Hayley: What’s your general reaction when someone says they don’t like jazz? I’m sure you’ve heard that a few times throughout your career…

Steve: I would say ‘Then MJF is the perfect festival for you.’. Whether they would listen to that or not, I don’t know. I think the sentiment behind people saying that—which, of course, I’ve heard a few times over the past thirty years—is usually based on a couple of assumptions or a couple of bad experiences. Not bad experiences [necessarily], but experiences where someone’s heard something and it’s just not appealed to them. That itself can be down to a number of factors, whether it’s that they’re not connecting with the people on stage, or that the music being performed doesn’t feel relevant to them. Even the location. 

It’s strange, because even now, despite its rising popularity and traction with more listeners, it’s still music that polarises people, and all manner of things contribute towards that position of ‘I don’t like jazz’. [For one,] I think there’s a sense that it’s music for musicians, or for people in the know. That you have to know about the music to be attracted to it or to understand it. For some people, it can sound a little too technical rather than emotional, and I would agree with that. I’ve seen a lot of performances of ‘tutored jazz’, where you can tell who the [performer’s] teachers were. They’re almost reproducing a learnt style, which doesn’t have much emotional communication in it—and as a listener, that’s what you want from a performance. I think some people feel that that’s missing from jazz. It’s purveyed as an exercise in technical bravado, you know? As if the point is getting through something that looks really hard. 

I think there’s also a little bit of social prejudice about where the music comes from, with it being music of black origin. You have to unpack that and think ‘OK, [but] where’s its place here and now?’. It’s from that part of the world, but it’s [since] journeyed through other parts of the world and arrived here in the UK having been touched by various things en route and then, of course, people here are putting their own stamp on things too. People who come from those backgrounds are reclaiming jazz as well, which is really encouraging to see. 

But going back to your question, I would say what we try to do with MJF is present music in an environment where the barriers to entry are very low. You don’t have to take much of a financial risk or risk much of your time to discover something new and find out whether or not you like it. So I suppose I’d also say [to someone who says they don’t like jazz] ‘Well, come try it and see’. You’re not going to lose anything. 

There’s a lot to look at though in that resistance to enjoying a certain genre of music. Even defining it as a genre is becoming increasingly problematic, given that there’s much more genre fluidity now. I always try to approach it as a challenge to be overcome [though]. Someone still thinks they don’t like jazz, so that means I’m not doing my job properly. I then have to work even harder to present some music that they might not have expected or that might mean something to them to bring them in. 

I like the way that you describe it as a ‘resistance to enjoying a certain genre’. I think, in the case of jazz in particular, a lot of people say they don’t like it without ever having given it a proper go. Have you always loved the genre or did it take you a while to get into it?

Oh, I’ve loved it since I was a baby. When I was growing up in the sixties—I’m really positioning myself here—I always remember being left in front of what was then daytime TV, something called the Test Card. It was there so that TV testers and broadcasters could test their [technical] equipment, and it was just an image of a girl playing noughts and crosses with some music playing in the background. The result was that a lot of people in my generation grew up having this music in the background of their lives, and it [ended up being] very formative for me because I don’t come from a musical family. Music wasn’t around me in any other form. No one played an instrument, we didn’t really have the radio on or a record player, anything like that. But, through the Test Card, this thing called music came into my ears at a very early age and I really responded to it. I was curious about it. It was the late 60s, so there was a lot of experimental music, a lot of jazz, a lot of European big band music. This was all part of a very particular repertoire which was created specifically for [the purpose of soundtracking the Test Card] and was never released into the public realm, so all the pieces were quite short and quite varied, but the result is that I grew up—accidentally—with instrumental music being very normal to my ears. That must have stayed with me, because, even though I didn’t go on to learn an instrument or more about music until much later, I developed quite a strong ear, which got me through a lot of learning a little bit quicker than some of my school buddies. It also made me curious to listen to music from all over the place. I became a very hungry listener. I like to think that I still am, and I think that’s why this job is so important. Because I like to think of someone else, aged three, you know, listening to something at the Jazz Festival and having a similarly inspirational experience which then turns them onto music for the rest of their lives. 

Did you ever experience any of that resistance you mentioned?

No, but [I’d say there was] a lack of encouragement from my family. They weren’t musical, so they didn’t know what to do with it. That inadvertently made me curious for myself [though], because I wasn’t being told to like music or be musical, [therefore] it became a bit of an escape. It became a world that I could go into that I felt belonged entirely to me. I could explore it and spend time in it without feeling like it was a chore or something that I had to do. It was a very innocent-eyed way of looking at music, but I think that’s still how I look at it now. Even when I’m putting our festival programme together, I’ll try to go back to that child’s perception and ask ‘What’s my gut reaction to this?’. Because I think that’s what people want out of music—a gut reaction. Unless they’re a performer themselves, they’re not really interested in dazzling technical ability or something that’s purely functional. It’s got to have a resonance with them that invokes quite a visceral reaction. That’s the invisible criteria that I use to programme something.

