A sax and its legend ... Sony Rollins
The word is out about the 15th London Jazz Festival, which starts on Friday November 16 and runs for ten days in various venues in the capital, from the Royal Festival Hall and Barbican, to Dalston's Vortex, or the legendary Bull's Head pub in Barnes.
Sonny Rollins is the headliner on November 24, and the bill includes Weather Report founder Joe Zawinul, pianist Chick Corea in an unusual partnership with banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck - but the Festival will involve dozens of gigs and hundreds of musicians, playing everything from from free-improv to fusion, world-music and swing, all across the city.
When the London Jazz Festival grew from the roots put down by the modest but imaginatively-programmed Camden Jazz Festival in the early 90s, jazz in Britain was on a roll. A generation of young homegrown players that included Courtney Pine, Andy Sheppard, Steve Williamson, Tommy Smith, Julian Joseph and Jason Rebello seemed to represent a new source of energy for local jazz - so much so that the legendary American record label, Blue Note, briefly signed some British artists, and saxophones and jazz iconography started showing up in adverts for perfumes and cars.
That was the accommodating climate in which the London Jazz Festival got going, and in which it was able to pitch its first appeals for broader funding, and sell tickets to a newly curious audience. But British jazz's life as a fashionable commodity soon ended when it turned out not to promise pop-comparable sales figures, and taste-makers' enthusiasms moved elsewhere. Nowadays, the London Jazz Festival is dependent on a few big backers (BBC Radio 3 and the Arts Council being the dominant ones) and more reliance on box-office income than any comparably prestigious jazz festival anywhere in western Europe has to contend with.
This financial pressure - coupled with a genuine enthusiasm among the LJF producers to identify jazz's creative spirit and influence even in idioms that don't sound jazzy - has obliged the Festival to walk a line between the most accessible manifestations of world-music and jazz-inflected popular forms, and what more orthodox jazzbos regard as "the real thing". The event's organisers have found themselves criticised in some hardline quarters for including a lot of music that "isn't jazz".
Some would claim that bigger subsidies and less dependence on sales would allow the LJF to pursue some kind of "purer" course. Others that the bottom-line factor obliges such events to balance popular forms against more specialised tastes, and thus lubricate the likelihood of audience-movements across genres. It's a debate that runs and runs, of course, in every art. In the LJF's case, it's certainly produced a unique musical celebration. I'll be coming back to its finer details over the coming weeks.
