30 years of the London Jazz Festival
November at the Southbank Centre can only mean one thing. No, not fireworks, and certainly not Christmas decorations. No, it's the London Jazz Festival. And 2022’s edition was particularly special, as the festival celebrated its 30th year.
Created in 1992 by music producers, Serious, the capital’s biggest pan-city music festival has long been acclaimed for presenting a prime showcase of musical talent – emerging and established – from around the world. To this day the festival has celebrated the place of jazz in a city at ease with its rich cultural diversity, and as we got ready for it to do all that again in 2022, we reflected on the first three decades of the London Jazz Festival.
‘May 1993 heralds the start of something new and exciting for the London jazz scene. After too many years without a jazz festival of the scale provided by other European cities, London will at last reflect the important cultural contributions made by its own committed and creative musicians.’
That was the mission statement of the London Jazz Festival when, 30 years ago, they laid the foundations for a festival that not only reflected and contributed to London’s status as world city, but functioned as a melting pot of all it, and jazz, had to offer. On Friday 14th May to be exact, Islington’s Union Chapel hosted the festival’s opening party, a night featuring the British singer Carol Grimes and the twenty-piece percussion-based London Afro Bloc, and headlined by New Orleans’ Rebirth Brass Band.
The latter, a sousaphone-led brass bass with rough slide trombones and kicking rock solid snare drums complimented their set with a euphoric version of Herbie Hancock’s 1970s Head Hunters. Sticking this young American band at the top of the bill reflected the London Jazz Festival’s aspirations to be an event for the entire jazz world, right from the off. That, and the sight of 20-metre-high images of jazz musicians projected onto the side of St Pancras station to promote its arrival, were to leave no-one in any doubt that the London Jazz Festival was here to stay.
London Jazz Festival: the origins
London’s connection to jazz extends way back beyond the 30 years of the London Jazz Festival. Though it most certainly existed in the capital at the beginning of the 20th century, one definite catalyst for the growing popularity of jazz in the city came just after the First World War. In 1919 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a group of white jazz musicians, performed their first British tour, followed by live performances by the African-American Southern Syncopated Orchestra, gaining much publicity in the press. Within eight years London boasted Britain’s first specialist jazz record shop, Levy’s in Whitechapel Road. The milestones continued in the interwar years, with the opening of the country’s first Rhythm Club, The Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street, Soho, before the launch of the BBC radio show Rhythm Club in the 1940s, helped take jazz to a new wider audience.
Opened in 1951 our own Royal Festival Hall has hosted leading jazz musicians pretty much since we first opened our doors. In 1955, inspired by the success of festivals in the USA and Europe, the National Jazz Federation brought its second British Festival of Jazz to our stages, complete with headliner Big Bill Broonzy. More UK-based festivals appeared in the jazz calendar during the 1960s, including 1963’s Daily Mail International Jazz Festival, and four years later, jazz fans were back here in our Royal Festival Hall for the eight-part concert series Jazz Expo ’67. This was the golden period for jazz in the UK, with the establishment of a number of pivotal organisations such as the Jazz Centre Society, and key venues such as Ronnie Scott’s, the Bull’s Head, Barnes, and the 606 Club.
Though jazz was spreading through London, it took the arrival of a Scotsman, John Cumming, to steer progress towards the establishment of the London Jazz Festival. As theatre director of Bracknell’s South Hill Park Arts Centre in the 1970s, Cumming began organising music festivals on the centre’s extensive grounds, including, in 1975, the Bracknell Jazz Festival. Despite leaving South Hill in 1977, Cumming continued to organise the festival for a further decade. In 1978 Cumming was brought in to work on the Camden Jazz Week (below), a multi-venue jazz celebration that had been running since 1974. He would continue to produce the week until 1992, doing so for the final six years with the production company Serious Productions which he established with John Ellson.
As the 1990s began Cumming’s reputation for successful jazz festivals led to him having several conversations with Music Officer for the London Arts Board, Andrew McKenzie, about establishing a new festival which would eventually build into a citywide event. Then Serious were approached to put on a jazz festival in 1993, across the north London boroughs of Camden, Hackney and Islington. Cumming had thought to call the new event the North London Jazz Festival, but the festival director David Jones said, ‘No, the hell with it! Let’s call it the London Jazz Festival!’ And from that bold statement, came three remarkable decades of jazz celebration across the capital.
London Jazz Festival: the 1990s
Rather than tread carefully in it’s new shoes, the London Jazz Festival hurtled off at full pace with an inaugural programme that included American saxophonist Bob Berg; the North Indian classical music of Salamat Ali Khan; Nigerian kora player Tunde Jegede; the idiosyncratic Ivor Cutler; the Delta Rhythm Kings; South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim; mainstream stars Humphrey Lyttelton and Acker Bilk; and the debut of Jools Holland Bigger Band Revue. As Cumming remarked to The Guardian critic John Fordham, ‘Where else can you get 100 years of jazz in 10 days?’
