Jazz at Chichester Real ale and Jazz

Jazz and real ale. What’s in a name and how to bottle a big decision?

We get a lot of people asking us about the J word.

That’s Jazz, of course.

Specifically, people ask us why we’re called the Chichester Real Ale and Jazz Festival when, these days at least, there’s not a lot of jazz to be heard in Priory Park each July – apart from our Jazz in the Park Saturday afternoons of course.

It’s something we’ve asked ourselves many times.

When we started, 30 years ago, we were a tiny jazz festival. Over time we expanded the range of the music we offered – cautiously at first – with excursions into swing and other genres not a million miles away from Jazz.

When we introduced a Blues Night each Thursday (back in the days when we ran three nights over one long weekend) we noticed something straight away.

It was much more popular than the jazz.

And over a great many years the interest in the jazz bands we continued to present diminished to the point where we needed to do something different.

That’s when we took the plunge to bring in better known acts from the worlds of soul, rock, pop, blues and a plethora of other musical styles to boot.

So many people knew as as Chichester Real Ale and Jazz festival though, that we have never had the guts to change our name.

We felt that we had a good reputation and were well known locally, so frankly, we bottled the decision to change our name….

…every year.

…for the last ten years.

We’ve sort of settled now on Chichester RAJF as a name. A terrible compromise.

Luckily most of the people who visit the festival know what they are getting and the number of people who complain about the relatively thin jazz component of our musical line-up are few and far between.

So Real Ale and Jazz, Jazz and Real Ale, RAJF – you can call us what you like.

We’re just trying to put on a great music festival in Chichester that everyone can enjoy.

Tags: history, jazz, music