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From Music Week - 29 October 2005

Jazz artists are rocking the boat

With acts now playing at rock venues and their albums found in rock sections, jazz is finding a new home, writes Kevin Le Gendre

If the rock venue will not go to a jazz band then maybe the jazz band could go to a rock venue. That is not quite what the prophet Mohammed said, but those who believe in taking their music as far and wide as possible may put their faith in these words.

Acoustic Ladyland, one of the British jazz success stories of this year, have secured bookings in venues which do not usually host improvising musicians. "They're now playing places such as the
University of London Union," says Oliver Weindling, head of Babel, the adventurous independent that signed Ladyland, a four-piece where the saxophone player is the lead vocal. "And they're doing a Barfly tour and that's really the whole indie scene; that's the first step on the commercial rock ladder where you would have found the likes of Franz Ferdinand a couple of years ago."

What is perhaps more significant than the appearance of the jazz artist in the non-jazz space is the fact that in some Virgin Megastores Acoustic Ladyland's album, Last Chance Disco, is no longer racked in the jazz section. Rock fans who can relate to the brash, bolshie riffs underpinning the songs might get into improvisation without really feeling bad about themselves.

The other great success story of the year is Ladyland's labelmate Polar Bear, the twin sax-fronted band that weaves subtle echoes of hip hop and electronica into its jazz fabric. It has seen its profile rise considerably thanks to a Mercury Music Prize nomination for Held On The Tips Of Fingers. The extra publicity has increased the album's sales to 8,000.

The media splash of the Babel artists as well as the healthy sales enjoyed by Jazz Jamaica, flagship act of Dune, another leading independent, have gone some way to lift the gloom which descended on the UK jazz scene following the demise of the Scottish label Caber last year.

But the coming of Polar Bear and Ladyland was not in the script written by the major labels a few years ago. Following the breakthrough of Jamie Cullum and Norah Jones, the smart money said that the vocalist would be the commercial vehicle most likely to drive jazz towards the mainstream. But it has not had a decisive knock-on effect.

Mike Gavin of Linn's distributor Harmonia Mundi says, "Claire Martin has sold very well for Linn Records, but that's just one artist. Whether you want to call it the Jamie Cullum factor or not, I don't know. I mean, there are plenty of singers out there still struggling."

Indeed. Some of the outstanding British jazz vocalists - Christine Tobin, Cleveland Watkiss, Ian Shaw and Eska Mtungwazi - still toil away on very limited budgets, while Clare Teal, snapped up by Sony from Candid, the label which originally took a chance on Cullum, has only sold moderately. Gwyneth Herbert, signed by Universal, has been dropped after just one album.

Maria Rivington, category manager specialist music at Virgin Megastores, says, "To a certain extent the lack of movement from the majors has helped the independents at a grassroots level. It's given them the creative licence to find and nurture their own talent, so you haven't got the majors pushing down on them.

"The independents have recently taken control of the jazz circuit and through their investment and hard work have managed to bring a new cutting edge to the scene. There have been many acts with potential, but they haven't come through for the majors and perhaps this has made them more cautious in finding the next Jamie Cullum."

But should they have actually been looking for the first Acoustic Ladyland instead? With the benefit of hindsight, that might come across as a glib statement, but Pete Wareham's band had been around long enough for A&Rs to take an interest.

Maybe the age-old fear of instrumental jazz needs to be reviewed. Received wisdom says that if punters cannot sing it then they will not be able to take it to their hearts.

But Polar Bear play wordless songs, which can last up to 10 or 15 minutes in concert. If you wanted to be slightly provocative you could say that Seb Rochford's band does artful, sophisticated mood music where the strength of the writing and playing makes the absence of lyrics irrelevant.

That's essentially what Weather Report did. Although Zawinul and Shorter's pioneering outfit, the pride of CBS back in the Seventies, has been both blessed and blighted by the mantel of jazz-fusion legends, fans did not just gape at mind-blowing virtuosity. They imbibed the catchy melody of many tunes.

If we look beyond the UK to the artists which have made an impact on the international jazz scene in recent times - apart from Norah and co, who do we see? Esbjorn Svensson Trio, Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, The Bad Plus. They all have one thing in common. They are piano trios.

When The Bad Plus played at London's Jazz Cafe a few years ago the venue was packed with kids mesmerised by Ethan Iverson's work on the house grand. After a rendition of Queen's We Are The Champions, which went as far out to the avant-garde as the trio care to go, one youth was heard to scream to all and sundry, "Motherfuckin' genius!".

It would be crass for major label A&R to concoct "The Brit Plus" and order them to do yet more Radiohead covers, but the surprising breakthrough of all of the aforementioned surely sends out the message that there has to be a little bit more thinking when it comes to new jazz signings at the majors. The vision has to be wider.

Instead of opting for jazz which will not ruffle feathers, the majors might perhaps do well to support jazz which will capture the imagination. But to do this they have to overcome any knee-jerk prejudices towards instrumental music or what they perceive as "difficult" listening.

