Totally Stockholm 1
Eric Birath, Photo: Viktor Joandi One of the bigg
est musical events on the calendar every year, Stockholm Jazz Festival nurtures the musical heritage of traditional jazz while at the same time building bridges to the casual music lovers who don’t usually venture into that realm. There must have been some doubt along the way about this year’s edition, and things do look just a tad different, but thankfully the festival and its live jazz music will still be going ahead. That’s great news for Stockholm’s live music scene and it would certainly have been a shame to see the October jazz tradition broken, even for something as serious as a global pandemic. The bad news is that the big, international names will not be able to come to spice the festival up. We will, more or less, have to make do with our own domestic Swedish jazz scene. Luckily, that scene’s a very vibrant one, and it’s eager to come out and meet an audience again. Even if the size of said audience still might be capped at 50 people. Eric Birath, the head honcho of the classic jazz palace Fasching, and the Stockholm Jazz festival director, helps us untangle the story. I’m sure there has been a lot of back and forth regarding whether this year’s festival was going to go ahead, and just how it was going to look. Could you talk us through your ups and downs along the way to what we will experience here in October? Usually we release some of the headliners of the festival in April, then have a second release in May. At that time this year, we were all still staying home, not seeing friends, hardly going to shops and the thought of even going to a festival seemed very far away. Gradually, as the summer progressed and the covid cases fell, our hopes of putting on a festival in October seemed more plausible. We finally decided to go through with the festival, even if it meant only 50 people in the audience at every gig. Now it looks like we might be able to get up to 500 people at the largest venues that we use, although we still don’t have final word on this from the authorities. It’s of course a shame that live music has had to take a back seat to health concerns for this long. When it comes to jazz, would you agree with me it’s a genre where that interaction or link between the audience and the performer in a live setting is even more important? I think all performance arts are dependent on the interaction between audience and performer, but jazz, with its elements of improvisation and often acoustic setting, feeds off this interaction even more. The clubs and venues used for jazz concerts are often small, making the encounter between performer and audience close and intimate. An attentive audience can trigger a reaction on stage and vice versa, taking the experience of the concert and music to another level. It must have been incredibly hard to attract any international artists, considering the circumstances, with travel restrictions and quarantines? In any normal year Stockholm Jazz Festival features artists from 10-15 different countries, this year it is very much a Swedish affair. Touring artists are dependent on being able to play in many different countries and cities in order to finance the tour, so it’s not only the situation in Sweden but in the whole of Europe that has forced most artists to stay in their home countries this fall. We were hoping for some US artists, who still hadn’t cancelled their tours in late August, but the entry restrictions for non-EU citizens were prolonged until October 31, putting an end to that hope. We have had to cancel concerts by artists from Brazil, USA, UK, Norway and so on. So you can focus more on the Swedish artists instead, but don’t most of the big Swedish names play the festival every year anyway? The festival has around 200 performances every year, so yes, some of the bigger names in Swedish jazz play almost every year with one project or another. We do however try to make sure that there is a relevancy to the artists that we book that particular year - it can be a new album that has received critical acclaim, a new musical setting or a popular breakthrough. 9