebs nicely in a village hall.
Then the Adjunct Ensemble, in a quintet edition, gave a full-throated long sample of their freewheeling, incantatory stew of producer Jamie Thompson’s prepared and found sounds, sax, drums, bass and vocal declamation of texts from Felispeaks. Their work explores aspects of the old avant garde, with musical gestures one might have heard in the 1960s, but there are twenty-first century twists and a freshly minted urgency. It called to mind at moments both Escalator Over the Hill-era Carla Bley and Matana Roberts’ sound collages, and would be a good fit for an arts centre that has cultivated an audience for complex music that is emotionally and aurally quite demanding, if such places still flourish.
Well, here begins and ends my imaginary career as a jazz promoter, I’m glad to say, after this extended lesson about the astonishing range of varieties of jazz that now exist. I would, though really love to be able to book the closing trio, Andy Sheppard’s Pushy Doctors, somewhere because this once regular Bristol trio are so unfailingly entertaining. A treat for everyone who was still around (an impressively high proportion of attendees, but then listening to this stuff is their job). Alas, although the trio were long an adornment to pubs and small clubs in Bristol and round about, it was Sheppard’s first show with organist Dan Moore and old comrade Tony Orrell on drums for six years, and Andy’s move to Portugal means we may have to wait a similar stretch to hear them again. Never mind. Bands come and go but the scene, we hope, goes on.
