Interview with David Jones, Director of Serious, London, with Emma Webster, 11 th February 2016

How did you first get involved with music promotion and the London Jazz Festival?

I worked in theatre and loved music but I couldn’t figure out how you could actually earn a living working in music; I didn’t really have any models for that. I sang boy treble and we sang all the Britten operas, so I got sort of drawn in to lots of different musics for a variety of different reasons. So after some adventures I ended up working at Battersea Arts Centre cleaning the toilets in the morning and tearing tickets in the evening, on split shifts. And I ended up, through that, as the administrator – at the age of 21 – of a theatre company. And they were the least funded of all the – what were called then – ‘revenue funded theatre companies’. So at 21 I was trying to master how you organise tours and how you ran a budget and how you employed people and all of these things.

So I worked in theatre, then worked in television, and then got drawn into music because I was asked to direct a festival, which is funny because that it is more or less what I spend my time doing now. We called it the Bloomsbury Festival because it was based at the Bloomsbury Theatre, and people used to confidently come up to me and say [in posh voice], ‘Oh yes, I remember the Bloomsbury Festival from forty years ago’, and there never had been a Bloomsbury Festival; we checked as thoroughly as we could in those pre-internet days – no Bloomsbury Festival. But it had that ring of something that had been there. And we basically programmed a lot of music in-between: outfield rock music, soul, some jazz, a lot of improvisation. I’ve always liked improvisation and I’ve always seen my definition as to what ought to go into the festival as being about improvisation and spontaneity, and once you’ve got that, then I’m very happy pulling in other musics that aren’t necessarily defined as jazz if jazz musicians are interested in them and they feed into jazz and bring new life and new blood into it. Or draw on jazz. I remember programming Asian Dub Foundation and people said, ‘Well, they’re not jazz’, but they loved Sun Ra. They saw Sun Ra as the explanation, the inspiration, for why they do what they do.

So anyway, musicians who’d been in the Bloomsbury Festival said, ‘Well, can you do more gigs with me?’ And I was going, ‘I’m not a concert promoter; that’s not what I do!’. And then I looked around two or three years later and I was a concert promoter. I didn’t like the promoter title: it seemed like blokes in camel hair coats should be called that. By this time, I knew [fellow Serious director] John Cumming although we weren’t working together. And we both agreed that the idea of a producer was something that we felt quite kind of comfortable with: that it has more of a sense of bringing creativity and creating something special. And we weren’t even particularly close at that time: we just realised that it was better not to be crashing into each other. So we started quite a loose alliance to put on jazz artists who were touring in mainland Europe but weren’t coming to Britain very much and often weren’t being looked after very well when they did come. So we started doing that and that was a big success. Then people came to us and said, ‘Well, how about doing a festival in Hackney, Camden and Islington’, and John said, ‘Let’s call it the North London Jazz Festival’, and I said, ‘Nah, the hell with it! Let’s call it the London Jazz Festival!’ And that was the early nineties and that’s where the London Jazz Festival came from, really. It just grows from there. It hasn’t been something where we’ve said, ‘Let’s make a 25-year plan and let’s be in this place by now’.

But I think one of the things we’ve always recognised, unlike any other place in Britain, any given week, any week we choose in London, is going to be like a jazz festival in any other city. You know, there will almost invariably be major concerts, high level performances and sessions, a great programme at Ronnie Scott’s and half a dozen other jazz clubs of artists

that are internationally recognised. So if you’re going to do a jazz festival, you can’t simply put on those people; you’ve got to be aiming high and you’ve got to be reaching out to audiences that aren’t already going to jazz all the time, and you’ve got to give the core jazz audience something that they just wouldn’t get, whether it’s a mad profusion over ten days, or whether it’s, you know, artists who otherwise simply couldn’t come in some other context. So I think that’s always been, for me, that’s been the driving force behind the Festival. Because things that were extraordinary to us in the first two or three years are commonplace now; everybody does them. There wasn’t a concert hall putting on jazz on a regular basis. Now there’s the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican, Cadogan Hall, all with enviable jazz programmes, some of which Serious is involved in, some of which just happen because they’ve got great programmers and great ideas. So I would hope that if a festival is to have a continued rationale it has to go places that other people aren’t already going. And I guess that’s what I’ve steered by, myself.

John Cumming and David Jones were there at the start of the festival – when did [third director] Claire Whitaker start?

1996. Claire does many things and they’re weird because they don’t fit into one neat job description, just like my own skills don’t sort of live in one place, so you can’t draw a near organogram of the directors and go ‘This is their separate ideas and this is where other people fit in’, you know, because Claire, for example, is expert on African music, and most of what I know about African music, she introduced me to. She has a passionate vision of steering towards education and learning; that it shouldn’t be something that happens over a hill as part of the Festival, but it should grow out of what the Festival actually did and there should be that sense of engagement in as many things as we did. But she was also brilliant on thinking about how … Well, you could say it’s fundraising but I think it’s more explaining the company, and explaining the Festival. I think John and I have a habit of being quite introverted and quite caught up in our passions, and Claire, perhaps because she came from outside and wasn’t there at the very beginning, is much better at simply saying, ‘This is what happens and this is why it’s good’. And once she’s opened that door, we can all go through it. But I think she is brilliant at articulating the strengths of the Festival.

I’m interested in ‘cultural dating’ – bringing together artists who may be interested in working together – is this something that both you and John are doing?

Yeah, we’re doing a lot of it. And I think it’s something that I feel very confident in. There was a sort of vogue in the nineties for sort of saying, ‘We’ll just create a safe space for artists to work in’, and I’ve never felt that makes a lot of sense in music. I mean of course you want artists to work together but they can do that. In theatre that’s harder, you know, without a forum for improvisation or a script, they tend to be quite big things that have to provided. Musicians tend to be able to work together and share ideas. In a sense, in the lifetime of the Festival, it’s just grown easier as you can move sound files around and you can experience the whole recorded history of music in one go if you want to. So I’ve seen much more making suggestions that musicians may not have thought of as something that we should do, but also being able to say quite quickly, ‘You want to achieve this? Let’s try it out’. So I think that sense of taking risks and then hedging them is the way that we would work. In other words, I don’t expect to subject audiences to hours of unmediated working it out. And I think sometimes the way to do that is to give great resources to musicians so that they can really focus and trust them to develop things, but also to suggest that it’s better to do something small and simple and quick and then build on it, than it is to create something enormous with colossal expectations. I’ve seen that happen so often when classical music commissions jazz musicians. You know, it’s not even something that’s consciously done by

inexperienced producers; it’s just their way of working is to go ‘I’ve found you some money, go write a piece’. And so a musician who isn’t necessarily used to writing scores as their primary means of expression goes away and is dwarfed by the whole history of twentieth and early twenty-first century music. They write something where somehow their own individuality gets squeezed out, and then everyone wonders why they’re vaguely disappointed; the musician is, the composer is, and the audience is.