Not that every aspect of the festival’s first outing went smoothly. Driving home from one show, Cumming took a wrong turn, and was stopped by the police. Unable to provide them with ID, he was taken to a police station. On trying to prove to the officers that he was the Director of the London Jazz Festival he casually mentioned he had £5,000 in the back of his car – these being the days before online bank transfers – to pay some of the acts. Safe to say this aroused police suspicions even further, and only an early hours phone call to Cummings’ partner finally enabled him, and the sizable float, to go on his way.
Buoyed by the success of its debut year, in 1994 the London Jazz Festival expanded with a host of new venues – including its first gigs here at the Southbank Centre – to enable bigger audiences for festival headliners. Headliners like Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette and Joshua Redman, and, in 1995, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who celebrated their 30th anniversary here in our Royal Festival Hall. The audience, including the then Chancellor Ken Clarke MP, were hit with an incredible two hour and forty minute long interval-less set. An apologetic Southbank Centre chairman tried to hurry Clarke out of the auditorium at its conclusion, but Clarke – a huge jazz enthusiast – was having none of it, insisting on going backstage to meet the band, even sharing a beer with them in their dressing room.
Keen to promote the merits of British jazz, the festival’s opening years included a huge wealth of talent from these shores. Among them were John Surman, Grand Union, Tomorrow’s Warriors with Courtney Pine, Stan Travey, Mike and Kate Westbrook – who headlined the 1996 festival with their Orchestra of Smith’s Academy – and a rare performance by Giant Steppes – Diane McLoughlin’s 17-piece orchestra – featuring trombonist Annie Whitehead, guitarist Deirdre Cartwright and singer Ian Shaw.
Not that the festival was ever in danger of being introspective. For three consecutive years from 1996 to 1998, mini-festivals within the programme celebrated European music, with Jazz from Norway, Jazz from Austria (featuring the Vienna Art Orchestra) and then Jazz from France respectively. And in 1994, the year that Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, the festival closed with the first ever British concert of the Elite Swingsters and their mix of the swing of big band with pulsating township mbaqanga.
By 1997 the London Jazz Festival had grown such that The Guardian saw fit to label it ‘one of Europe’s leading new music events’ – not surprising given that year it included performances from McCoy Tyner and Charles Lloyd, Roy Hargrove, Fred Hersch and Danilo Perez – with the ‘most wide-ranging’ programming of any UK jazz festival. Reflecting this breadth of programme, the opening night of that year’s festival here at the Southbank Centre saw Asian Dub Foundation join forces with Nitin Sawhney on our Royal Festival Hall stage. Sawhney himself would return the following year to headline his own festival gig in our Queen Elizabeth Hall.
In 1999 the music of Robert Wyatt got the jazz treatment, with the man himself watching on from a box in our Royal Festival Hall as some of his favourite musicians, including trombonist Annie Whitehead, trumpeter Harry Beckett, and singer Julie reimagined his work. Whilst such departures from trad or straight jazz earned the London Jazz Festival plaudits, it was not without its critics. That same year editor of Jazz Review, Richard Cook, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to ask how a jazz festival could, for example, give prominence to reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson ‘without falling foul of the Trade Descriptions Act’. Such criticism was rebuked in that year’s programme which stated ‘the festival makes no definition of what is jazz – it would be out of date as soon as it was made’.
London Jazz Festival: the 2000s
The new millennium brought a fresh commitment from the London Jazz Festival to reach new audiences and give as many people as possible the opportunity to experience jazz music. This was epitomised in 2001 by the introduction of the festival’s Free Stage, right here in our own Clore Ballroom – with a further such stage added to our Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer in 2004. Since the 1995 edition of the festival, our Royal Festival Hall foyer had hosted free events including Radio 3 broadcasts, interviews and live performances from artists such as John Surman and Carol Kidd, but the Free Stage offered a real commitment to a consistent programme of free events.
Not that making the events free signified any drop in quality, and the Free Stage soon established a strong reputation, helped in no small measure by Gilles Peterson DJing a particularly lively Future Sounds of Jazz event, and the multinational Monk Liberation Front, including pianist Jonathan Gee, saxophonist Tony Kofi, and Evan Parker on soprano sax, performing all 70 of Thelonious Monk’s compositions in a heady six-hour marathon in 2003. The Free Stage was the place to be again in 2007 when Kinetika Bloco emphatically rekindled the spirit of Sun Ra, ‘south London stylee’. ‘You’re making my festival very difficult’, complained one attendee, ‘I only come for the free stuff but there’s so much free stuff!’
