Blowing change: Saxophonist Alexander Beets is the driving force behind the World Jazz Network that is building networks worldwide to bolster resilience.
This weekend tops off two weeks of music festivals in Johannesburg, with both the Joy of Jazz and Womad, the culmination of possibly the longest run of large-scale music events in the city since the Covid pandemic. It began with the Folklore Festival on 16 September and the DStv Delicious Food and Music Festival at Kyalami on 23 and 24 September, as well as smaller heritage weekend music gatherings. There was also supposed to be a Burna Boy mega-concert at FNB Stadium, but that’s another story.
When artists still feel the long-term effects of pandemic closures — fewer venues, static or reduced fees, rising costs and the catch-up expenses of putting a career back together again — festivals offer a desperately needed work lifeline. They’re equally a major joy-boost for audiences. But music festivals aren’t uncontroversial; they can carry heavy environmental costs and pose difficult questions for the cultural economy.
The carbon costs of moving large numbers of performers, support staff and attendees around — particularly by plane, but also petrol and diesel-powered road transport — makes up 80% of festivals’ CO2 load. The kinds of refreshments served, how much printed paper publicity material is created, how power is generated and water used, how everything is cleaned up and disposed of afterwards, all tax the environment. Outdoor festivals, particularly those with campsites, are responsible for about two-thirds of such costs; indoor events for the remainder.
The universally destructive effect of global heating puts those concerns top of the agenda, but others have existed for a while longer.
Festivals can create work opportunities and leave a legacy of skills, draw visitors and create cultural branding that assists long-term regional development. Equally, they can carry their support structures with them and leave nothing behind, and displace and draw resources away from local cultural economies and traditions to the benefit of global commercialism.
When Covid pressed the force-stop button on live performance and travel, festival organisers had no choice but to develop innovative new models or perish. At that time, the questions were simply about survival and holding on to hope. For jazz festivals, the first World Jazz Conference, a hybrid event in 2020, led to the foundation of the World Jazz Network to carry on those conversations. Its second conference was in Amersfoort in the Netherlands early last month, again part of the Amersfoort World Jazz Festival, which is supported by Foundation JazzNL. The focus had shifted from survival to progress. But much new thinking points towards solutions to those other festival problems too.
Dutch tenor saxophonist Alexander Beets — who also features at Joy of Jazz this weekend — is the guiding spirit of the World Jazz Network. More than 30 delegates attended the World Jazz Conference, from the Netherlands, Sicily, Turkey, Eastern Europe and East and South Asia, as well as the commercial jazz hubs of the United Kingdom, Australia and North America. From Johannesburg, one attendee was Andre le Roux of IKS Cultural Consulting, whose research for the 2020 Amersfoort Jazz Festival had helped Beets develop the model for the network.
“Rebuilding music scenes after Covid isn’t only about inbuilt resilience,” says Le Roux. “It’s about growing new forms of resilience, and patterns of reciprocity that can help live music events grow sustainably.” It became clear, he says, that resilience was not simply about money, but more about the relationship capital that organisers could build, both in-country and with potential partners in other countries.
“All kinds of questions exist, with far-from-obvious answers. The mobility issues, for example, are different between vast countries with very remote areas like India or Australia, and an extremely small country like the Netherlands. Very large countries may have artists we’ve never heard of, who are nevertheless superbly talented and highly popular. So if you tour cultural goods and services, how do you work out who’s an ‘equivalent’ artist?”
He believes the answer lies in information-sharing through the relationships that a body like the World Jazz Network fosters: “That’s where the networks of reciprocity get built.”
Much as the cultural boycott of apartheid forced many South African artists to look inwards for opportunities and inspiration, so did Covid.
“For governments that weren’t keen on mobility, Covid was a fantastic opportunity to shut down borders,” Le Roux says. “But at the same time, it made event organisers look for opportunities within localities, to look at existing local artists and venues, and at the possibilities for local and even hyper-local circuits. Where that happened — and at the conference we heard striking examples, for example, from India — it built resilience by putting food in the mouths of indigenous artists and strengthening local performance infrastructure.”
Le Roux believes many organisers are emerging from that period far more confident that successful, high-quality festivals can be built primarily around local resources, artistic and practical.
“We’re going to see many more different kinds of festivals. We’ll put more small towns on the map and, as at Amersfoort, have festivals made up of multiple events in small venues, which stimulate local work and local revenue. We’re no longer talking about a Montreux [Jazz Festival] as the only kind.”
There must still be touring opportunities too — they’re a vital element in cross-fertilising inspiration and reaching audiences, and artists need to travel as part of their professional growth. Le Roux recalls with admiration the closing concert of the Amersfoort event, “supported by what was essentially a multinational pickup band: from South Africa, Ukraine, more — the kind of collaboration that opens the door to unique future collaborations.”
That touring, though, is far less likely to be dominated by the old, carbon-heavy, circus-comes-to-town model. “Through networks, we learn of different artists, not just the mega-mainstream ones. Organisers are able to target performances that suit a particular event or setting. Through the World Jazz Network is partly how, for example, Dumza Maswana and Volley Nchabeleng came to perform at the G20 India Culture Working Group,” he says. “And because of the environmental impact of just one flight, we need to maximise audience access to an artist when they’ve travelled, rather than locking them into contracts that limit performing to one big-ticket concert only.”
He says such new models of music collaboration result primarily from building warm, solid, person-to-person and festival-to-festival relationships. “It’s not really what happens through state-to-state diplomacy. Yes, states do have a role. Festivals can’t fix a country’s transport infrastructure, for instance — but their existence and revenue potential can increase the economic incentives for the state to do so.”
Opening the conference, Beets too had been uncompromising about how vital that rock of sustained relationships was for restoring the resilience of music touring. “This is not,” he admonished solemnly, “speed dating.”