“I think that’s what people want out of music—a gut reaction.”

With you saying music was a place to escape to, did you find yourself gravitating towards local venues or even events like festivals as spaces in which you’d be able to explore that world in the physical? Did you ever get involved in making music?

I learnt classical guitar as a teenager, both as a result of my experiences with the Test Card and a lovely music teacher that I had at school. At this point, I would say music teachers—bless them—are absolutely pivotal to encouraging engagement with music, even just as a listener. I was blessed with an amazing teacher and a tiny class, so we all got lots of attention. I would actually say he’s responsible for me doing what I do now. I don’t think I’d be doing it without that kind of input at such an influential age. From there, sprung a huge record collection, a hunger for listening and an eagerness to be surrounded by live music as soon as I could be. I grew up in quite a rural location where there wasn’t much music making going on, so I had to travel to see it and be around it in that live capacity.

That’s the other thing about music—experiencing it with other people—and what I realised playing classical guitar as a teenager was that most of the classical guitar repertoire was for solo guitar, so I always ended up playing on my own. After a while, I thought ‘Hang on a minute, I want to spend time with my mates!’. I’d done all my grades and my diplomas and what not, but I drew a line when I realised that I was going to spend the rest of my life alone on stage! I think that interaction with other people, whether as listeners or producers of music, is pivotal, because even though we’re having a personal experience, we’re often doing it in the company of others. The sensation of having a [private] response to music whilst in the company of other people who are also doing the same thing is very unique to music. It’s very powerful and I think the more that you have that experience, the more attuned you are to the environments in and the occasions on which it can happen. Springing forward to the festival, that’s another thing [we focus on]—creating environments in which music can be experienced on a very personal level. Especially at a festival, where people might not be ‘dedicated’ listeners of [whichever performer] they’re watching. That in itself can spark a surprise emotional reaction, which I really thrive on seeing. I really thrive on seeing someone have a reaction that they weren’t expecting to have. It’s very rewarding to see, [knowing you] enabled that.

There’s a phrase—‘collective effervescence’—that’s supposed to describe that feeling of engaging in a shared experience with others, and I always think that’s really relevant to live music. With you saying that you grew up in a pretty rural area, is that what brought you to Manchester? Were you hoping to be closer to the places in which you could experience that?

I grew up down South, but I’m an adopted Mancunian. I’ve been here now for thirty-something years. I left when I was eighteen and didn’t really go back. 

When I first came to Manchester, it was nowhere near as ‘collectively effervescent’ as it is now. It was actually quite hard. It was still the mid-to-late 80s, when there was no one living in the city centre and none of the investment in infrastructure that we see now. It was quite a scary place at times, with a lot of poverty and really poor living standards. I’m painting quite a grim picture, aren’t I? That’s the environment that I escaped into from my rural, leafy idyll! [But] you can feel the music that came out of Manchester during that time. In a way, that’s quite a good example of music meaning something to people because it has a direct relevance and resonance to them. It was also a very welcoming environment [though] that really embraced outsiders. I never felt excluded or unwelcome here, and I think that’s one of the things that Manchester does really well which perhaps doesn’t get celebrated enough. I remember when I first arrived in Manchester, someone coming to talk to me as soon as I got off the bus, which was unheard of where I came from. You’d treat that with suspicion! ‘What have I done, what are you going to do to me?’. But it was just someone chatting on their way to the station, probably asking what I was carrying or wearing or something. 

That sense of curiosity and openness and welcome has also played its role in shaping what we’ve tried to make the festival for people here, almost converting that [spirit] into an offer for Manchester’s audiences, artists and institutions. For me, it’s about creating an event that’s part of something, rather than something imposed upon the city. You can see that in a number of ways, from the choice of venues, partnerships and artists as well as that welcoming spirit, and I guess I’d trace it back to that time I got off the bus and thinking ‘Oh, they were just being friendly. Maybe I should be friendly back’. That’s what we’ve been trying to do. 

Had you been involved in the music industry at all before starting Manchester Jazz Festival?

I was a composer for about 10 years—which is what I ended up studying for my degree—working with a lot of dance and theatre companies. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the music industry, but it was certainly the arts, [and] I would never have thought of it as a career or projected any trajectory forward from that point, [like] ‘I’m doing this now, so in five years time I’m going to be doing that and in ten years time, I’m going to be leading this…’. I had no idea what I was doing and I think in a way, that’s helped. Ironically, I think it’s guided me, because again, it comes back to having that sense of curiosity. There were no courses in arts management or cultural policy or even how to put an event on [back then], we were literally relying on our basic human capacities. Really, only now would I look at myself and think that I work in the music industry. I think ‘Can I still call this a job? How much longer can I get away with it?’.