While it remains difficult to say exactly what kind of jazz musician could effectively "work" on a major label, there is no doubt that the talent pool is as rich today as it has been for many years. There are many forward thinking jazz musicians in Britain whose progress is exciting to watch.

Gwilym Simcock, Ingrid Laubrock, Byron Wallen, Nathaniel Facey, Zoe Rahman, Andrew McCormack, Jason Yarde and Eska Mtungwazi are just a handful of artists who might possibly benefit from major label investment. But they would have to be handled exactly the right way. "The thing is that if you look at the history of major label signings, you know people such as Guy Barker, Courtney Pine, Django Bates, you can see mistakes were made. If the A&R can come in and build something with the artist then it might work," says Babel's Weindling. "But I think that the artist-label relationship has to change to a more democratic, or let's say, more interactive thing, as opposed to the old style proprietorial relationship."

Most British jazz artists are astute enough to realise that the major label deal is first and foremost a pipedream. And their CD sales, even if they are signed to an established, well-distributed independent, are likely to be modest. What remains a real focal point for their career is the gig.

The one thing that unites all of the recent success stories in British jazz - anybody from Jamie Cullum and Acoustic Ladyland to Mercury nominees Courtney Pine, Denys Baptiste, Soweto Kinch and Polar Bear - is that their fanbase was built primarily on the strength of excellent live performances. Unlike some pop, rock, hip-hop and R&B acts, jazz artists must deliver on stage.

"Basically you've got the captive party there," says Weindling. "If you can get people to come to your gigs then you can touch them and build a relationship. You can clone music but you can't clone
people. "In pop more people buy CDs than go to gigs but in jazz it's the other way round. Brad Mehldau might sell 3,500 copies of an album, which isn't that much for pop, but he can fill a 2,000 seater venue. Off the back of a gig he will sell copies of old albums as well as new ones. Jazz fans are always interested in catalogue."

In other words, the traditional retail outlet is not the only way to sell jazz. But what about the impact of new media? "I think downloading will eventually become available for specialist music because of the lack of other opportunities but we'll have to wait a while," Weindling speculates.

"At the moment, Amazon is important for sales of jazz. Polar Bear are in the Top 20 in the Amazon chart and I think that mail-order, on-line sales and the net are very important for specialist music."

Yet jazz artists, especially those signed to an independent, would still want to see their product in sales outlets all over the country. With that in mind, Virgin Megastore, along with HMV and Fopp, has emerged as an important jazz retailer in the past few years, getting behind the smaller as well as the bigger names, staging live PAs by the likes of Soweto Kinch, Abram Wilson, Gilad Atzmon and Claire Martin.

Virgin is the official retail outlet of the London Jazz Festival and is aware just how important the capital is to the good health of the music. "About a quarter of all our jazz sales come from the London region and we recognise that it has played a massive part in the growth of the jazz market," says Maria Rivington.

"Virgin is almost becoming like a large sized independent store really," says Oliver Weindling. "I think that they've been squeezed by pop in supermarkets and they've realised that there's a lot of
quality music around in other genres and they're keen to support it."

But what happens in London does not necessarily apply nationally. The state of the British jazz scene cannot be judged on the capital alone. "It's still impossible to get some CDs in stores up and down the country," says Mike Gavin.

"Somebody living outside of London or Manchester is going to find it hard to buy an independent jazz release. As far as distribution is concerned, everybody is suffering, whatever the genre. The record retail business is in the midst of huge change and nobody has worked out exactly how to negotiate it.

"We haven't seen the full impact of digital downloading yet. That's largely confined to pop so jazz shops remain key, and there are still lots of artists struggling for outlets for their work."

What is worrying is that the independent jazz shops in London continue to have a hard time keeping their heads above water. Ray's, one of the most historic jazz shops in the capital, has been reduced to a tiny strip of floor space in the bookshop Foyles while Moles, also relegated from its original King's Cross premises to a floor above Harold Moore's classical music shop, is also due to shut down permanently. Ironically enough during the London Jazz Festival.

All of which leaves British jazz in a strange place. While there is an urgent need for more coverage in the national press, awareness of the domestic scene has been significantly raised by the "Jazz Britannia" television series and concerts and the batch of Impressed albums which Gilles Peterson compiled for Universal.

The F-IRE collective, an epitome of self-starting, also provides an inspiring story. Their artists - Jade Fox, Julia Biel, Robert Mitchell, Tom Arthurs, Jonathan Bratoeff, Ladyland and Polar Bear to name but a few - have gone from community centre gigs to CMN tours in a few years.

However, the bottom line is that many contemporary British jazz artists do not sell enough albums. They live off gigs and still need to widen their fanbase.

Building bridges to other genres can help. Interestingly, the London Jazz festival is using the Rhythm Factory and the Albany, traditional rock venues, this year. Maybe jazz and rock artists could actually share the stage too. Mixed-genre bills have worked before.

In the past Miles Davis opened up for Neil Young. Today Soweto Kinch could feasibly slot into the same programme as Roots Manuva or De La Soul and Courtney Pine, one of the best live acts to be found in the country, could grace the same stage as Lemar or Damian Marley. And Jamie Cullum. Jazz and pop go a long way back, after all.