Last week in this space I alluded, parenthetically, to having been in the right place at the right time to hear about Glasgow's appointment as European City of Culture 1990.
The place was the old Greater Glasgow Tourist Board offices in St Vincent Place and the occasion was a meeting of the board creating the first-ever Glasgow Jazz Festival, a number of members of which were also involved in the Euro-capital bid. It further occurs that it must be thirty years ago this year (i.e. back in 1985) that the first tentative moves towards what is now by some distance Glasgow's victorious long distance runner in the festival chase were made. I was a young enthusiast back then, and although it was one of the things that brought me to the attention of the then editor of The Herald, Arnold Kemp, I stood down from the board in the 1990s and - to declare an interest - have only relatively recently become involved again.
The jazz world in Scotland was very different back in those days, with many of the trad and Dixieland bands that had come into being in the revival of the late 1950s and early 60s still gigging, a young combo like the John Rae Collective playing bop a real novelty, and a talent like Wester Hailes teenager Tommy Smith a unique phenomenon. There are clear trajectories to be followed however, with trumpeter Alex Dalgleish the teacher of contemporary band leader Ryan Quigley, and the members of drummer Rae's combo now among the father figures of the newest generation of players being nurtured at our music school Centres of Excellence, in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Scotland, the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra and at Professor Smith's jazz course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. It is a very different jazz world in which the Glasgow festival persists, and that is just as well, because many of the star names from America that drew the crowds to the early Glasgow Jazz Festivals are no longer with us and promoting the music requires a much wider set of skills, and perhaps bigger ears.
It was the failure to acknowledge that reality, I think, which irritated me most about the jazz item on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday morning, part of an edition guest-edited by Lenny Henry. It was about a scheme in London's East End, in which the excellent saxophonist Soweto Kinch is involved, encouraging young people to play the music, with the prize being participation in a concert at the Barbican. It sounds a fine scheme, but it was couched in such patronising terms that it devalued the audible talent of the young people involved. Here were, we were told, young folk who would overturn years of popular music history, and return ye olde jass musik to the charts where currently the r'n'b and hiphop their contemporaries love has set up camp. This, of course, is utter nonsense on many levels: the low-selling charts have long since ceased to be an accurate measure of the taste of young people, and those I have encountered who have learned jazz skills to the highest level have done so for rather more admirable personal development reasons than with an eye to chart success, although they would all deeply love to make a living from playing,
That slackness seriously impaired the serious purpose Lenny Henry was making in an edition of Today that included interviews with an Asian Ukip politician and a black Savile Row tailor, because jazz, of all arts, was a significant vehicle for the demolition of the colour bar, especially in the country where it originated. Many years ago The Herald had a jazz columnist who at one point used the inversion "Crow Jim" to describe discrimination against white players by black jazz musicians. I cut it, thinking it racist, and would do so today, but the BBC was guilty of some similarly shallow thinking in its patronising attitude to the young people of East London, whose skin colour it was, of course, impossible to discern on the radio.
It would be a mistake to get carried away with the implications of the error. Is it "Metropolitan bias" when two of the youngest jazzers I know best may be Scottish but have polished their art at music schools in London? Perhaps not. Although it would have been better to have heard about NYJoS, TSYJO and the Glasgow Jazz Festival Schools Band Competition in the same piece, it was just a case of Today not looking further than the end of its nose, no matter what colour it is. Jazz music deserves better in 2015, and I am looking forward to Glasgow's resilient festival already.
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