In a way, I think I’ve avoided being part of—in inverted commas—‘the music industry’, as there are a lot of aspects of it that don’t appeal to me. I think of it as something commercial and cutthroat, with a focus on income generation over quality of work [and something that would see me] working with lots of people I wouldn’t necessarily like hanging out with. I don’t think jazz likes the music industry very much either. There are some people working in jazz who [navigate] the industry very well and without compromise to what they do, but there’s a spirit in jazz that’s a little bit defiant. I mean, it’s rooted in protest, isn’t it? It’s not surprising that a lot of jazz musicians and promoters are resistant to becoming part of an industry.

Having said that, there is a jazz community—an international jazz community—that I do feel privileged to be a part of. There are now organisations that exist to bring jazz peers together, but in the spirit of openness and togetherness, rather than to [discuss] how to make more money or what the next big thing might be. Being, for instance, part of the Euro Jazz Network [is about] meeting your peers from different countries and learning about their challenges, their opportunities and their working methods, as well as feeling their spirit and that sense of positivity and welcome again. You can get so much done when you approach things in that frame of mind. 

I’d love to hear you tell the story in your own words, but from the research that I’ve done, it sounds like the festival was largely born out of that spirit of people banding together, in this case to create a space for Manchester’s then-underserved jazz community. What were your thoughts or aspirations going into the very first Manchester Jazz Festival?

It was very much a collective effort and not down to any one person. It was an enthusiast-led initiative really. It started with a meeting that was called at the Musician’s Union in 1995, in which jazz musicians in Manchester were pretty angry about not having a jazz club and not having a jazz festival. At the time, there was one particular funded organisation that gave a lot of work to [just a few] musicians, so there were a lot of musicians in Manchester who felt they were being left out or excluded from opportunities. As is typical with groups of musicians, there was a lot of moaning going on about what we didn’t have, and then, from that meeting, a couple of us went away to look at what it might take to start a jazz festival and some others went away to look at what it might take to start a jazz club, including Matt and Fred, who went on to start Matt and Phreds. 

Is there any reason you think you were drawn to the festival side of things, rather than the idea of setting up a venue?

I don’t think we quite realised we were going to produce a festival at that point. It was more about rallying an energy into something that was creative, into making something happen. [At the time,] it just so happened that there was a brewery interested in doing some beer tasting. They got in touch with a jazz journalist called Mike Butler, who put them in touch with us and a couple of us thought ‘Hang on, maybe they could sponsor an event…’. Then we went to meet the venue manager at what’s now Dukes 92 and they were up for us using the space, and they had a stage outside. There were about ten or twelve of us—volunteers, jazz fans, jazz musicians, partners of jazz musicians—who all [came] together to organise what we thought was going to be a one off event over an afternoon in the middle of June. 

What we didn’t know was going to happen was that that would be the same day that the [IRA] bomb went off in Manchester in 1996. That happened right at the start of the festival. We were all there, the audience was in position—around 3000 people there ready to experience the music—and of course, the bomb went off at around 1’o’clock. It was complete and utter chaos. Police, ‘evacuate, evacuate!’. Of course, no one had mobile phones then. People were coming into the city centre, so we had to start trying to turn them around, and all the time, in the back of our minds, we were thinking ‘We spent all that time organising this and we were just about to start and then this…’. But, undeterred, we were able to restage it safely a couple of months later. It had a resonance to it, a vibe. It had an impact with people and there was a hunger for it to carry on. 

There wasn’t really any intention to make it an annual or a regular thing. It was just ‘Can we do this?’. [But] then the organising team, who are all extremely hardworking and passionate individuals, started to meet more regularly and think about what shape the event might take if it became a more regular thing. How it might be supported, what the priorities might be… It kind of looked like ‘OK, this could be a regular festival. There isn’t one here, there’s clearly demand for it. We can build on something here’.

Personally, I was very keen for us to have some artistic priorities, which were then and still are now about celebrating the region’s talent, encouraging new work and breaking down the barriers around access to the music [in order to] develop audiences and discourage the statement that you read out at the beginning. I would say that, 30 years later, those three cornerstone aims are still there. You can see it in our commissioning programmes, in the public realm activity and in our partnerships. I think that’s quite intentional. In terms of what you asked—whether we intended to make it a festival—I think what we intended to do was [fulfil] those aims, and it just so happened that a festival was the vessel through which those could be channelled. 

“There wasn’t really any intention to make it an annual or a regular thing. It was just ‘Can we do this?’.“

I can definitely see all those elements within the festival, even now.