Is that something you had a sense of not wanting to do from the very start?

Yeah. I think that we weren’t very interested in classical orchestras who wanted to play vaguely jazz-related [music]; you know, ‘We’ve got a Gershwin programme’ never did go down very well, and now, there’s a firm barrier that goes, ‘We don’t do that thing’. We were interested when people like Joanna MacGregor was saying, ‘The Britten Sinfonia can do this amazing exploratory project with Andy Sheppard and Shri Sriram and’, God, a bunch of other people, really exciting. ‘And we’ll use the Art of Fugue as our starting point’. I mean, that just seems to me a brilliant interactive project, and we were very proud to have that inside the Festival. And we’ve done a lot of really good work with orchestras. I enjoy that sense of big forces, but I think mediating how that’s done, and not just giving it a space is very important.

Give me a sense how a project you were particularly pleased with and also how it came about – the nitty gritty, what happened.

The odd thing is, my work around the Jazz Festival around the last few years still takes more than half my time, but I’m not producing work as much as I used to. I mean, I enjoyed immensely working on Adventures in Sound [in 2002], which was an idea that we created with Somethin’ Else. It ended up as a broadcast, a six hour broadcast, where we went in at the crack of dawn with some ideas about how we were going to use people like Evan Parker, and four or five other key improvisers, and we set up structures around them, and when they said, ‘Oh, can we pull in this person at this moment ..?’ We started at 9 o’clock in the morning and the concert began at four o’clock in the afternoon, and so we knew that people would be working together for periods. And I think it was a very good thing that it hadn’t been rehearsed, that it hadn’t been shaped. The audience really got into the drama of it; they could see musicians visibly responding to what was going on around them. It was almost like being able to take an audience into the inner workings of the idea.

How did that actually come about?

Well, that was me talking to Joby Waldman at Somethin’ Else. I mean, the thing that I think is very important to bring out around the Festival is it isn’t a top-down programmed festival. It isn’t a festival where Serious and a highly paid Artistic Director go away and go, ‘Here it is’ – like tablets from the mound – ‘I’ve created a festival; we’re going to do these things’. It’s something where everybody inside Serious who wants a voice in it, and I think probably half of the sixty venues that are in the festival every year, are programmed by people who have a passion for jazz themselves, so you’re drawing on their knowledge. [To explain] It’s an idea that Brian Eno came up with; it’s not an original idea, but it’s something which he articulated most strongly – which is the idea of surrender. And something where you don’t attempt to say, ‘This is how it is’. More, you respond to ideas, and you take them somewhere. In other ideas, it’s more akin to judo; that sense of you’re moving with an idea and you’re taking it somewhere and then you’re giving it back and people work on it. And I think many of our best things in the Festival have been created that way, rather than us being resolute and pushing outwards and defining. Or conversely, standing behind and defending one single artist to make something.

And I think John and I started off very interested in collective working. We had models of improvisation. I was always very impressed by Derek Bailey’s Company, which had, on the one hand, a commitment to free improvisation – and acerbic intelligence behind it as well; it was never allowed to just become soft and indulgent; it was setting very high standards. And I think that sense was very important for me, you know.

The audiences is one simple test. It’s always been incredibly important to me to describe the work properly, rather than pulling down words like ‘unique’ and ‘special’. It’s trying to give people a sense of what they’re going to expect because there are for pretty much anything you believe in passionately, 700 people who will seek out rigour; they’ll see that as a positive. If you put the ideas in the right order and you do your very best to deliver on what you promised. But if you just start trying to soft sell difficult music by emphasising its similarities to easy to assimilate music, you lose people’s trust. And I think, obviously no big festival can get it right across every single event, but we really spend a lot of time trying to think what the experience is that the audience is going to have. And that’s probably one of the reasons why I’ve tended to cleave to how the Festival communicates and what it says about itself, because I don’t think there are more big brains needed to get good ideas and put them into the centre, but there’s definitely a need to say, ‘We ought to do less of this and we ought to do more of that’; to look at the whole experience and try and make it as good as possible, and then move it out there so that all the audiences feels addressed. Not just so that if you’re a fifty-five year-old man who’s been going to jazz gigs for thirty years, you feel addressed, but also so that if you’re a twenty-five year-old clubber who has just picked up on some Bix Beiderbecke and your Spotify is telling you that this stuff is interesting, you feel that … It’s a bit like the Proms – it’s a sort of huge entry point and nobody quite knows what happens to all those people the rest of the year. But what I do feel is that audience [numbers] have gone up. There are infinitely more jazz concerts than there were when the Festival started and they’re mostly getting great audiences. I mean, people talk about jazz as if it’s a marginal music, and I don’t think it is. I think it’s one of the great live musics, whichever way you look at it. Whether you’re talking about the fifteen hundred people who would come and see Cecil Taylor were he to do a concert, or the tens of thousands who want to see Jamie Cullum or Gregory Porter. And I love the fact that, you know, the avant-gardists who would try and exclude almost everything are shocked and upset by things we programme, and I also think it’s really fantastic to be able to make new connections and to enthuse people about things that they wouldn’t necessarily have gone to. The jazz Festival provides an extra safety rail, an extra way of being able to understand something.

You mentioned earlier that you draw the line at programming orchestras playing Gershwin. I’m interested in the idea of festival producers developing the genre, of setting the genre boundaries. Who are the people drawing these boundaries?

On the one hand, I mean I think there’s a fairly small guarded classical establishment, and you want to welcome them into the fold. It’s fantastic when the BBC Symphony Orchestra devote the resources to creating a Bill Frisell concert that we had in the Festival six or seven years ago [2009], something like that. It was a triumph! They commissioned Mike Gibbs to write arrangements. It was a beautifully created event which the BBC Symphony Orchestra really loved doing. It was broadcast and it opened a set of doors for Bill in a really really interesting way. I’m much less interested when people try and sanitise things. For me, that would almost be a defining thing. If you’re trying to make it safe and you’re trying to make it so that there are no edges, then you’re probably not serving jazz, because I don’t think historically that that’s been a hallmark of jazz, you know. It’s funny because a lot of the musics I like get imprisoned in genres that aren’t really genres. I mean, world music is a marketing creation, you know. It’s sometimes the best handle you’ve got to describe

something, but jazz has a reality. You can extend that in either direction. You can make a very strong case for its African-American roots and you can stretch it back as far as you like in terms of the things that must have influenced the music, that influenced what has become jazz. But you can also take it forward; you can also build a picture of European jazz and why that’s there and what that’s doing, and you can link it in to other musics. But it’s that thing that I talked about, spontaneity and improvisation that seems to characterise it. That, for me, is the defining thing. As far as its racial origin or a particular time where it was seen to be at its height.

Are these the kind of ideas that were there at the start when you and John started the Festival?

