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

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.