It’s really hard to stick to your guns when money is tight and there’s all sorts of pressure to do other things, whether that’s to be more commercial or even from artists [themselves]. It sounds like a strange thing to say, but in the early days there was some resistance from artists around our focus on new music and original repertoire. There was resistance from the Arts Council too about us commissioning new work. That sounds crazy now, because that’s [literally] what they do, but going back a long time, they were very resistant to funding new work because it’s jazz and you don’t do that and when is it ever going to get performed again, what’s the legacy [of the piece,] you know? That was the message coming back and we had to fight really hard, developing a policy for how we would continue and what the legacy of commissions would be. Now everybody’s doing it, commissions are everywhere! Every jazz musician plays original music now. I’m not suggesting that we pioneered that, but it was at the heart of what we were doing and I was often surprised at where the resistance came from. 

Would you say that one of your top priorities in your role as Artistic Director is almost to protect and maintain those values?

Protector of the realm! Yes, protector of values perhaps. That sounds a bit pompous, doesn’t it? Going back to what I was saying earlier about the pressure on arts organisations, staying true to your mission or your values can really get tested at times when you’re faced with financial, environmental, [or even] human challenges and [working] conditions are difficult. There are so many things you could do to make people’s lives much easier and probably be more financially profitable too, and I probably do have to argue the case a lot for doing what might not be financially viable but needs to be done or has its place alongside our other outputs. It’s also about balance [though], because we’ve got to survive as an organisation. No one’s naive enough to think that you get funding and then just do whatever you want. You have to present a case for why you’re doing what you do, and those cornerstone aims are there for a reason. [Even] within our own organisation, I have colleagues and board members, quite rightly, often questioning ‘Why are we doing that Steve? It’s really expensive, we’re going to lose loads of money and we’re going to need loads of people to do that’. You have to make sure you’ve got a strong case for what you’re trying to achieve and that it’s not, at [its extremes,] going to bankrupt the organisation or put everyone under such pressure that that actually outweighs the benefits of doing it. 

How do those considerations affect things in terms of programming? Have you been involved in that side of things since the very beginning?

I’m afraid so, yes—and, again, that’s something that I wouldn’t have said that I set out to do. In the very early days, it was just a mixture of people volunteering their time, so no one applied for a job. It was just whoever had the time and the energy [to do what needed to be done], which was great. It got things started, it’s how things got mobilised, but within that you have to eventually find a structure of sorts, otherwise it’s just mayhem and everyone’s just doing whatever they want. Having a musical background helped me argue the case for why we should prioritise those cornerstone aims and also helped us be distinctive compared to other festivals at the time. Going back, we had our peers at Wigan Jazz Festival and Appleby [Jazz Festival]—which is no longer—so there were more mainstream and traditional festivals happening in the area that we didn’t just want to duplicate. We wanted to provide an alternative offer, which also informed why we chose to focus quite heavily on contemporary work. It also took us down a road, intentionally or not, of subsidy. Of creating a mixed-economy model for the festival that used funding from various sources, as well as a little bit of earned income. 

Funding is a blessing and a curse. It enables you to realise or champion some challenging things that wouldn’t be able to stand on their own two feet in a commercial context, but also brings with it a raft of accountability and reporting requirements. Going back to your earlier question, that kind of helped inform our cornerstone aims, because I quickly realised how they could [help us gain] funding. Because I was familiar with the Arts Council, having worked in other areas of music where we’d received [their] funding before, I very quickly became the lever to access that funding. I suppose learning to articulate your case to a funder is a skill that I’ve managed to develop over the years and one that’s linked, I think, with programming the festival, because I can root our vision in a case for how it could be supported and sustainable. 

The programming sort of went parallel with the funding. We set out a vision [informed by] what we were or weren’t seeing around us and then make a case, in funder’s language, about why it was important to support that. Programming really responds to that opportunity. It’s saying ‘I can deliver this programme because I can see how it could be supported. It’s not unrealistic, it’s not unachievable’. 

And, of course, it’s not only your funding partners, but also your audience that you have to cater to. Is it always at the back of your mind that you might have different types of jazz fans in attendance? Is it a case of balancing what will appeal to the ‘purists’, if you like, and those who are more open to the experimental? 

Yeah. This area is really interesting. [Thinking about] audience development but also audience engagement, so you’re bringing people along rather than sending them away. Definitely, over the years—especially in the early years, when we were setting out our stall, so to speak—we had people coming up complaining ‘Why don’t you do this? Why is there no that? I don’t like this jazz’. It’s difficult, because you can’t please everyone. I think [getting negative feedback] is inevitable though, especially because a lot of our work is presented in the public realm. We’re there, immediately available [to share an opinion with]. We’re not behind a paywall or a venue door. Part of the joy of working in those spaces is that you get direct contact with your audience—and boy, do they tell you what they think. Good and bad. We know that there are people who’ve had really wonderful times and discovered new things [at Manchester Jazz Festival], but equally it’s a great opportunity for someone who doesn’t like what you’re doing to be able to come up to you, poke you in the chest and say ‘I don’t like this’. But everyone’s entitled to their opinion, [and] working in the public realm has given me a good sense of how to deal with it, [which is to] have a response that isn’t necessarily an argument against what they’re saying. If you sense they have the capacity to listen—which often they don’t if they have a strong opinion—then you can present your case. We’ve had less and less complaints in recent years though and that might be down to the fact that there are more and more types of jazz available, and more occasions [on which people can] see it. 

