Katie Melua to headline this year’s festival

This morning we’ve announced (with the help of Spirit FM) the line-up for this year’s RAJF.

And we’re really excited to have an artist as well-known as Katie Melua headlining this year’s event – especially as Katie has a new album out next month which, by all accounts, is going to be something pretty special.

Katie’s been working with uber-cool producer William Orbit – who told the Times last week that Katie “can take her voice places I’ve never heard anyone else go”.

I don’t think he meant Chichester.

It’s our 30th birthday this year and we’re celebrating that on the last night of the Festival with The Orchestra – made up of former members of ELO and ELO II. You can find out more about their history here.

Stuart pointed out that 30 summers ago, when the first RAJF took place, ELO were number 1 in the UK singles chart (Xanadu – in case you’re wondering), so there’s something appropriate about marking our big 3 – 0 with some of the stars of 1980.

We’re pretty pleased with the rest of our line up too – but more of that later.

Posted on April 22, 2010 in festival news music

Tags: history, music

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.

Posted on March 5, 2010 in about real ale and jazz music

Tags: history, jazz, music