Yeah. I mean, [John was] deeply knowledgeable about jazz, long before I knew him, and you can never recreate the fact that he saw Miles Davis and Archie Shepp at the Hammersmith Odeon and I was too young to, you know, it’s a fact. But his work was in jazz and he was fascinated by what happens when you listen to Chuck Brown or when you listen to African musics and you fed in. And his points for those meetings were very often jazz musicians, whereas conversely I would be interested in African music. Slightly suspicious of a certain kind of American who plays the cultural tourist and then returns to base sharpish. There is sometimes that sense that people are looking for an exotic spice to add to their music and I started off suspicious of that, and I think now it’s just become a much more meaningful exchange on both sides.

I was stunned when I went to Accra in the year 2000 and found that out of 44 commercial stations, four of them were jazz stations, playing jazz 24 hours a day. And it was jazz shading into Afrobeat shading into Latin. But I’ve always been aware of the impact of jazz on Africa and I’ve always fought that idea of the unchanging music of Africa, and I was fascinated about when you think about the kind of political impact of Cuba in the early 1960s, sending its great ensemble around West Africa, as cultural emissaries, you know, and the impact that had on what we now consider to be African music. But then Jim Reeves is a big part of that as well. Somebody once unloaded a shipload of Jim Reeves cassettes into the African cassette market; that’s where all the slide guitar comes from [laughs]. So I like that mongrel tendency in music and I think that jazz is a very good place for that.

Jazz in the early nineties, it’s hard to remember, was a much more tight-arsed affair, and it was much more about making its numbers. I mean, people say, ‘What characterises what you love? It’s improvisation, it’s …’ But they had a much more codified idea of what a solo was – it was rooted in bebop or it was rooted in something even further back. And it wasn’t very open and it wasn’t very confident. And now, jazz is confident. All the musicians I know are quite comfortable reaching out to the world, you know. It may take them a few years to shake off their academic training, however – because virtually every jazz musician now has been to music college, which again, is a big difference in the scene over the twenty odd years that we’ve been running.

And how have the education programmes such as Take Five impacted on the Festival? And is the burgeoning relationship between yourselves and academia something you’ve cultivated?

I’d say it’s something we’re probably feeling there is a more equal relationship to be had now than there was a while back. Even when we started twenty years ago, people were smart enough to know that they couldn’t just dismiss jazz out of hand, but they were suspicious of it because they hadn’t worked out how to turn it into a curriculum, and now they have, for good and for bad. And yeah, quite often, the people who were in jazz were treated as

second-class citizens, whereas now there are major jazz courses and everybody knows they’re important. I think, again, for us, it’s a question of how does the Festival do something that isn’t already happening. Is there a way that doing a masterclass – at Guildhall or Trinity Laban or wherever – is doing something that they pretty much couldn’t do themselves when that artist is in town another time? Our education work, I think, I’ve been very excited by the extent to which it’s giving context to people who don’t already know they’re passionate about jazz, rather than extra learning for those who do.

And I think it’s right that big festivals should be able to face in every direction and sometimes do contradictory things as well. I mean, it’s what, 250 events and if you’re going to do that many, you’re bound to have things that bump into each other and things that don’t just fit into a nice neat order, and I love that. I mean, no matter how much you went to in the Jazz Festival, you probably couldn’t see more than about five percent of the total. So everybody in a sense is mining out their own paths. I mean, we talk about personalisation now as if it’s an online thing but I think, you know, it’s an offline thing: it’s how the festival is, and I relish it.

Do you programme thematically throughout the festival, e.g. strands for fans of avant-garde music?

We do it informally. I mean, we look across the programme and go, ‘Hmm, three saxophonists playing in big halls at the same time: we must do something about that’. I think that the difference [with a festival like] the Gateshead Jazz Festival [is that it] happens in one venue and it has pretty much the assumption that there will be lots of meeting points in the programme and you can switch from one strand to another and move from Hall 2 to Hall 1. But essentially, you’ll only have two or three things going on at the same time. Whereas on a busy day with the [London] Jazz Festival, you’ve probably got twenty or thirty choices to make, and even if you assume that half of them are not even on your radar – they’re not a place you want to go to, they’re not an artist you want to see – that still leaves ten or fifteen things to choose from, which is a mad profusion. And thank goodness it’s all full! Because most of the time everything is packed. I don’t think it would be wasteful if by putting on all of these things you were splitting your audiences but actually what an abundance of music seems to do is to create a huge audience for it. A bit like you could say, ‘Oh, there’s too much on in the West End; there should be, you know, a third as many things so that people have a chance to see everything’. But you don’t want to see everything; you want to have choices, and you want your quirky own tastes to be fulfilled.

It’s interesting when you say that everything is full – was there a point, particularly around the recession, where things took a dip?

No. At that point the audience grew, and we very consciously tried to reach out to a much younger audience, and I would say the average age of the audience dropped ten, fifteen years. I don’t have the facts to prove that, but my instincts, just looking around, a lot of people dated that from the point where they went. And it’s because we got bigger, so that you weren’t faced with either a concert you wanted to go to but you couldn’t get into, or a concert you didn’t want to go to, but you had no idea you even wanted to buy a ticket, and you gave up and went to the free events because it was there. I think we got better at programming further ahead; I’ve not found the point at which an audience doesn’t want to buy a ticket far far ahead. And that’s not in my nature; I mean, I’ve never bought tickets far ahead – I don’t. And it’s not because I get loads of free tickets; it’s just because I have no desire to commit my time, but our audience is different. They say they want to be there, they want to go to things, up to a year ahead.

So over the last 25 years, have there been times you’ve had to tighten your belt or does it just keep getting bigger?

We’ve consciously tried to make it a little bit smaller, and I’d also say the way we resolve the dilemma you’ve presented is that we try to raise the bar all the time. I mean, once upon a time we would have broadly been reflective of what clubs are programming. Now, gently and in different ways because of the different nature of our partners, we’re saying, ‘Can you please clarify what you want to do? Is your priority to programme what you always do but have it full, in which case you really need you to bring in some things that you don’t always do. By all means, have that artist who’s going to fill the venue, but ask them to do their David Bowie show that they haven’t done before’, you know. And actually, every venue responds to that. I mean, I would say that at the moment, I’ve never seen the scene run by such strong, committed, creative people, and there’s much more of an ethos. And we’re talking as if John and Claire and I make all the decisions, and if that was ever true, it’s certainly not true now. People like Amy [Pearce, associate director of production] are incredibly important; we try and respond to what everybody inside Serious wants to say and I guess there must be a circle of a couple of hundred people – journalists, broadcasters, musicians, people who run the venues, people who run other festivals – who we listen to and work with, and of course the huge international scene, where we’re kind of a key part of.

How have geopolitics impacted on the festival? Are there countries you work with more now than you used to?

