The classical music world has a sophisticated network of such organisations, and British jazz should aspire to have the same.
Here is a very modest organisational wishlist, with details of the comparable existing classical counterparts and how much funding they received from the Arts Council last year:
National Jazz Orchestra
London Symphony Orchestra - £2,193,283
National Jazz Centre
Royal Opera House - £26,342,464
Small Group Jazz / Composition Development Centre
Aldeburgh Music - £1,368,199
National Centre for Early Jazz / Repertory Jazz
National Centre for Early Music - £233,416
Jazz Education / Development Programme
Royal Opera House Bridge Development - £730,000 (from next year)
For each of the classical counterpart organisations I listed, I could have easily listed a tiresome number of examples. There are also many other structures I have not suggested jazz alternatives to.
The whole of British jazz received a paltry £1.17m this year.
This must change.
Be careful what you wish for (think: Lincoln Center) ;-)
ReplyDeleteBut that's an example of how having a single institution soaking up all the funding can be very damaging.. not a network of independent ones.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced that more institutions are what we need. Big institutions tend to use loads of money in ways that don't directly benefit many musicians (ie big salaries for their directors, building costs, admin costs...) and also tend to conservatism.
ReplyDeleteThere are already lots of existing institutions which could do a lot more for jazz - the BBC, Barbican, South Bank, etc...
The main things I would like see are:
-a bigger pot to support touring bands
-increasing the jazz services remit (with that bigger pot) to include touring abroad
-more funding for promoters who support innovative music. Take your debate over ticket prices at the NLT for example: I'd hate to see you put prices up and get smaller audiences as a result, you do a great job promoting new music through the gig and there should be more funding in place to enable you to pay bands properly.
It's very hard for english musicians to get the international profile of musicians from scandanavia for example, simply because we don't get funded to travel. Its a lot cheaper for a festival promoter to book a danish or polish band, knowing that the travel costs can be easily covered...