In the auditoria the shows were no less raucous, with Courtney Pine’s 2000 headline show described by The Evening Standard as ‘a two-hour show at screaming pitch from start to finish’, whilst the Jazz Jamaica All Stars had our Royal Festival Hall skanking til late in 2001. The 2003 edition of the festival was notable for the appearance of two emerging talents making major waves. One was the Mercury Music Prize nominated Soweto Kinch, who arrived off the back of collecting the MOBO Award for Best Jazz Act, the other was Jamie Cullum, fresh from signing a million-pound record deal with Universal. It wasn’t Cullum’s first appearance as part of the festival though, just one year earlier his trio had performed here at the Southbank Centre as one of our free lunchtime gigs.
But the 2003 edition of the festival wasn’t all about the new blood, as what was arguably its stand-out show came courtesy of three of the genre’s elder statesmen. Pianist Michael Garrick, percussionist Frank Holder and bassist Coleridge Goode – a trio which together combined some 250 years – were joined by youngsters Kinch, pianist Andrew McCormack and trumpeter Byron Wallen to pay homage to the late Joe Harriott, a Black British pioneer of free jazz.
By now produced in partnership with BBC Radio 3, the London Jazz Festival had become a firm fixture on the country’s music calendar, and in 2006 was voted London’s Best Music Festival by Time Out readers. Led off by Saxophone Massive, an event which saw Andy Sheppard lead 200 saxophonists, the bill for that year’s festival included the first London concert for Wayne Shorter with his acclaimed acoustic quartet here in our Royal Festival Hall, as well as stars like Cassandra Wilson and Evan Parker, and the first festival performance of Herbie Hancock at the Roundhouse.
By 2007 the festival had grown to encompass over 240 events, including gigs by Sonny Rollins, Chick Corea and Tord Gustavsen, alongside British artists and star acts like Stan Tracey and John Surman. This year also saw a number of concerts as part of the Arts Council England funded series, Passage of Music: Marking the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. These gigs included original Jazz Warrior Orphy Robinson at Millfield Theatre, and here, in a sold-out Royal Festival Hall, Jazz Jamaica, which featured guitarist Ernest Ranglin, eminent Jamaican pianist and educator Marjorie Whylie, and Jamaica’s first lady of jazz, Myrna Hague.
The following year the festival went further out into the city, with its Festival on the Move initiative. The culmination of which saw Neil Cowley’s trio embark on a 24-hour concert marathon which began here at the Southbank Centre, and included venues as diverse as Ronnie Scott’s and the Natural History Museum, before finishing with an intimate gig in The Vortex. The 2008 edition of the festival also saw the first Jazz Voice gala – featuring Lizz Wright, Lea DeLaria and Jamelia – which had grown out of the 2007 Ella Fitzgerald tribute event at our Royal Festival Hall, We All Love Ella.
But it wasn’t all joy at the festival that year, as June 2008, had also seen the death of pianist Esbjorn Svensson of Swedish trio EST, aged just 44. The group had a strong connection to the festival, with their first major London concert coming at our Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the 2001 London Jazz Festival, and two years later they had returned to open the festival in our Royal Festival Hall. To commemorate his life and music, the London Jazz Festival of 2008 included a memorial concert to Svensson in our Queen Elizabeth Hall.
As well as being the setting for many an artist’s first major performance, the London Jazz Festival has also seen a number of stars bow out at its concerts over the years. Among them the saxophonist and clarinettist John Dankworth. Cumming had heard Dankworth play for the first time in our Royal Festival Hall as part of the Gerry Mulligan Band in 1963. A mere 46 years later, in the same venue, Dankworth’s achievements were celebrated as part of a 2009 London Jazz Festival concert, and the man himself, aged 82 and wheelchair-bound, brought the packed auditorium to its feet, with an unexpected solo. Dankworth passed away a little over two months later.
London Jazz Festival: the 2010s
Dankworth wasn’t a one-off. Octogenarian jazz legends continued to wow audiences at the London Jazz Festival into the next decade starting with Sonny Rollins, age 80, delivered a two hour set that was considered not only one of his finest, but one of the stand out moments from a 2010 festival that also included remarkable concerts from Charles Lloyd, The Bad Plus, and pianist Robert Glasper. This wasn’t even Rollins final appearance at the festival, he returned once more in 2012. In between came another man of four score years, and one; the saxophonist Ornette Coleman who headlined in 2011.
