From Music Education to the Festival Stage: Building a diverse and sustainable Scottish jazz scene

Jazz has occupied a defined space within Scotland’s cultural landscape since the 1930s, performed in dance halls, pubs and clubs, and later at urban and rural festivals, while providing the background for dinner dances, wedding celebrations and corporate entertainment. As elsewhere in the UK, jazz has over the years enjoyed peaks and endured troughs in popularity and in present times is facing considerable existential challenges. Chief amongst these challenges are musician wages that have not kept step with rising living costs, a fragile and precarious working environment that has little to no institutional safety net in place and an oversupply of (often academy trained) musicians for a shrinking marketplace (Medbøe et al., 2023). It is tragically ironic that musicianship and creativity have arguably never been of a higher standard, while the delicate ecology that supports jazz in the UK is under severe threat on most fronts.