I think obviously Eastern Europe has become incredibly important [partly] because there are amazing artists. Poland, for example, on its own, you could run a festival of terrific artists and give an audience amazing things from Poland. Eastern Europe’s also become a place [where] the music, jazz was so important in the kind of late Communist period – it was an expression of freedom in a way that wasn’t mediated by capitalism. That’s an incredibly bald statement and I’m not sure it stands up to detailed analysis, but there was a sense that jazz represented spirit, and it’s still seen as very important and that’s where people come at the music, you know. They’ve internalised what it means. There’s a spark, if you like; there’s something about their own individuality that they express through jazz. And that’s very attractive to listen to; for me, I find that a very interesting music to follow through. I think France has always had a very interesting approach because France is like London – the whole of France, like London – and is very comfortable with the idea of people coming from other cultures, and becoming, in their view, they become French; once they get their carte de sejour, once they live in Paris, you know, and so they can come inside the scene. Whereas our English language would treat people differently, so you might see a black artist who had lived in England for fifteen years, they would still be described as an African musician, and it’s not racism per se; it’s just a different take. There’s plenty of racists in France; I’m not saying it’s the perfect way to be, but there is the sense in which the contrast of how the cultures get dealt with, I find endlessly fascinating. Personally, I find I do a lot of work, my work, is about French producers, French artists, and French composers. And John’s work is with a completely different group of people, and then other people pick up in the middle and work with them. But France is a big inspiration, I would say. I think what the London Jazz Festival has done is to feed out to the world at large a confidence that jazz is an important music and it has a place for engaging with any other music it chooses to work with. So I think we’ve managed to push over a lot of boundaries and other people have gone, ‘Well, if they can do it, so can we’. I don’t think there’s any festival left who would go, ‘You can’t do that – we’re a jazz festival!’ You go back and look at the early press files of the Festival – the first five or six years were spent with a group of critics debating in agonised

terms whether what we were creating was jazz or not, even though it was played by jazz musicians!

I’ve never had the slightest doubt that of all the musics I know, jazz has the most exciting future. I mean, I’m very interested in capturing the past and analysing it and learning where we come from, because obviously everything I know about music has come either from having bought records from about the age of about 16 and 26, or live music, or things that my friends have told me to listen to; those are the three routes that I can remember. I don’t sit now and go ‘Ooh, a big pile of CDs. I’m going to amass a detailed knowledge of what lies inside’. A CD for me is a tool to find out whether this person might do an interesting concert. But what that means is, of course, I only really really really know the music of the musicians that I was able to experience live. So I never saw Miles Davis, for example. I got to grips with some of his music. I mean, every so often I hear something amazing and go, ‘What’s that?!’ And it’s Miles Davis, 1958. And Louis Armstrong: he was, like, this embarrassing bloke when I was ten doing ‘Wonderful World’, you know, and it’s only when people lead you to and play you the right things, that you go ‘Oh my God! This is revolutionary music – how fantastic!’ And so I love the events that we create and that other people create within the Jazz Festival that take stock of what’s gone before, and the cultural milieu it was created in, hold it up to the light and learn from it, because I think about what I’m learning, other people must be learning too. In general, our audiences are a bit younger than me now and getting younger all the time, so what I don’t know, they probably don’t know either. Or they’ve worked out what it’s all about, gone into it in detail, and then they’ve got something really interesting to bring to it.

I think there was a point at which our audience grew hugely. I mean, we still value people, as old as they want, coming to shows – it’s fantastic – and I would never want to create a programme in the way … You know how Radio 1 goes through that thing every few years, going ‘Our audience is too old’? And it constantly tries to lose the old ones. We would never want to do that. But at the same time, I think we definitely want to make ourselves accessible to people who don’t already know what we are. And fortunately, that’s another advantage of a big festival in that one year, someone might encounter one show, have a good time, come back and see a few the next year, and then the third year they drag all their mates along and they block out ten days in their diary and they look to going to the Jazz Festival. And people definitely have a completely promiscuous view of what they’re going to do with the ten days of the Festival. I sometimes think it would be fun to run a competition and see who can get the most stamps in their book of going to the Jazz Festival.

Have you ever tried a festival pass model?

No, because our model is so unlike most festivals. We’re not like the Edinburgh Fringe because we do produce the central core of events, but the simple idea that I use to explain the festival is that it’s like an onion. There’s an inner ring of things we do and we create, and there’s an outer ring of things that we’re responsible for stimulating, and perhaps we’ve arranged to bring a South African artist over to London and then they’ll go and play the Vortex or they’ll go and do this or they’ll go and do that. And then there’s an outer layer of people who are very confident creators, and we simply engage with them on terms that they and we can mutually agree that they’ll be in. But it means that financially, a festival pass wouldn’t work. You know, if a club’s got to sell fifty tickets and somebody turns up with their festival pass and they can’t get in, what do you do? If your Keith Jarrett concert has sold out and someone has bought a festival pass and they can’t get in, what do you do? I think passes make sense when you’ve got roughly the same size venue everywhere or a fairly small programme, you know, where of course you don’t want people to pay hundreds of

pounds to see eight different concerts. But people aren’t doing that with us. And I think for the most part, anecdotally, we get the picture that the average attendance is two or three events and some free stages. That’s enough to feel that you’re inside the festival, and perhaps you’ll then go to your mate, ‘Oh look, we could get to this. That 4 o’clock concert on the second Sunday, we could go to that too. That fits in’.

I don’t want to get sidetracked on the topic of Love Supreme but I’m interested in what was the driver behind setting up an outdoor festival where the ticket price covers everything.

Well, that wasn’t our festival – that was something that would’ve happened without us. Ciro Romano created that festival and Serious were employed as the programmers in the first year and we now have a sort of friendly relationship where we bounce around ideas and suggest things. Ciro will go, ‘Shall I have Lianne La Havas this year – yes, no?’ and we chat. But it’s not, in any sense, our festival. I’ve always been terrified of doing outdoor paying shows. I mean, sure, you can make lots of money, but you can have it all literally swept away. Yeah, I don’t like them. But [Love Supreme’s] Big Top is one of the nicest places I can imagine to listen to jazz. I think the arena is great because it puts younger bands into a festival context so that people can experience them, and the outdoor stage is far more conducive to sitting in your deckchair and a drink and chat to your friends, and you can listen, but by chatting you’re not intruding on people’s enjoyment in a way that you would if you were in a club or a concert. So I think Love Supreme’s a brilliant thing to exist. So for John, that plugged into his own history of programming the Bracknell Jazz Festival, which was one of the big small festivals. When there were many more festivals happening outdoors than there are now, Bracknell was the lodestone; it was the one where amazing things would happen. And I used to go to it before I really knew him very well and thoroughly enjoyed it, and was educated, but it’s not what I see Serious doing. But I think the more models there are [the better]. It used to be that [arts festivals] would programme a George Melly, or they would take a deep breath and programme an Abdullah Ibrahim or something, but now that they’re doing things that are truly innovative, that’s a really good thing.

What are you excited about when thinking about the next ten years?