The London Jazz Festival has always been about pushing boundaries, and in 2010 it broke down barriers we didn’t even realise existed, with Jazz Cuisine here at the Southbank Centre. British saxophonist Andy Sheppard and Italian percussionist Michele Rabbia formed an unlikely trio with Michelin starred chef, Ivan Vautier, who cooked food on stage while the musicians played, adding a further element of percussion improvisation through his mic-ed up pots and pans. Amazingly, this didn’t catch on, even if it was probably the most deliciously smelling gig we’ve ever hosted.
For all of London, 2012 was a seismic year, but the London Jazz Festival was determined not to be upstaged by the year’s sporting events. Beyond the aforementioned Rollins, the bill included major jazz stars such as Bill Frisell, Herbie Hancock, Melody Gardot, Jan Garbarek, Brad Mehldau, Esperanza Spalding, and Jack DeJohnette, plus the first festival performance Brooklyn-based fusion band, Snarky Puppy. Performing what would be his final London Jazz Festival gig that year was the guitarist Paco de Lucia, who had wanted to appear in front of actual palm trees on our Royal Festival Hall stage. Unfortunately the acquired trees proved too tall and bushy, and the gig was only able to go ahead once one of our production managers had both lowered the stage and climbed a ladder to trim the tops off the palms with scissors.
As it had since the 1990s, the London Jazz Festival continued to welcome music from a remarkably broad church. In 2015 the influence of dubstep, hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass could be heard at the festival through the music of Robert Glasper, of Manchester trio GoGo Penguin, and Moon Hooch’s saxophone-led dubstep and acoustic techno. The same year saw Terence Blanchard’s E-Collective play music inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement at the Barbican, and Ice-T read, over a score, from the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ late work Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.
In 2016 one of the giants of the electronic scene, St Germain, featured in the festival, bringing his mix of deep house, African sounds and jazz to the Royal Festival Hall, whilst Miguel Atwood-Ferguson offered an instrumental re-working of the music of J Dilla. By now, the festival boasted a decidedly international feel, with around 30 countries represented by the 2,000 artists of the 2016 edition. Among the other performers on the bill that year were Brad Mehldau, Carla Bley, Tord Gustavsen and, in what sadly proved to be her final London concert, Geri Allen.
Core to the celebration of the London Jazz Festival’s 25th year in 2017 were a series of new commissions, which included new music from Terence Blanchard, with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and Yazz Ahmed. Also commissioned were a series of 25 one-page scores in collaboration with Club Inégales, whilst Keith Tippett and Matthew Bourne created a new piano duo. The Jazz Voice Gala continued to wow, this year featuring stars including Mica Paris, Seal and Angelique Kidjo (below). And continuing the increasingly international flavour of the festival there were artists from Scandinavia – as part of the Southbank Centre’s Nordic Matters year – as well as Turkey, Estonia, France and Switzerland.
London Jazz Festival: the 2020s
The current decade got off to a sombre start as the London Jazz Festival’s co-founder John Cumming passed away from cancer at the age of 71. For many in jazz, Cumming was the London Jazz Festival, and as Richard Williams, wrote of him, in The Guardian, ‘His own tireless curiosity and sharp perception made him responsive to the earliest tremors in the music’s tectonic plates: he was, as all great arts festival directors must be, not just a connoisseur of the past but a friend to the new’.
It wasn’t just Cumming’s death that rocked the festival in 2020; the doors to London’s jazz venues were also firmly closed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Undeterred, the festival moved online and was, for the first time, streamed in its entirety. Away from the larger concert halls, it existed instead in the city’s intimate jazz clubs and rehearsal rooms, with performances from, among others, Joe Stillgoe, Claire Martin, Yazz Ahmed, Nathaniel Facey, Bill Laurence, and Kansas Smitty’s beamed into living rooms the world over.
In 2021, thankfully, we were able to once again welcome the London Jazz Festival back into the Southbank Centre. Among the 300 shows which constituted last year’s festival were performances from Soweto Kinch, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Nubya Garcia and Elliot Galvin. And there were also some really magical London Jazz Festival moments, including a Tony Allen retrospective curated by Damon Albarn, Ben Okri, Femi Koleoso and Remi Kabaka, and the Nu Civilisation Orchestra re-imagining Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, on the album’s 50th anniversary.
In 2022, it was the festival itself which marks a milestone anniversary, celebrating three decades of incredible incarnations since that first night in Union Chapel. And, just as it had done for almost half of its lifespan, the London Jazz Festival began right here in our Royal Festival Hall with the Jazz Voice Festival Opening Gala – fittingly one of 30 performances to take place here at the Southbank Centre, in the festival’s 30th year.
Compiled by Glen Wilson
The bulk of this text is adapted, with permission from Serious, from Music from Out There, In Here; 25 Years of the London Jazz Festival by Emma Webster and George McKay.