I’m not sure what people are calling it, but have you noticed that the surge in popularity of acts from within the London jazz scene—acts like Ezra Collective, Yussef Dayes and Nubya Garcia—has had a noticeable effect on your audiences or their openness to new types of jazz? As an organisation, do you feel you’ve experienced any benefits as a result of it?

This is an interesting topic as well, and I’ve got some thoughts on both sides. I think one bugbear of a lot of people who aren’t working in jazz in London is that it keeps getting called the ‘UK jazz explosion’ and it’s not. It’s the London jazz explosion. What that inadvertently does is stick two fingers up to the rest of the country, [as if to say] ‘We represent the UK in London and we’re doing it all here. It doesn’t matter what you lot are doing, this is where it’s all happening’. That’s where my defiance as an adopted Mancunian kicks in and says ‘Hang on a minute…’. There are different things happening in different parts of the country and if you want to [legitimately] call it a ‘jazz explosion’, you have to listen to what’s happening in Newcastle and Bristol and Birmingham and all these other fertile scenes [producing] music rooted in communities and a passion for connecting people. 

We’re not London. Only London can be London. There are some peculiarities about London, such as the population density or the ease with which people can connect with others in quite a small area, then build up scenes that reflect those communities. We don’t have that resource in other cities to anywhere near the same extent, so it’s harder for a scene to mobilise itself in the regions than it is in London. Of course there’s going to be a scene there and that’s great, that’s fantastic for the UK and for jazz and a certain type of creativity. I wouldn’t say we’ve piggybacked on that [though]. I think in some ways we’re just running in parallel and I think a lot of other scenes would say the same thing, both in those cities I mentioned and more. They don’t need to reference or nod to London, there are [enough] things happening there. There are musicians creating groundbreaking work everywhere if you look for it, but it might not sound like it sounds in London. 

I’ve also seen, in thirty years, that jazz wave rise and fall in popularity. I think the more we can spread the word about the power of jazz and what it means to people, the better. [Look at] Ezra Collective winning the Mercury Prize. Now they’re playing Wembley Arena. That’s an amazing achievement, for them and for jazz, but that gig is taking place on the same night as the opening night of the London Jazz Festival—who will have helped Ezra Collective on their journey—and it’s nothing to do with it. So what purpose is that trajectory serving? Now it’s just about Ezra Collective being successful. Of course, they acknowledge their roots and they’re always acknowledging Tomorrow’s Warriors—who are a pioneering organisation producing so many of the powerful musicians that we have in jazz at the moment—but it’s a mixed result when you’re taking it outside of London. 

There’s also that London bubble thing, which always sounds really patronising, but you do feel it when you’re operating outside of London. It’s very easy for people in London to forget what’s going on outside of the capital and to perhaps not appreciate the challenges of sustaining a scene, or how or why it’s different [elsewhere]. The factors that make it different are often beyond people’s control. There’s the economic angle as well. We have a cost of living divide which affects the degree to which we can embrace talent from London. If I book a band from London through an agent, the agent will charge me the same fee as a promoter based in London, even though the cost of living crisis has pushed down the relative value but pushed up the relative cost of operating [like that]. It costs me more money, effectively, to do the same thing as someone in London. I don’t think that’s appreciated.

In a wider sense, too, we’re only just seeing a rise in investment in the cultural economy here. It’s a growing economy in terms of output, but still—Arts Council funding has been on a standstill for about ten years [and] Local Authority funding has disappeared in a lot of places. Thank god we still have an intelligent team at Manchester [Council] and Greater Manchester [Council], but not everyone is that lucky. The economic picture is a very strong factor in terms of how the London scene impacts the regions. 

I’m sure that the people that I’m talking about would respond in different ways to what I’m saying. They might say ‘Steve, you say that but, we’re in London, and do you know how hard it is? There are so many people here, I have to fight really hard to get people to my gig’. There are two sides to every story. I’m just giving you my [take on] how it feels to a peer [operating out of] somewhere like Manchester. 

Alongside all the other things that you have to consider, how do you also balance trusting your own taste and implementing your artistic direction with essentially just programming a line up full of acts that you’d personally like to see? It must take a lot of self control.

I learnt very quickly not to just programme what I liked. I think there’s a tendency to want to do that, though I’m sure some promoters wouldn’t [admit] it. Especially as you’re learning about programming and promoting, it’s very easy to fall back on artists that you know and artists that you like, but of course, you [should be] doing much more than this. You’re creating a journey for people, you’re presenting options. You have a responsibility to ensure that there’s balance, range, diversity, and that there’s all sorts of price points and different environments to see music in as well. There’s such a broad stylistic range within contemporary jazz, so it’s trying to make sure, not that there’s something for everyone, but that everything in the programme has a purpose and a reason for being there. 