For myself, I’m most interested in taking aspects of what London Jazz Festival has done very well and introducing them into other festivals; things that we work on, and helping other people to do that.

And what is it that you are good at?

I think that confidence of creating work. If you haven’t got a lot of money to spend, why ever would you bother trying to book a half famous artist and spend a lot of money on them when you could be making a piece of work? And on the way you could be giving your staff that confidence of how something like that works: how not to intervene, how not to be prescriptive, about how to support an artist; how to produce, I suppose. That seems to me to be a really interesting thing to do.

And things that have gone wrong?

By the time we did the London Jazz Festival I think I’d pretty much got a sense of how you did things. But I remember asking Sonny Rollins for a medical certificate to get insurance; to get insurance I need a medical certificate, I’d never booked an international artist, so I just sent a note to his wife saying, ‘Please could you ask Sonny to go and get a medical certificate so that we can go and get insurance’ and I was told very firmly that Sonny Rollins has never given out a medical insurance and never would! [laughs] But they’re small stories. They’re more the times that you realise you’ve angered somebody by pushing yourself in the

wrong place, or conversely, you’ve left yourself with a great big problem because you didn’t intervene. It is hard to teach those things.

That theatre background was really important for me. There was a time when the Gulbenkian Foundation used to give out a certain kind of Mercedes bus; they gave you 90% of the money to buy one of these, and they seated a cast of seven plus a driver in the front with seatbelts, and in the back compartment, you could build a set of six – no more than six foot seven in height – so there were an awful lot of productions going round with a cast of six or seven and sets that were no more than six and a half, which was pretty fortuitous because you were often doing it in community halls with very low ceilings and if your set was nine foot high, you would have had to shave the top off or not do the show. But it taught me a huge amount about touring. We used to earn £25 a night in England and £50 a night in Holland so we spent lots of time in Holland. And so I think I’ve got a gut instinct of what it’s like to be on the road, and I’d say that it’s got worse for musicians now, because if the only way you can make a gig is by getting up at 4 in the morning to be on a 6 in the morning flight, 7 in the morning flight, you’re perpetually shattered. And then you add up, you ratchet into that London. To us, London is where we live and gigs, we put on all the time, so we go to the gig going, ‘We’ve got to run this show; it’s quite small in terms of what we do’, but you’re confronted with an artist, going [theatrical voice], ‘This is London! The world press will be there, my publisher will be there, my record company will be there. What should I do? Should I panic? Should I throw a big hissy fit?’ And you need to love them. You need to be in a place where without being intrusive, you’re simply looking after them and giving them a sense that they can do their best, and you’re not going to drag them off to a reception or make some absurd demand on them twenty minutes before they have to go on stage. And, you know, you’re there for human contact if they want it, but you can also just sit back if what they’d rather do is meditate in their dressing room.

Going back to your theatre background, in your contacts with other (music) promoters, are there any noticeable differences? Working in theatre and TV is perhaps more collaborative . . ?

Yeah, you’re right, there’s a big difference. And it’s mainly because in Britain we have almost no specialist music programmers. I mean, you have concert promoters, in the sense of, that’s a rock and roll thing, it’s defined by British rock agents, who may have an interest in an outfield area, might work a bit in African music, might take on a jazz group, but essentially, it’s very much about a reproducible model of how you tour a thing, and you tour them into venues which do have this and don’t do that. And almost invariably the artist, the manager [of the venue] will be the promoter; he’s not responsible for finding hotels. If they take the artist for a drink after the show, that’s being nice, also builds a bond that may mean they get to promote the artist next time round; a very transient relationship. Whereas with Serious, we always try to behave as if every single artist we work with, no matter how small, was someone we knew we’d be wanting to work with in twenty years’ time. So you’re starting a relationship or you’re sustaining a relationship – we try and sort of teach all our staff this.

So do you tend to have relationships more with artists personally or with agents?

It varies. Agents, managers and artists are the three entry points. Some of it depends on language. I mean, if the artist speaks Lingala and a bit of French, and I speak some French and English and a bit of Spanish, your options for real communication are quite limited apart from saying ‘hello’, you know, you can have that slightly crass schoolboy French. In the end, that artist is going to say they had a good time in London and there was this cool bloke, can’t remember his name, who bought him a drink afterwards. So quite often, a manager provides confidence that an artist’s work is going to be looked after well. And an agent, I suppose,

does the same. They are quite important. So I think within jazz, again, I mean, the liars, the cheats and the fools have mostly dropped out of the business. That was the most productive output of the recession because a lot of people were hanging on by their fingernails dropped off, and the people who stuck it through were either people who diversified or people who had really worked out why they were doing it and were recognised as being good at it. Because Serious’ economic structure is that of a coalition. If we were dependent on public funding, or sponsorship, or box office, we would not be here, but because we’ve got all three and some other bits and pieces under our belts, that we can balance things out. We’re lucky to have people who are really supportive around us. I often feel really well looked after by people who have no particular business to look after us.

Does that extend all the way up/down to politicians, local authorities?

Yeah, there’s a surprising number of politicians who really love jazz. I mean, you’ve been to Jazz in the House, haven’t you? But in other years there were even more ministers there. It was a rare moment, I think, when they could meet on genuinely neutral political ground. I don’t know. Somewhere there’s a thesis to be written about ‘Why do politicians like jazz in such large numbers?’ but they do.

When did that relationship with the Jazz Festival start?

Claire very much fostered it by saying ‘this is important’. I feel that there are two types [of politicians]. There’s someone like Ken Clarke who is an omnivore; he likes culture in all forms. And one of my happiest moments in the whole Festival, actually, was when we did the Art Ensemble of Chicago [in 1995]. And the chairman of the Board of the South Bank wrote a letter – not bothering to tell us anything about it – to Kenneth Clarke, asking him if he would like to come and see the London Jazz Festival because he was known to like jazz. And Ken Clarke said, ‘Yeah. Art Ensemble of Chicago!’ And that I expect sounded like an OK name to this hapless chairman, and he was sat next to Ken Clarke, and the concert was two hours and forty minutes, non-stop. I was sitting on the other side of Kenneth Clarke, talking to him because I get on with him. Not chatting, you know, not friends, but I like him as a sort of renegade figure within the Tory party. And the Chairman could not believe that this music was going on and on and on, barely stopping, and when it stopped, there wasn’t a nice break, there was more of it, and it was going on and on and on and on and on! And by the time it finished, he got up and said, ‘We’ve got to go now’, and Ken Clarke said, ‘Oh no, I want to see the band!’. So he went backstage and he was such a charmer, ‘I love your music!’ And of course the band were just, for them, the Conservative/Labour thing didn’t exist, so there was a major British politician in their dressing room talking to them knowledgeably about the music and they loved it! And they gave him a beer and they talked. There was this poor man just watching his complete idea of entertaining politicians go off the rails. So that was pretty early on but yeah, it’s consciously something that Claire has had the cultural confidence to lay down. I think both John and I move in political circles, we’re members of parties, we follow through what we’re interested in, and people know we run the festival so they cleave to it.

