In 2024, having spluttered speechlessly at the non-jazz headline acts of major jazz festivals for several years, I came across Montreux and its 58th manifestation. Its promoters boasted it would “span all genres”. All genres of what? With a line-up that included Alice Cooper, P J Harvey, Kraftwerk, Soft Cell, Duran Duran, Sting and Massive Attack, one was entitled to ask. Not all genres of jazz, then.
Still genre-spanning this year, it will play host to such as Neil Young, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross and Chaka Khan (well, all right; the last two at a push). In 2023, the genre span incorporated Simply Red, Bob Dylan, Richie again, Generation Sex (who they?) and Seal. The promoters were at it again: “True to its musical DNA, the festival primarily explores American and British sounds. Artists featured in the Auditorium Stravinski programme have won 85 Grammy Awards, including some thirty in the last fifteen years.” Wouldn’t it be nice if if Grammy recipients included more jazz musicians?
Genres started to be spanned at Montreux in the 1970s, following the festival’s 1967 inauguration, when only three musicians performed: Charles Lloyd, Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett, probably, as the Lloyd band, at the same time. Just three years later and expanding, it allowed in Led Zeppelin and Stone The Crows. By 1980, Elvis Costello, Fats Domino and Van Morrison were deemed appropriate. Ten years later, Sting and Morrison were there again, as were Brian May (he of Queen) and Kool And The Gang. Morrison had begun to appear emblematic as the non-jazz act that might bring in both jazz fans and people who didn’t like jazz, to festivals everywhere. The audience for Morrison at a jazz festival may well have included punters who liked both kinds of music but at a guess would have consisted mostly of fans of the Oirish Balladeer who spent their other evenings at lakeside bars. In 1992, in a cultural double bind, Mick Hucknall and Simply Red were on the list.
It goes without saying, and in fairness to Montreux, that most performers at jazz festivals peppered by non-jazzers are jazz musicians as most jazz devotees would understand the term, even allowing for sectional interests within the jazz category. It also needn’t be urged that one can like both Robert Plant and Herbie Hancock (at Montreux in 1993, alongside about 50 others). But at the same event beneath the same aegis? Expansion of festivals inevitably brings further spanning. Why? To turn a break-even financial position into a modest profit? To prove that jazz will not happen unless non-jazz acts are hired to bring in the multitudes? To argue that jazz’s boundaries are now so slack that other, non-jazz genres are jostling to be spanned? At the Festival International De Jazz De Montréal (to give it its proper title) this year, George Thorogood & The Destroyers, as conventional a band of rockers as you’d wish for, is up there with authentic jazz musicians, while Mike Stern is downtable and Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith would be last on the small-print list if it weren’t for Welcome John, Wic Whitney and Yehezkel Raz, and – irony alert – we all know who they are.
Not all jazz festivals are into genre-spanning but most big ones are to some degree. Last year at Cheltenham, Plant popped up again, with UB40 and “pop princess” Sophie Ellis-Baxter. The Syncopated Times website observed: “Continuing to call it a jazz festival is rather daft, but Cheltenham Jazz & Genres Loosely Associated With Jazz is a bit of a mouthful.” Indeed it is; but we get the point. All that’s needed is to make the mouthful less of a cheek-buster.
Maybe it’s worth resurrecting because of the mania of some of us for inclusivity. Stephen Pollard, writing in the current issue of The Spectator, criticises the BBC for distorting the annual Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. “Every year I write”, he says, “about how even the Proms, which bills itself unambiguously as a festival of classical music, can’t bring itself to be just that: a festival of classical music. And every year it gets worse, with the idea of inclusion so pervasive that music which has as much to do with a classical music festival as my pet cat would have at Crufts taking over ever more evenings. This year’s schedule is the final straw.”
Pollard then lists some of the non-classical events which represent genres shepherded into the “inclusivity” fold: on day two, The Great American Songbook and Beyond with Samara Joy, which is followed by Round Midnight with “hip hop artist” Soweto Kinch. That’s followed a few nights later by Angeline Morrison singing folk songs from her album The Sorrow Songs, and then Arooj Aftab and Ibrahim Maalouf with their captivating, eclectic melting-pot of influences from jazz, folk, pop, blues and South Asian and Middle Eastern melodies: jazz, Latin jazz and African rhythms, respectively. There’s an evening of Soul Revolution, which, says the Beeb, will trace a path from spirituals through gospel to soul, revealing the role of these genres in supporting the civil-rights movement.
It’s just a coincidence, and perhaps a reassuring one, that the interlopers here have a lot to do with jazz, one stage removed. Perhaps, as the aforesaid website suggested, it’s a linguistic matter. So-called “classical” music is undergoing the same kind of pressures as jazz has perennially endured since the 1950s. But The Proms is a title that subsumes the idea of classical music as a given but not exclusively; whereas a festival with jazz in its title should be just that, and not include music from popular categories fully able to look after themselves. Isn’t it about time that events which bill themselves unambiguously as jazz festivals should be just that: jazz festivals?