I always look at it as a whole, never as individual gigs or isolated moments. I always look at the whole experience. ‘What’s this like to experience as a listener, going from here to here to here? From this church to this square, from this noise to this silence?’ Of course, not everyone does that. Not everyone goes to every gig, so not everyone has that sort of journey. [But] I do think festivals are about the experience more than the individual gigs and I want to make sure that that experience, as best it can, speaks to as many people as possible, and surprises people as well.

I think there’s also a responsibility to detect quality, whatever that means. [Maybe] a readiness or a relevance or a spirit of music making that has a thread to improvised music and jazz. A reason for being in the jazz festival. We had resistance to calling it a jazz festival from day one, but there was also an argument for celebrating this music and its history, as well as where it is now, and supporting musicians who, [when we started], had been neglected and overlooked, and didn’t [benefit] from an infrastructure for their careers. Bearing in mind that we’ve got that genre pinned to our name, there’s a responsibility to service what that represents. What it means to be jazz. What is it about this music that justifies having that name pinned to it? For me, you can sense it. You can hear it, but I don’t think you can write the definition down, and you couldn’t easily say ‘This is jazz and this isn’t’. 

I think when I hear something happening in the spur of the moment, being created either alone or with other musicians with that spirit of adventurousness and spontaneity, it’s in. That’s why it’s in the festival. It’s not really about how well a musician can play their saxophone scales or [asking] ‘Have we got an Afro-Cuban band? Have we got a jazz-funk band? Have we got a free jazz band?’ and trying to pigeonhole those styles to make sure that we’ve got one of each. It’s more about reflecting that spirit. In a way, everything’s connected by that if nothing else. 

Also, we haven’t mentioned this yet, but I’ve always, right since the outset, been wanting to change the demographic of people on stage making music. To make sure that there’s much more diversity, [including] cultural diversity, gender diversity and all sorts of other kinds of representation that, at that point in the 90s [when the festival first started], just wasn’t there. I’m so pleased that we now have a wider demographic and a more diverse generation of players coming through that we can celebrate and work with and platform. It’s fantastic. It hasn’t always been easy [to do that]. There are a lot of historical barriers that have existed for all of those [groups], so I’m very keen to make sure that those people who feel left out are given their chance, especially [in terms of] gender balance, which has been rooted through the programme since the very first festival, before it was even called gender balance!

When Key Change came along, I thought ‘Great, there’s an initiative! Fantastic, we can sign up’. But even though it’s easier now because there[’s a bigger pool of] musicians from a variety of backgrounds to programme from, I still have to work hard to make sure that that diversity’s there, because if you take your foot off the pedal, things very quickly default to they way they were before and I don’t want that to happen. That’s another responsibility that comes with the programming—an invisible one, if you like—to make sure that across the whole festival, [as well as] across each day or each venue, there’s fair representation of our population. It’s not always easy and I don't always get it right. I don’t always make it work. I’m happy to say I still get things wrong, [even] after all this time, it’s going to happen. But balance checking is a big part of decision making in the programming process, as is making sure that the decisions being made are reflective of what we say our values are. 

To say you’ve been running for thirty years now, it’s so impressive that gender balance has been one of your priorities since the very beginning.

That was an achievement in 1996, I have to say!

Having been involved since day one, how much do you feel that you’ve personally shaped what Manchester Jazz Festival has grown into and how much has it potentially shaped you in return?

Inevitably, I think. I think those values [we’ve discussed] of openness and fairness are good values to [possess] as a human being, so having them as the cornerstone values of the festival is a natural reflection of [the people involved], and making sure that those values are maintained is actually another value in itself. I think some of those things come to you as you grow and you get older, and I now find it really important to make sure that those more human values are carried through, as there’s so much hardship and friction and conflict in the world that the more effort goes into balancing that out with the opposite, the better, whether we do that as [individuals] or through the work that we present. 

I’d like to think that, without saying it explicitly, you can see some of those human characteristics in the priorities that we set out and in the music that we present. At the same time, I’m very keen for artists to have that freedom of expression and to articulate ideas which might be difficult, which might [mean we] encounter problematic situations in which things escalate. [Maybe] something is happening on stage, where someone’s communicating a political view and someone in the audience doesn’t like it… How far do you go to support free speech? If there’s a threat to safety, then it has to stop. But free speech and free thinking is also an important part of jazz and all artistic work, so to preserve the space for that is important, and I think that is a human quality as much as it is anything artistic. 