Does that tend to happen in other artworlds as well?

I think in the classical world it does because the classical world is stuffed full of boards who are recruited for their political and financial connections, so you know, an enormous amount of special argument and string pulling seems to go on. Possibly that’s just be me being paranoid but I don’t think so; I think it’s the facts of life. But I’ve seen that with Serious too. I mean, because we tend to regard ourselves still as minnows, but every so often you see a look in someone’s eye and you realise that to them, you’re the monster that blocks out the

sun, you know, that their feeling is, ‘Well, however much I might enjoy having a drink with David or John or somebody else, ultimately if Serious wasn’t there, I could get a share of what they’ve got. I’ve no quick way to resolve that, but I think it’s one of the reasons why I’m very respectful of anybody else who’s actually working in the field – as opposed to talking about working in the field – because it’s hard, and there isn’t very much resource to start with, and a festival of the quality of the London Jazz Festival is always going to be expensive. Because we’ve managed to square the circle and keep those three forces – box office and sponsorship and public funding – working together, I’m sure other people must feel, ‘Well, if they didn’t do it, I should’.

Is there anybody else in the country who could put Keith Jarrett on?

Yeah. If we didn’t do it, Keith would not want to stop playing Britain. If a bomb fell on this area and we were all wiped out tomorrow, there would be a desire to see Keith Jarrett. I think people very often feel that if they weren’t there, they’re irreplaceable, and I think Serious is a pretty special coalition and I think one of the things that we’ve done, pretty systematically, is take very little out of the business. I mean, pretty much everything we earn goes back in to paying for Serious. It isn’t making anybody rich, it’s not buying big houses and a fancy car.

No villa in Spain?

No villa in Spain, I’m afraid, otherwise I’d invite you. But yeah, somebody else would figure a way and Keith would want to play. You know, I’m often surprised and pleased that artists stay so loyal to us, because there are often very good financial reasons why they should think of doing it another way round, and I think it’s because we recognise that jazz artists are in this funny area where they do need a lot of looking after, and we’ve deliberately built a big company that can provide all of those things, rather than a company where you have to push against the system to get them.

Can you give examples of artists who started with Serious back in the nineties and who are still with you?

Yeah, yeah. Someone like Pat Metheny – who actually has never played the Jazz Festival, now I think of it. Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins. I mean, of that generation. Brad Mehldau. Joshua Redman. And it’s partly because we don’t try to keep them on some sort of tight leash. If the Wigmore Hall wants them to play and they go and talk directly to the artist, we don’t throw a big hissy fit. We just like to know what’s going on, you know, so that we can pick up that relationship sustainably once they’ve done whatever the Wigmore Hall has to offer.

Is there something in the contract that says you can’t play three months before or after?

Yeah, usually. The funny thing is, with the artists we work with, they’re mostly quite sensible. We don’t at the moment feel that we’re writing contracts in order to protect ourselves from malign influences. We perhaps should look over our shoulders a bit more but we don’t and it seems to work.

Where might the malign influences be coming from?

Well, you can imagine somebody going, ‘There’s money to be made in jazz, let’s …’ I mean, it’s interesting because Live Nation have twice tried going to jazz. They did a North Sea Jazz Festival once across London in July and lost half a million pounds doing it. Those kind of things. That means while the people who’ve just left Live Nation are in charge, they’re going to go, ‘Jazz – no way!’ And they might be persuaded that an individual jazz musician will

draw an audience but their gut reaction is, ‘We lost a load of money doing jazz; let’s not go there’. And it happens in world music. Every so often someone will kind of go, ‘Oh, there’s money to make here; let’s pump a load of resources in’. But something strange happens where people don’t have the understanding of where the audience might come from and they go, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing that again’.

Do you have relationships with Womad, Celtic Connections . . ?

Yes.

What kind of relationships?

They’re important ones. I mean, there’s nothing written down. We could call them partners, probably, those two festivals, because we do share ideas. They’ll phone us up and go, ‘How has this worked for you?’ I mean, Womad has a desire to have a certain element of jazz in their programmes, you know. They’ll go, ‘Would Snarky Puppy work in this space?’ Or ‘We’re being asked a lot of money for this – do you think it’ll be a show that’ll fit on our big stage or should we do it on a smaller stage and offer less money?’ Those are the kind of conversations that happen. A lot of people like us running festivals are equally comfortable talking money and art and they tend to happen in the same breath, almost.

Did the BT River of Music project (part of the 2012 London Olympics) impact on the London Jazz Festival?

No, the Jazz Festival was really good that year. A very strong one. It was great to have just done this killer project and still be kind of half maimed from it, and be able to see a really really prime festival that year. So that was one pleasure. But the other one was that we were able to offer jazz musicians the opportunity to do really large-scale creation without the pressure to sell tickets. I don’t know how much you know about BT River of Music, but the idea of it was to create 78 events, bespoke events, that would include 205 nations. So there would be somebody who you could point to walking across the stage who could represent, credibly, Liberia, Libya, any other country you like with a L, and so on from A to Z. There were a very large number of jazz musicians there and the analogy I often use from my work in Africa is that jazz is [a bridging music], it’s what joins up other music, so if you can play jazz, you’ve probably got the ability to at least busk your way in most musics you’ll find in Africa; you’ve got an understanding of Latin music, and if you can read music, to some extent you can play classical music, and given that you’ve got to be able to count to play jazz, you can also fit inside other music and be attracted to other music that have strange time signatures. So there were a lot of jazz and jazz-related musicians who were part of the project; Zakir Hussain for example, who did the very first concert. Obviously you can’t create 78 projects simultaneously – no huge company could do that – so we staggered it over a period, and we made them all over Britain, and in fact, all over the world, and then they linked up to the Olympics in various stages of preparation. Some of them were mapped out ideas that had been put together like a little kit in the rehearsal room for two days and then go on stage. Some of them toured and then came to the stage, and some of them were created on the stage and have gone on and are still touring. Mostly outside our remit. We didn’t choose to work with the enormous number of artists that we had existing relationships with; we more worked with producers and managers who brought those projects together for us. Because again, it’s like a jazz festival. You knew you couldn’t see most of the fruits of your labour. You could only be on one stage at a time because the stages were five or six miles apart.

