Jazz Festivals in the Time of COVID-19: Exploring Exposed Fragilities, Community Resilience and Industry Recovery

Abstract

This chapter considers how four festivals across the UK – Brecon Jazz Festival, Brilliant Corners in Belfast, Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, and Manchester Jazz Festival – have adapted their processes and practices in order to reimagine the jazz festival during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the emerging post-pandemic period. We explore challenges and opportunities through the virtual live music experience; the longevity of economic models developed during COVID-19; relationships with audiences, musicians and funders; and changes in the role of festivals and their teams. Building on our previous work, we maintain that the jazz scene is a particularly frag-ile and fragmentary element within the wider UK music industries. In the absence of certain useful infrastructure – such as agents and touring networks – many jazz mu-sicians rely upon the festival circuit. This reliance became increasingly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic when the cancellation of music festivals removed a large seasonal component of musicians’ annual income. We argue that the insights explored through this genre-specific example will offer general lessons for the UK music indus-tries as they look towards a post-pandemic future.

Citation

Raine, S., Medboe, H., & Dias, J. (2022). Jazz Festivals in the Time of COVID-19: Exploring Exposed Fragilities, Community Resilience and Industry Recovery. In G. Morrow, D. Nordgård, & P. Tschmuck (Eds.), Rethinking the Music Business: Music Contexts, Rights, Data, and COVID-19 (109-127). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09532-0_7

• Online Publication Date: Sep 8, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 12, 2022
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 109-127
• Series Title: Music Business Research
• Series ISSN: 2522-0829
• Book Title: Rethinking the Music Business: Music Contexts, Rights, Data, and COVID-19
• ISBN: 9783031095313
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09532-0_7
• Keywords: Music business; Covid-19; Jazz Festivals
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2915341