interested in jazz can afford an education in jazz. The main outcomes, apt form education, are a youth orchestra, the preservation of musical heritage, scholarships for professional musicians to further their music studies.
Such case studies of successful models can provide useful examples of transferrable ideas, Azucena said. In the Q&A that followed the most pertinent question that arose was how do you start to convince your government of the need to invest in a music strategy? Azucena acknowledged that there was no easy solution but that key to Sound Diplomacy’s success has been presenting statistics to government cultural agencies.
It is essential, Azucena said, to convince the government’s cultural agencies that music is not a financial cost to the city but a source of revenue. She also stressed the importance of involving the music community, the people who really care about the outcomes, in the input process. “You are the ones who need to advocate for this to happen,” Azucena said.
To the question as to who hires Sound Diplomacy, Azucena said that there is usually one person in a city council who is a big music fan who pushes for this to happen. Try to find an ally in the city council who is a music lover, Azucena suggested.
Jazz Who’s Coming? Chair: Tina Heine (Germany) Tina Heine, of Salzburg Jazz Festival steered a discussion group attended by festival directors, venue managers and booking agents. The subject of the group discussion was jazz audience development, knowing their demographic make-up and ways of communicating with them. Tina began by distributing a questionnaire on jazz audiences, saying that this is just part of a programme on audience development that the EJN will be focusing on in the next two to three years. Meetings will be held at different festivals during this period to share information and strategies.
By way of introduction Tina gave some background on her activities. She founded Elbjazz in Hamburg and currently runs Jazz in The City in Salzburg. Both festivals have multiple venues and programme a wide variety of jazz. Both festivals aspire to reach new audiences. Tina explained that the motivation for Elbjazz came from running her restaurant, where she programmed jazz on Monday nights, from soul and funk to free improvisation. By word of mouth the Monday night jazz sessions became very popular. Tina deduced that people came because of the atmosphere and because they knew they would have a good time. Tina learned that the success of staging concerts lay in how you present them and the atmosphere around them and she began thinking about a large jazz festival for Hamburg.
What, Tina asked herself, was needed to make a jazz festival happen? She thought that, like the restaurant, she needed to find cool places where people love being anyway, to bring the music to where the people are and think carefully about original market strategies. Elbjazz was set up in the 43