It wasn’t directly linked to the Jazz Festival. It was more about Serious, to be honest, to the extent that Serious as the producer of the Jazz Festival was the commonality, and obviously

relationships we’ve made inside the Jazz Festival were very important. I just remember one project I was quite involved in, there’d been an artist liaison person called Natalie Maddix who’d been brilliant at dealing with people, and I’d realised that she was a kind of choral leader, and I asked her to put together a project which Hugh Masekela would parachute into on the day of performance, where a group of people would sing XX and two other songs, without any rehearsal, because he could only come in the night before the concert. And he’s going to be on a stage in front of six thousand people. And I knew that I wanted to work with a choral leader called Joyce Moholoagae because she knew all of the people from Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, all of the Southern African countries we were looking to reflect. And I knew that Joyce couldn’t pull the project together on her own, but Natalie went in and line produced her. And Natalie and Joyce produced this amazing thing, and Hugh came in and was going, ‘What have you got me into? You made me do this stupid project – what is it going to be?’ And I said, ‘You’re going to love it, Hugh’, not knowing at all whether he would, but he did, and it was absolutely fantastic. And I was like, [shivers] I really enjoyed it and I was hugely impressed by Natalie, so when Natalie came to me a year later and said, ‘I’ve got this vision of doing house music with gospel’, it was an easy thing to say, ‘I’ll support you – let’s create a project where we you do that’. It’s been in the Festival but it has nothing to do with jazz; it was simply a great idea. And so that’s more than the 78 if you like. But there were also about 50 other stories. I mean, some of the projects were quite expedient; generally I think people enjoyed doing them the yoke that brought those artists together was too much just of the moment. Although I’m always surprised. It’s very rare to meet any of the people that took part in it and not have a story to tell back to me about how they’ve kept working together.

You asked what I was interested in what the future looks like, and then we went off on to other things. For me, I’m very interested in the Middle East. I think there’s a whole area of creativity there that I don’t really know but which I sense is just an amazing burgeoning awesome exciting music and again using jazz to find a way forward, so it’s very interesting how people use that, and that seems like a very good place for the Festival to be. I’m very interested in how jazz works with unusual instruments. One of the best written pieces I have ever read in popular journalism – as much as you can call The Wire magazine popular journalism – in the current issue by Philip Clarke about organs. And organs are one of my secret pleasures – I enjoy organ recitals.

Hammond or church?

Church. They’re just an amazing machine that made incredibly loud music before electricity was discovered. But it’s just a beautiful piece about you use organs. And there are definitely jazz musicians that are interested in what you do when you feed your creativity into this extraordinary thing.

So have organs been a feature of the Jazz Festival before?

Barely. I think Jon Thorne wrote a piece about an organ in Union Chapel but it’s been very much a minority. It’s something I’m very interested in. I like the idea of supporting venues. It’s because, I suppose, our natural force has been, ‘How do we sustain the jazz clubs?’ I do like the idea of helping shape venues and using the Jazz Festival as a way of giving them a sense of what jazz can be and how it can work in their venue.

The idea of working in spaces that want to engage with jazz but don’t, so we were talking about what you could do in a museum. Quite often, people will go for the quick hit of, you know, put on a jazz group in a gallery, don’t give them very much money, don’t give them proper resource. And I’d quite like to turn that one around and say, ‘How can we do

interesting things in some of the bigger spaces – prestige spaces, I suppose – and how do jazz musicians want to work with that?’ I mean there’s so much that’s interesting. I think that people are becoming more and more interested and confident in the area of improvisation, and that’s not particularly a jazz thing, although jazz musicians almost by nature, you would assume they’re good at it. So jazz can lead in that. When rock agents say to me, ‘Why should my artist play in the Jazz Festival?’ and I’m going, ‘Well, they can do something they probably can’t do anywhere else and still be paid reasonably well for it. You can separate it out from your artist’s work. You don’t have to say, “We’ll make the next tour or the next album that”. You can just come and do something and we’ll resource it, and we’ll help you do it. And obviously if you want to earn a huge amount of money, don’t play the Jazz Festival. But if you want to earn some money and have it really well produced, then that’s what we can offer’. So I also think that reaching out is a big part of what we do.

And I think also there’s just so many people working in live music and that’s true both of musicians and of agents. You know, under 30, there’s just this wave of talent that’s really exciting and is putting to shame people ten, twenty years older than them. I think it’s because people have had the ability to listen to just about anything on a fairly equal level. If you were competent ten years ago, you could find out an awful lot online. In the last four or five years you can just literally have it all. So you can just go, ‘I want to listen to Sun Ra for twelve hours’, well, set the dial for Sun Ra and what do you know, there it all is.

Is music not quite such an integral part of people’s identity in the way it used to be – less tribal?

Yeah, I know what you mean, and you were defined by the records you walked around with under your arm. I mean, I remember in the early nineties, in the late eighties, feeling like record companies ran everything and in the late nineties feeling like what I did, by then – including the London Jazz Festival – would probably continue, but probably as a niche of a niche; like, there was DJ culture, buying records, I think downloads were just coming in. I thought that would be the future, and I thought that live music would be an absolute marginal thing, and it’s so thrilling that it’s actually, that I was so utterly utterly wrong, and that live music is where – really, if I’d thought about it, I should have known – was the one thing really that you can’t reproduce. It’s that sweaty experience of discovering music in the way you want to.

The dominant discourse is that live venues sector is the UK is suffering – is this your experience? London has apparently lost 35% of its venues.

I’ve seen that statistic but I don’t quite understand it. It doesn’t square with what I know. Yes, I can list some venues that have closed but I could list as many venues that have opened. I think there was a time when huge numbers of venues became clubs and I think that a lot of those clubs have turned back into live music venues, so where does that enter into those statistics? I think it’s plain wrong. But I’ve no vested interest in saying it’s wrong but it doesn’t fit my own … I’ve no more basis for saying it than I suspect the people who are saying 35% of all venues are under threat.

From your point of view, does it feel like there’s any kind of crisis?

No, I see full venues all the time. I mean, it’s interesting because when I talk to a ticket agent or I talk to the company who are placing the ads in the newspapers – and I had a meeting with them last Friday – and they were saying, ‘Well, how’s this crisis hitting you?’, and I said, ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ And they said, ‘Well, all the promoters are suffering because the arena shows and stadia aren’t selling’. And I said, ‘Well, I’m really not surprised’. I’ve never knowingly bought a ticket for an arena concert or a stadium concert. I think I’d like to

go and sometimes I get given a ticket but no, I don’t want to pay 60 or 70 quid to go and sit in a far off box and watch a dot on a video screen. It doesn’t seem to me to exist in my universe. So I’m not surprised that the artist can’t deliver the show that will galvanise people to go those spaces and I’m not surprised that audiences are saying, ‘I’ve done enough of that stuff. Now I want to go to a smaller space and get something amazing’. But I think that you have to analyse the scene. I suspect also that because record companies aren’t developing artists. You know, Radiohead were probably expected to make money on their fourth album and then EMI have made an awful lot of money out of them. But now the pressure is like, is there enough in your first album to justify a second album? If so, the second album [has got to sell] or there’s no future. And so because the artists are making no money out of record sales any more, the pressure is to get their live work up and big as quickly as possible, but jazz is pretty immune to that. Partly because Ronnie Scott’s can pay very well for people to play to 200 people. There’s no rock equivalent of Ronnie Scott’s. So there are ways in that you can earn some money playing small venues which you certainly can’t do on a rock circuit with a £5 ticket.

