De Beauvoir Jazz Festival

0:12Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. This time we feature the inaugural edition of the De Beauvoir Jazz Festival, set to take place in London on July 11 and 12. Set up by local resident and designer Payal Vadva, it is a jazz festival for the neighborhood, integrating different spaces and inviting world-class jazz artists from around the world. It was a pleasure to speak with both Payal and Peter Horsfall, their artistic director.

0:46Payal Vadva and Pete Horsfow from the Bivoire Jazz Festival, the very first one. I might start with you, Payal, you know, the founder of the festival, if I may say. And that's, is that your first festival, something similar that you're organizing, actually? Tell us a bit more, because you come from a slightly different background. I come from a completely different world. It is my first festival that I'm organizing. I'm very grateful for Pete to have put some trust into this one and said yes, to have been a part of the mix. I've worked in design and civic innovation for about 20 odd years before this.

1:19It was time for me to start thinking about what I wanted to do next, particularly outside my doorstep. And I think talk is cheap. You can preach at other people and try and do things through them. But it takes a lot of effort to do it yourself. So trying to do something that makes a difference in the neighborhood that I live in. We'll talk about the neighborhood very soon, but also jazz was always one of your passions as well. So I really like the music. I am married to a man who is an encyclopedia on jazz. So I think he's more obsessed with it than I am. But it's the kind of music that is, you know, all over the house at all points in time.

1:57I'm very interested in performing arts at large and in cultural production. and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how, I guess those things make a difference to society. So there's something in there that I'm exploring. But if I'd like pop more, this could have been the Dubovat Pop Festival. So yeah, but I think I do like jazz more than I like pop. What about you, Pete? How did you get involved actually with the festival? And I want to know a bit more about your background as well. So Pyle approached me at a gig, which is why I spend 99 % of my time doing. Not bad, that's not bad. But maybe 98%.

2:33As she rightly says, you know, there's a lot of people come up to you at a lot of gigs and say a lot of things. You know, I want to do this, I want to do that. Oh, could you come and play for us here? Could you come and play for us there? You know, kind of people promise you the world, you know. So it's great to meet somebody that actually has got not just the intention, but the willingness to do the grind of organizing cultural events, you know. It's the same with gigs, I find. Maybe for some people from the outside it seems, oh, you turn up and play and it's wonderful and everybody loves it and then you go home and it's just great.

3:04And whilst there's a nugget of truth somewhere in there, it's very deeply hidden because the rest of it is actually the grind of rehearsing, practising every day, every single day for donkey's, donkey's, donkey's years, you know, setting up gigs, making sure everybody's there, making sure everybody knows what they're playing. And then actually the performance is the easy bit, is the pleasure of all of it, you know. The rest of it is the grind. So anyway, it's nice to work with anybody that is willing to put in that time because that's really what needs to be done for anything to happen. It's interesting what Peter was saying because I can imagine that, you know, making your fast, especially if it's the first one, can be quite challenging.

3:45You have to talk authorities and, you know. So tell us about some of those challenges. Was it how you expected? It has been. I guess a lot of the work I used to do in my other life before I decided to start a festival involved trying to bring a lot of stakeholders around the table and get people to identify what was needed. So I spent a decent amount of time in community engagement. I spent a lot of time building digital products. So when you do that, you have to do a lot of user research. So there are some transferable skills from my other life that I can bring to this. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand who the big, I guess, personalities were within our neighborhood, who were doing some really interesting things for the community.

4:33Spent a decent amount of time getting to know them better. I knew some of them, but I didn't know all of them. I spent a lot of time meeting businesses. We have many fiercely independent businesses in the neighborhood. So really understanding how they may react to a particular event in the neighborhood happening. But also a lot of time with Hackney Council, who've been incredibly supportive. We've had three local councillors who I've been seeking advice from. Chris Kennedy, who works at Hackney Council. Joe and Jasmine, who are our local councillors, have been nothing but incredible. So I think it's been really nice to get to this point, having worked with people rather than do something at them, which is what I've always been very conscious of.

5:20It takes work, making sure people understand where you're coming at things from and why you're trying to do things a certain way. And we are a community interest company. So also the governance of, I guess, the organization, making sure people understand that this is not for profit has made a big difference to setting things up in the right way. And Peter, I think there was definitely a space for a festival like this, you know, looking at some numbers, there's more people listening to jazz. I think it's going through a good moment, jazz music in general, especially young musicians. How do you see the world of jazz today?

5:55Are you excited about this new artist and everything? I think if I could give you a very bland press release answer, which would be, yes, it's wonderful that the jazz renaissance in London is just, you know, getting to dizzy new heights. But the reality is, how do I see the jazz scene? I think there's always an element in it where you look at the press around something. It says that there's a renaissance of something. You think we've been here all along, you know, not just me, but I learned from much older musicians than me. as should be the case and they pass things down. But especially in a city like London, aside from New York, I think maybe New Orleans as well, in a very different way, they've all got their own styles.

6:40But the scene is incredibly strong in London with the standard of players, the breadth and depth, the best in Europe by quite a long way if you want to be a regular giggy musician. And so I think it's great to have these bigger cultural events that highlights, it kind of highlights what's already there, which is, again, how it should be and it's what we're trying to do with the festival. It's not to say we're bringing in things from far afield. There's nothing wrong with that. But the style of this festival is, look at what we already have and let's celebrate it, you know, not only in the neighbourhood but in London at large, you know.

7:13We've got world, there's no other way to describe it, world-class musicians who are working every day, every week, every month in London at venues. you might be on your way out on an evening, you might be passing, I don't know, Ronnie Scott's or the Peter Express on Dean Street or any number of different venues in London. And you might be finding homegrown talent that's always been here, is still here. And we're just shining a light on that. That's fantastic. And Pai, I want to go back to the idea of this being a neighbourhood festival. I was reading the line-up and the venues and that's very much a neighborhood kind of festival.

