Glastonbury Festival

The Jazz Lounge

Tony Benjamin Brings Real Jazz Back To Glastonbury

Jazz at Glastonbury has been struggling to find an appropriate space since the Jazz World stage has played host to bigger and bigger artists in recent years, pulling in the crowds but at the expense of a place for its name’s raison d’être. This is due to many factors, and as it stands Jazz World continues to feature some of the best world and jazz related artists from around the world. So the Jazz Lounge has been an idea that has not only been in the pipeline for a few years but is now a much needed development in the festival’s remit of making a space for every relevant musical form today.

Tony Benjamin is a Bristol-based jazz journalist and is the principle writer for Bristol’s high quality entertainment monthly, Venue magazine. Through his longtime friend Dick Vernon (one of Michael Eavis’ many right-hand men), who liked the idea and made the Jazz Lounge become a reality, Benjamin has been the chief booker and has drawn a superb selection of talent from across the UK. Creating a hugely enjoyable space with sofas, tables and chairs and a bar the venue has the exact atmosphere for festival-goers of all persuasions, not just jazz fans, to hear some of the UK’s finest jazz players; some are veterans of years of working around internationally and in the UK, others are young up-and-coming musicians starting to make a name for themselves. I spoke to Tony about his thoughts on creating a new space – that works perfectly – for jazz at Glastonbury.

MF How did the Jazz Lounge come in to being this year?

TB Well it’s been a collaboration between Dick Vernon, who works with Michael Eavis all the time, and I’m a jazz journalist from Bristol, and we’ve had conversations of the problems of locating what’s going on with jazz in the country on a large stage in a festival atmosphere. But also how we would have jazz at the festival for people to see. So what we thought about was what kind of environment would make jazz musicians accessible and what would make audiences come and see them, but also make the music the center of attention. So we came up with the idea of a café bar, with seated tables instead of people standing up in the space and giving the place a kind of stylistic class really. So we aimed to make it feel a bit indoors which is a bit weird at an outdoor festival but that was the sense of contrast that would give it a different flavour.

MF Acoustically though that makes it better for jazz as it tends to not sound as good through a big PA, so it’s a good move from that point of view as well.

TB Also it’s a bigger version of the kind of places the jazz musicians normally play in.

MF The other important point about doing this at Glastonbury is that this is exposing this music to a bigger audience than the regular jazz crowd that are attracted to traditional jazz venues.

TB Yeah, because there has always been jazz jams backstage but that’s only a fairly select crowd that hear those, so we are very committed to this being a very public thing, public access was crucial, but we also expected this to be a give and take thing on both sides. We wanted the audience to be less wild than they would be in an average bar on the other hand we wanted the musicians to deal with people having a good time at a festival. To be honest I’ve only selected musicians of top quality but also those that I know are less precious and more adaptable, but also play very thoughtful and extremely intelligent music in any context. It’s been really nice getting feedback from the audience who are having a really good time and are coming back, and from the musicians that are having a great time and want to play some more.

MF Jazz remains one of the most rebellious forms of music and as such can be challenging, but highly entertaining when seen live, therefore it’s perfect for Glastonbury.

TB And within that, my conception of jazz and the breadth I have of seeing where jazz is, it’s a big envelope now, and it’s more about the approach to the music than what the actual music is – I mean I think some of the best drum and bass DJs are jazz musicians; they find a creative thing and are inspired by the people around them and move with it, they use different musical ingredients, but they don’t play an instrument – they just play records. Equally you can have strange electronic stuff, or electro-acoustic stuff, it’s the spirit of it that is important. So a lot of what I have booked is what you might expect like drums, saxophone, bass, but even then the players are playing stuff you might not expect to hear from such a lineup.

MF What artists define what you wanted to get out of this stage?

TB Well there’s a band on today called The Breathers, that’s a guitarist with improvised vocals and he’s a brilliant loop pedal guy as well, but arranges and rearranges things instead of just playing something and letting it run, creating this kind of Phil Spector wall of sound approach, with a trumpeter. And these two have played the most bizarre gigs, they used to have a residency in a pasta restaurant, which they just started using as a rehearsal space where they developed this thing. So they aren’t going to frighten the horses, it’s very ambient but incredibly smart. And for an afternoon, I was hoping for a sunnier afternoon, but that will be just the right vibe for three o’clock in the afternoon.

Mike Flynn

Bandstand Line-up 2004

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