Almost every artist we work with is uncomfortable playing venues that hold more than 2,000 people. Some will go as big as Hammersmith Apollo, which is three and a half thousand but they’re in shock! I’ve had conversations with quite a few artists about ‘Would you like to play an arena?’ And they go, ‘Well, I’d love to play to that many people but no, I can’t think of a way in which it would be a good experience. I can’t see what I would do in that sort of setting’. So there’s always an unsatisfied demand. I mean, if you sell tickets for Keith Jarrett, you’re not saying, ‘Will I sell all the tickets’, you’re pretty much going, ‘Which audience do I want to sell it to?’ And that’s true of a lot of artists. We’ve got a Wayne Shorter concert coming up next week, and there is no doubt, there never was any doubt, that there would be eighteen hundred people in the hall. The question is: would you spend money advertising it to try and sell it out in a day, do you let it sell organically to sell out in advance, do you hold back tickets to reach out to particular audiences? So with a certain number of artists, the question is more: what will people pay to have that experience? And you also know that even if you put them cheaply into a huge venue, a lot of people will go, ‘I don’t fancy that experience’ and there wouldn’t be enough other people coming in who would be going, ‘I feel really at home in the Wembley Arena so I’ll go there’.

How do you make that decision?

Generally speaking what we’re trying to do is not advertise. We’ve spent a lot of time and money building up our digital side because once you’ve built it up it’s free to run. We sent out an e-shot this morning talking about an obscure Norwegian artist called Sasha Siem who will sell out King’s Place and it will all be done by word of mouth and online and people retweeting our tweets. And it will be, once we started thinking about buying a Guardian ad that will be £600 in a box office of £75,000 and, you know, why would you do that? So what we try to do is find as many direct leads. People often used say to me, ‘Oh, people really trust the identity of Serious’, and I actually thought it was a very dangerous thing to believe when you assume that that little word ‘Serious presents’ was going to sell tickets, but it does mean more now when they are getting stuff from us online that says we’re doing this concert, a number of things I suspect kick in. They’re seeing something which goes, ‘I’ve had good experiences with these people before; I trust that if the concert doesn’t happen then I’ll get my money back and I’ll know what’s happened; that people will be honest with me; and that if they say this artist is really distinct and exciting, a) I’m inclined to trust them, and b) I can click through to this link to find out what it actually sounds like; and I trust that the PA won’t blow up or that I won’t be left standing in the cold for two hours’, and you know,

there’s a set of things that go behind it and I think that that’s quietly one of the things [on which] both Serious and The Jazz Festival have built up their reputation.

Let’s end with an easy question: what have been your top three highlights over the 25 years?

I think Asian Dub Foundation was a particularly special one, and that was I recall was with Badmarsh and Shri opening, and it was very interesting having two shows, two sets, but on the base of it, no jazz club or jazz festival was putting them on. We put them together and fifteen hundred people came, but people who were essentially very underground. Quite often it’s that thing of putting people into concert halls when their experience has been somewhere else, and then for them not being happy in advance at the idea of doing this and then finding huge pleasure at reaching out to an audience. I think one of the things that I thought was really amazing was a film called Louis [in 2011 LJF], which Wynton Marsalis, as I recall, wrote the score for, created the score for. It was done with basically a very strong American band and silent film which was newly created for them to play to. It was a beautiful film; I saw it twice. And that was just an amazing thing to be able to stage within the Festival. A lot of those special events, they really kind of stuck out. But then it’s also just the pleasure of the wonderful things that you encounter on a free stage or something. I remember Terence Blanchard playing a closing set at Ronnie Scott’s, in the 2014 Festival launch event, and it had been quite a good – everyone was buzzing, it was the first night of the Festival, you’d got it done, it worked, and then you go and you just hear music that somebody else puts on, and you don’t have to think about how the mechanics works. And Terence just played the most amazing 20-minute set; it was just fabulous. And people who didn’t even really know very much about jazz in the audience were completely blown away by what he could do.

I think one of the things that a festival does – any good festival does – is that it accelerates things. And I think that musicians perceive it that way. You know, when you have the balls going round and round I the child’s toy, and a woomph on every rotation and the thing can go up to the next level. I think festivals are very much like that. They provide that sense for a lot of people to get to know your work simultaneously and where you think I can really put my effort in here and something will come out the other side. And that’s a responsibility for us as well because a lot of artists come to us with that kind of framework and if you don’t somehow deliver for what they hoped for – which may have been a completely unrealistic hope in the first place – you feel bad; you feel that you’ve fallen short. I guess in a general sense, that’s a big source of pleasure: that so often we’ve been able to get it right and we’ve been able to sort of, if you like, infiltrate the mainstream in so many things.

There’s always somebody who will go ‘I put all that effort in and nobody came’ and generally by nobody they don’t mean literally there’s no audience; they mean ‘the business’ wasn’t paying attention. But equally it’s the ten days in the year where you can be fairly sure that Time Out is going to do a major piece on it, there will be think pieces across the media, there will be the BBC paying attention to jazz. And it wasn’t like that when we started, obviously, but it’s something we’ve quite consciously tried to build up. I think we feed positively back into the whole sector. People often go, ‘What do you do for British jazz musicians?’ and it’s true; there would be another way of running a festival that would be about going, ‘This year we’ve identified forty formidable British talents and we’re going to tour with those forty talents. You could pay roughly the same amount of money, divvy it up, big commissions, perhaps international artists they can collaborate with’ and that would be another way of helping the scene, and the way we’ve chosen to do it is by much more organically whipping

up the sense of excitement about the music that hopefully sustains people right across the year.

Is that something that over 25 years has grown like that or do you think it suddenly happened like that?

Somewhere around the year 2000 we became a pretty core part of most venues. In other words, they would either go, ‘I want to work with the Jazz Festival and I’m going to clear my diary at that peak time, five weeks before Christmas, I’m going to block out the diary and let the Jazz Festival in’, or ‘I’m going to do something with them’, or ‘No, it isn’t for me, I’m not going to do that’. And I would say that it shifts: each year one or two people come in and perhaps one or two drop out. There isn’t a long list of places that I wish were inside that Festival that aren’t. And equally, artists lead you places. One year an artist may say, ‘I want to do your Festival but I want to do my show at the Forum in Kentish Town’. And that’s fine. They’ll be at the Forum in Kentish Town. But you won’t go back there and say, ‘How do we programme the Forum in Kentish Town? What shall we put on?’ Because it would take another artist. And this year Robert Glasper had said, ‘I fancy doing KOKO. A medium-sized place, standing; I don’t want to play some huge venue, I’d like to play somewhere with a bit of feel and funk to it’, and that’s his idea of what he’s going to do at the Jazz Festival. So you’re at Koko but next year we might not be. Of course, next year’s our 25th birthday so everything is possible!