7:53And I think that's not necessarily the case with other jazz festivals. And by the way, for our listeners who are not from London, the Bavois is in a beautiful area here, right, of the UK. I think we need to kind of tell them. It really is. It's a deep privilege to live in it. I found myself in that area 16 years ago when I moved from India to London and I found a place on Gumtree, as one would 16 years ago, in Dubowa. So I've been in love with the neighbourhood. Very lucky. Very lucky. It wasn't what it is like today then. It wasn't as trendy, possibly. It's a lovely neighbourhood that's nestled between Islington and Hackney.

8:33More of it sits within Hackney than it does within Islington. What's really lovely about the neighbourhood is that it's got a very specific character that's almost reflective of all of London in one little area. Most people walk, most people cycle, and it's not completely by accident. It's all down to design. In the late 1960s, 1970s, there was a plan to actually raise the entire neighborhood to the ground and build a big highway. And a bunch of residents got together and protested against it. And in doing so, not only did they save most of the neighborhood from being raised to the ground, they actually managed to convert most of the neighborhood into a low-traffic neighborhood.

9:14So, you know, we talk about low traffic neighborhoods today in London, but it is one of London's oldest low traffic space. It's been about 50 years. You know, the way they turned it into a low traffic neighborhood is by planting cherry trees around the neighborhood. It's really lovely because what you have is the most beautiful part of London where people can cycle, people can walk. And that's how most people get around with lots of different spaces that are possibly not spaces where you would host music regularly. But the point of the festival is to open them up to people, to help people discover those spaces, understand the built environment of that neighborhood, but also begin to appreciate what cultural production can do to those spaces.

9:53So quite excited about it. We've got about eight different venues for one of the days of the two-day festival. And these eight venues will be simultaneous venues. It's a multi-venue festival. Can't wait for it to happen in July. Amazing. And, Peter, I wonder if you could share perhaps some of the names and performance. Will it be a mix of kind of people, well-known artists and maybe not so well-known? So tell us a bit more about the curation. We've got probably, look, if you like clarinet, if you like the clarinet as an instrument, I'll tell you, this festival is for you. We've got three. Honestly, there are armies of clarinet fans heading to the festival.

10:30Now, we've got three of the, I'd say, the world's best jazz clarinet players playing. The first being Giacomo Smith, who people might know from the band Candice Smithies, which I was also a part of. Also performing worldwide, performing concertos in concert halls, as well as every major jazz club that you can think of. In addition to him, we've got Adrian Cox, who's like a specialist in the history of the clarinet, really. He's kind of a walking encyclopedia of the history of New Orleans clarinet playing. So we've got him playing in the church, delivering a set of spirituals in the New Orleans style.

11:02and also we've got Ewan Bleach who is again spent much much time in New Orleans playing with a famous band out there called Tuba Skinny in London and again all these people are out there working in London a lot but we're just shining that extra little bit of light on them that they so rightly deserve so that's three clarinet players for you just for a start So if you're listening and you're a clarinet fan you have to come now How small is that niche do you think? Well, I think there's more than we expect, right? I mean, we've got a lot more going on. We've got Georgia Cecile playing on our opening night.

11:37I'm so excited about that. Also, just incredible to see a woman as amazing as her having agreed to play a festival like ours. We're at a first-time festival, so I'm so grateful she's agreed to play. For sure. And I think Georgia Cecile, she's like, how do I say this? she's plowing her own furrow, a bit like someone in the pop world, like Little Sims or someone like that, is basically eschewing big labels and things like that and is doing everything herself and winning. Great to see her headlining festivals, headlining Ronnie Scott, and headlining our festival as well. Pai, I need to ask you the basics as well.

12:14If somebody's interested and they want to get a ticket or find out a bit more, what should they do? So come see our website. It's called debovajazzfestival.co.uk. If you're trying to figure out how to spell this, think of the author Simone Debova, and it is effectively the surname in there. So, DebovaJazzFestival.co.uk. All of our tickets are on our website. We have a range of things going on over the course of the two days. So, the festival is on the 11th of July and the 12th of July. 11th is our opening night, and we've got Georgia, and we've also got Gordon Webster flying in from New York, playing effectively a swing set at Bishopsgate Institute.

12:57So we're very excited about that day. And then on the 12th... That's if you're a Lindy Hop dancer. So if you're a dancer, that's the one for you in the festival for sure. Absolutely. And on the 12th, we've got a whole day's events planned. So it starts at 9am and it ends at 11pm. And I'll try not to hog all this time on the radio to tell you about the entire programme, but there's a lot going on. we've got approximately about eight free things going on at the festival and we've got a whole lot of other gigs approximately about seven of them that are ticketed tickets are highly subsidised thanks to an Arts Council grant Thank you Arts Council England I know I'm so grateful because it really helps us make sure we're pricing things right and we're also able to offer subsidised tickets to residents of the three local estates in the neighbourhood and so those are£5 tickets and so we're very grateful for Arts Council Especially in these days of ticket prices for gigs we all know what's happened in the last 10-20 years so it's important to us to keep it accessible in any way that we could and the grant from the Arts Council has certainly helped with that I think in addition to the Arts Council grant it's also amazing to have Englefield Charitable Trust having helped us out with a small grant they're a neighbourhood charity and it really goes a long way to make sure that we can make sure everyone's included in the festival and everyone's invited.

14:22That's amazing. Listen, Payal and Pete, thank you so much for coming in. A pleasure. Pleasure, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Payal and Peter. For more information and tickets, go to debavoirejazzfestival.co.uk slash tickets. The show was edited by Elliot Greenfield. Thank you for listening.

14:47Thank you.