The Impact of (Jazz) Festivals: an Arts and Humanities Research Council- Funded Research Report Emma Webster1 University of East Anglia [email protected]
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[JRJ 9.2 (2015) 169-193] (print) ISSN 1753-8637 doi:10.1558/jazz.v9i2.29783 (online) ISSN 1753-8645 The impact of (jazz) festivals: An Arts and Humanities Research Council- funded research report Emma Webster1 University of East Anglia [email protected] George McKay2 University of East Anglia [email protected] Abstract Festivals are an essential part of the jazz world, forming regularly occurring pivot points around which jazz musicians, audiences and organizers plan their lives. Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the purpose of this report is to chart and critically examine available writing about the impact of jazz festivals, drawing on both academic and ‘grey’/cultural policy literature in the field. The review presents research findings under the headings of economic impact; socio-political impact; temporal impact and intensification and transformation of experience; creative impact—music and musicians; discovery and audience development; place-making; the mediation of jazz festivals; and environmental impact. It concludes with a set of recommenda- tions for future research, which identifies gaps in the field. To accompany the article, a 100-entry 40,000-word annotated bibliography has also been produced, which is freely accessible online. Keywords: benefits; cultural impact; economic impact; festivals; impact; jazz festivals; lit- erature review; social impact; socio-political impact; value 1. Emma Webster is the postdoctoral research associate at the University of East Anglia working on The Impact of Festivals project, and ‘researcher-in-residence’ at the 2016 EFG London Jazz Festival. She received her AHRC-funded PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2011 for a thesis entitled ‘Promoting Live Music: A Behind-the-Scenes Eth- nography’. Emma takes up a position as postdoctoral researcher on a new AHRC project mapping live music in Britain at the University of Edinburgh in November 2016, just after her current UEA project is completed. 2. George McKay joined the University of East Anglia as Professor of Media Stud- ies in November 2014. Previously he was Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Salford (2005–14), where he established and directed the Communication, Cultural & Media Studies Research Centre, and Professor of Cultural Studies at University of Central Lancashire (2000–2005). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. 170 Jazz Research Journal Introduction Positively it has been enriching my life more than anything else. I mean, specifically festivals and jazz festivals especially (50-year-old male audience member, EFG London Jazz Festival, 2015). You very rarely get, in any genre, whatever the festival is of—music, dance, theatre—that experience of wall-to-wall, nonstop, noon till mid- night and beyond. You kind of throw yourself open to it, don’t you? You kind of throw yourself in… If you like something, to have so much of it, in a collection of places and being around people who also want that, it’s quite a lovely human activity to be part of that (Steve Mead, Director, Manchester Jazz Festival, 2016). Festivals are an essential part of the jazz world (Frith 2007: 4) and serve as a ‘showcase, a creative destination and an attraction for visitors’ (Van Aalst and van Melik 2011: 197). Figures vary, but 200 jazz festivals taking place in Britain annually is regularly cited (Riley and Laing 2006, 2010)—although one authoritative listings website has fewer than half that number (91) for the United Kingdom in 2015 (jazzfests.net 2015)—and over 150 jazz festi- vals take place in Austria, Norway, The Netherlands, and Denmark com- bined (Rhythm Changes 2013a). Globally, albeit not just inclusive of jazz festivals, there was a 30 per cent rise in the number of recorded ‘cultural festivals’ from 1996 to an estimated 10,000 in 2006, of which half could demonstrate some degree of international recognition (AEA Consulting 2006: 16), and an increasing amount of academic interest around festivals and impact from a variety of disciplines (cf. Getz 2010). From an initial focus on the economic impacts of cultural experiences in the 1980s and 1990s through to a broader assessment of impact which considers instrumental and intrinsic value (Carnwath and Brown 2014), the literature shows that festivals play a significant economic, social and cultural role at local and international levels. For the purposes of this article, jazz festivals are those with ‘jazz’ in the title or which predominantly programme jazz and jazz-related music; the article has not been restricted to any particular country, however. Many jazz festivals take place in existing venues such as concert halls and clubs, with some ‘mobile spaces’ (Kronenburg 2011) in use, but jazz festivals are relatively unlikely to be greenfield camping festivals. This focus on a single (admittedly broad) genre thus ensures that the article gathers together fes- tivals of a broadly similar type and hence, as far as possible, impact. This research report is based on a literature review which necessarily spans different disciplines, different types of event, and different geographi- © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. The impact of (jazz) festivals 171 cal locations, and which is used as a basis for a comparative assessment of knowledge and conclusions about the impact of jazz festivals. The search was limited to literature in English but encompasses jazz festivals beyond the UK and Europe, partly because a review of literature on British jazz festi- vals alone would make for scant reading, but, more constructively, because there was also interesting research being done elsewhere. Literature was restricted to academic books and journals, and grey literature, but, due to space limitations, does not include newspaper or magazine articles, there- fore generally excludes publications such as Down Beat. Library databases searched include the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of East Anglia, and Oxford Brookes University, as well as the Public Library Ini- tiative (http://freetoviewjournals.pls.org.uk). Databases searched include the resources sections of the websites of Arts Council England, Creative Scot- land (http://www.creativescotland.com), Arts Council of Wales (http://www. arts.wales), Live Music Exchange (http://livemusicexchange.org/resources) and the National Alliance of Arts, Health and Wellbeing (http://www.art- shealthandwellbeing.org.uk/resources). The research was undertaken as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project called The Impact of Festivals (2015–16), in which Webster was the postdoctoral researcher and McKay the principal investi- gator. The larger project—of which this piece specifically on jazz festivals is but one output—was undertaken in collaboration with research partner the EFG London Jazz Festival, as part of the AHRC’s collaborative Connected Communities programme. A small number of extracts from interviews Web- ster undertook for The Impact of Festivals project more widely are included as ‘pull quotes’, epigraphs for illustrative purposes. To enhance what we hope will be the usefulness of the article for other researchers interested in jazz festivals, and festivals more widely, we have also produced an annotated bibliography of over 100 entries which is freely accessible on the project website (http://impactoffestivals.wordpress.com/ project-outputs), as well as on the following other sites: UEA institutional repository (http://georgemckay.org), Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals project website (http://chimeproject.eu), McK- ay’s academia page (http://eastanglia.academia.edu/GeorgeMcKay) and on the Live Music Exchange (http://www.livemusicexchange.org). This annotated bibliography provides a brief summary and critical material about every bibliography entry. Further it is worth noting that this report has a partner, also an output of The Impact of Festivals project, entitled From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury: © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. 172 Jazz Research Journal The Impact of British Music Festivals (Webster and McKay 2016), which is both more wide-ranging (all kinds of music festivals, including some jazz) and narrower in scope (British festivals only). From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury has its own freely accessible and searchable annotated bibli- ography, via the project website and other online portals above. Literature on the impact of jazz festivals tends to come from two broad camps. First is the more quantitatively-based research on economic impact and audience motivation from tourism studies and event management, in which the work of Donald Getz has been of particular importance for festi- val studies.3 A number of economic impact reports can also be found within the grey literature, more recently broadened to encompass social and cul- tural impacts as well. Second is the more qualitatively-based research from anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, often taking starting points from Raymond Williams’s ideas about culture and society (1958), Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque (1968), Victor Turner’s notion of communitas (1982), and current theorizations around the process of ‘fes- tivalization’ (Bennett, Taylor and Woodward 2014). Urban studies is also a source of literature; accounts tend either to be celebratory, focusing on the economic and place-making benefits of festivals, or more critical, in which festivals are instruments of hegemonic power which shift focus