In terms of how it’s shaped me, it most definitely has. Sometimes I wake up and think ‘Wow, Steve, you’ve got the best job in the world. I’m so lucky, I couldn’t wish for a better position’. The next day, I might wake up and think ‘Oh for god sake, now we’ve got to deal with this, this nightmare’s happened, this person’s done that, this money has disappeared…’ and it becomes a human crisis that needs managing. It doesn’t happen every day, but I experience both extremes of that spectrum quite regularly, I have to say, and learning how to pivot between those two extremes has been quite the journey for me. To [get to a point where I] think ‘Actually, you’re in this position and you’ve got to take the good with the bad, the rough with the smooth, the friction with the grease’. I also have a responsibility to do the job properly, which [can] mean all sorts of things. How I am as a person with other people, [but also] what we champion, what we set out to do and what we respond to around us. In terms of what it’s enabled me to do as well—to go to other countries and meet with European peers and go to other festivals—that has been such a privilege, and one that I would never have imagined. I mean, it comes with some hard work as well. But I don’t mind that. It’s certainly something that’s enabled me to reflect on how lucky I am compared to so many people. 

I’ve learnt a lot from other people too—how other people are, how they do things, how to have grace—and [from them also] having those values of fairness and openness. Seeing that directed at me from other people has been very warming and unexpected. If I go back thirty years, I wouldn’t have said that was going to happen, but it’s something I feel very lucky to have experienced and I have a responsibility to respond to that within the framework of what we do. To make sure that that kind of warmth is [channelled] through me outwards to the audiences and the artists that we work with.

You’re also now Manchester’s longest running festival and have been since 2013.

There was quite a spate of things that were set up [at the same time as us] in the 90s. Some of them are still with us, some of them have changed into other things, but yeah—no one can beat us now! I don’t know how much that means to people, but I guess it’s a testament to the need and the appetite for the festival, both from artists and from audiences. I guess there are still people prepared to muck in and do the work, and get behind that mission. 

From such a unique point of view, would you say you’ve seen Manchester’s music scene change a lot in that time more generally?

Oh yeah, tremendously. It’s exploded. I mentioned the indie scene when I first arrived and all those bands that came out of Manchester in the 80s, but at the moment, there have never been so many jazz gigs and jazz promoters in Manchester. It’s staggering, [but] it’s healthy to see and if it’s done well, that’s great. 

But certainly the scene has changed, because Manchester’s changed. People are living in the city centre now—which they certainly weren’t thirty years ago—and the investment in infrastructure, the student population, the transport links, all sorts of things contribute to that. Manchester’s reputation externally and its position in the world [has changed too]. The growth I’ve seen in the music that gets produced and the venues that have sprung up… [Though,] having said that, venues are also closing at the moment, and we’re at a point of terminal decline in some parts of the industry where, ironically, we’ve got two huge arenas [in Manchester] where people seem overjoyed to pay hundreds of pounds to see a big name, but they can’t cough up nine quid to go to The Carlton Club in Whalley Range to see an emerging band. Without [those small venues], there won’t be an arena in ten or twenty years time. That’s a crisis that we’ve got to deal with.

That change, again, is running parallel to the economic difficulties that we’re all going through, but the potential loss—the long term loss—that we’ll see, not now but in five or ten years time, if we don’t act will [entirely] change the conditions in which music is made and presented. Because if we can only see music in large capacity spaces, what sort of music is going to be created? Having said that, I think art will always be made. Whatever difficulties human beings might be facing, they will always create and there will always be artistic expression. What will change is how that art is presented and supported and valued, and that is within our control. We can make sure those things are preserved and protected. 

Change is a problematic journey sometimes. It’s usually encouraged and seen as something for the good, but it’s when you get change that comes with irreplaceable loss, that’s then the cause of deprivation. That’s the sort of change that’s very problematic to manage, especially when you don’t realise it’s happening at the time. We’re now seeing enormous growth in the presentation of jazz in Manchester though, which is broadly to be encouraged. I think it’s great that more people will be able to hear the music and see it as something they connect with, and be able to make further discoveries of their own. It also gives artists more places to play, it’s driving the economy and it’s also hopefully increasing demand. 

When you go out now to live events, do you find that your relationship to live music’s changed?

It’s very hard for me to go to a gig and not be on duty, I have to say, [both] externally and inside my head. It’s within my being now. Even if it’s a gig I’ve bought a ticket for, that might not be anything to do with jazz, I’ll be thinking ‘Oh god, they’re starting a bit late, aren’t they?’ or ‘The bass is a bit too loud’. There are always things [happening] where I think ‘If I was doing this…’, not only in terms of the [night itself] but in its presentation and its programming. But I think it’s good to see how other people do things. Learning from other people’s mistakes is quite handy as well. 

Whenever I go to a gig or an event, I spend more time looking at the audience than I do at the stage. I’m quite often turning around, looking at people’s reactions and seeing what they’re responding to or what they’re getting out of being there and how the musicians are connecting with them. I’m really interested in that and again, you can’t quite turn that off. But it’s a privilege to be working in this role and I feel very lucky to be working in anything musical. Going back to listening to the Test Card when I was three, I wouldn’t have thought back then that I’d be earning a living doing this.

