In the Observer (22nd January 2017 Peter Bazalgett’s wrote an article “The power of culture – what I learned after four years at the helm of our arts”, this was a plug for his book “The Empathy Instinct”. You can read reviews of the book elsewhere. However for all his talk of “empathy” and the […]
January 9, 2016 – 12:57 PM
Mark Brown’s article in the Guardian on the 4th January 2016, “Stage set for drama as ENO faces the financial music” demonstrates in graphic detail the problem with the Arts Council and arts funding; a lack of an explicit art form policy that holds the Arts Council to account for its funding decisions. Before […]
January 9, 2016 – 12:48 PM
On the 24th December 2015 there was an article by Simon Jenkins on London’s ability to drain resources from the rest of the UK. Simon Jenkins highlighted the problem of a metropolitan mafia and celebrities with vanity projects that drain scarce resources from the regions and underfunded art forms such as jazz and folk. London […]
December 31, 2015 – 11:17 AM
More news in The Guardian on the proposed £278 million concert hall for London (17.12.16). This a prima facie case of the metropolitan cultural mafia at work. The problem with the arts in England is there is no concrete policy for the arts that distributes public funding in an equitable, structured way. Not a squeak […]
In the Guardian on the 28th May 2015 “Arts Council boss promises more of a two way street”. The new CEO of the Arts Council Darren Henley was at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards at the House of Commons on the 10th March 2015 when I made an acceptance speech. I drew attention to the appallingly […]
The Arts Council published a policy for the support of jazz in 1996 and then 4 years later it was dropped in favour – as I recall – of “the bigger picture”. Needless to say no real resources had been allocated to the policy. In Paragraph 62 the Arts Council say clearly that they will […]
In 1993 the Arts Council conducted a national review of jazz. Jazz In, issue 29 for Oct/Dec 1993 wrote an editorial on the review and it makes interesting reading; in fact it could be published tomorrow. Please see: Jazz In Issue 29 Oct-Dec 1993 Arts Council Review of Jazz
I have just completed a paper on “Public investment of jazz – a coherent policy for jazz, changing demographics, live music and coping with the increasing supply of jazz musicians”. This paper examines: A level playing field for jazz The paucity of public funding for jazz The lack of a coherent policy for jazz in […]
On the 17th October I wrote to the Arts Council drawing attention to the fact that their own statistics, reported in the PRS magazine for the summer of 2014, stated that jazz received just two percent of the available monies for music. Opera received a percentage increase of 22.5% which gave opera and music thatre […]
In the recent National Portfolio Organisation funding round for 2015/2018 Jazz Services funding application was unsuccessful. There were a number of unhelpful comments and allegations on social media sites. These gratuitous comments brings to mind Edmund Burke’s comments on the publication, ‘The present state of the nation’ – “Well stored with pious frauds, and like […]