None of the conditions of a gig can be taken for granted, from the venue to the crew to the artists. So many things have converged to make that [gig] happen and none of it can be assumed. I appreciate all of that [much more now]. 

“Whenever I go to a gig or an event, I spend more time looking at the audience than I do at the stage.”

If I were to ask what you’re most proud of when you look back over your career, what’s the first thing that would come to mind?

Probably when we won the Adventurous Programming Award at the Europe Jazz Network. That was in 2016. That was a tearful moment for me. It was very humbling and surprising, shocking even. I wasn’t expecting it. Because it’s a peer award—by which I mean it’s not something that you can apply for, [and instead] your peers have looked at what you do and decided to [grant] you an award for what you’ve done with your work—it was a [huge] endorsement that ‘OK, we are doing the right thing’. 

Going back to the moment [I found out we’d won], the president of the Europe Jazz Network [called] me. She said ‘Steve, are you sitting down?’. It was a Saturday morning and I was in the garage working on my car, and I thought ‘Oh god, I’ll get a stool out…’. When she told me, I couldn’t believe it, because all these prestigious [international] venues and festivals had won this award before, but no one in the UK. 

It was also a moment for me personally. At that point, we would have done twenty festivals and my parents had just [passed away]. My Mum had died the previous year, so she didn’t quite get to see me [receive the award] and I think she would have been secretly quite proud. She wouldn’t have said it! But she would have been pleased that I had achieved something like that whilst doing what I enjoy doing. 

So that’s my personal memorable moment, [but it’s also] connected to the festival, because it’s not all about me. There have been so many magnificent people who have worked on the festival team, [and I include] the artists and the audience in that. Everyone’s made such a heartfelt and energetic contribution. That was just one point in time that I felt the programming work that we’d championed and the focus on those cornerstone aims of celebrating new work and supporting local artists whilst also being outward facing was [being acknowledged]. Then it was back to work.

As we’ve already alluded to, this year marks thirty years of Manchester Jazz Festival, which will no doubt prove another moment ripe for reflection and evaluation and acknowledgement—as well as celebration, of course! Looking back, is there any knowledge or wisdom you have now that you wish you had back when you started? Or do you think things needed to happen exactly the way that they did in order to get you to where you are now?

It’s been an enormous learning curve, from complete and utter ignorance to exhaustion. If we knew back then how to [put on a festival] properly—if my fellow enthusiasts who were involved in that first festival were all professional event organisers and there was a Marketing Director and a Programmer and a Producer, all in defined roles that they had experience in—I don’t think Manchester Jazz Festival would be what it is now. None of us expected it to be anything more than a [one-off] afternoon. I think the nerve to try and do something—and to look like we knew what we were doing—made it what it is.

There’s also something about the point that we were all at in our lives and the moment in time that we capitalised on. Lots of things came together at that particular point in time, and that included our lack of experience. We were running on enthusiasm, nothing else. I think that lack of professional experience ironically informed a lot of our priorities, because we were doing it just for the love of it and to make sure that those initial aims were delivered. If we’d set out [in the traditional way], I think it might have been a bit ordinary. Things wouldn’t have gone wrong and we wouldn’t have learnt anything. There’s still a little bit of DIY spirit within the festival. If you look hard, you can still see it. Certainly, I have no idea what I’m doing, even after all this time. Everyone in the team now has unbelievable skills and experience. They are so good at what they do and we couldn’t do it without them. But that naivety [we had in the beginning] can be a very strong driver for getting something done, above and beyond the practicalities. 

When you think back to where it all began, does it feel strange to think that thirty years have passed and the festival is still going strong?

It doesn’t feel strange, because every year is so different, and we’ve had quite a lot of recent challenges and changes. It sounds like a funny thing to say, but every year almost feels like I’m starting from scratch, because we have a new set of challenges to deal with and new economic pressures, and partnerships come and go. The only thing you can rely on is [what’s happened in] your life so far. Certainly, every year, even though some things are in the book and we know we’ve got to do this or that by this date, there’ll be a time when it’s like ‘Right, how are we going to deal with this one?’. A bit like the very first festival! There’s still a little bit of [that] flying by the seat of your pants [feeling], which I think is quite nice to keep. We’re running a jazz festival, not a dry cleaning service, where there’s [some sort of] process in place. This happens and this is how much it’ll cost and you’ll have it done by Thursday... It’s an organic thing. It has to stay alive and go wrong—and go right!—and change and reflect what’s happening around us. That in itself requires you to adapt and respond, and sometimes that might mean learning how to do something again in a different way. I think as long as you’re alert to having to do that, you’ll be ok. The danger is the assumption that you know what you’re doing.