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Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee 30 May 2019

30 May 2019 · S5 · Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee

Item of business

Arts Funding

Ken Mathieson Watch on SPTV

The nature of the funding system makes it very complex. Large organisations and established companies are in receipt of regular funding, which is on a three-year cycle, although they can still come a cropper, even if they are respected and well established. I will cite an example of what I am looking for. We are seeing a long-term decline in the audience for jazz, and if there is no audience for it, it will disappear, at least in Scotland. People cannot be expected to put in hours and hours of practice and then play gigs for the same amount of money that was paid in the 1980s, but that is the reality in the jazz world today. Most of the gigs that people can get by picking up the phone and chasing venues will pay £20 to £25 a man. Nobody can live on that, considering that a player of any standard has to practice constantly and play constantly in an improvising situation in order to maintain match fitness. The funding system works against people in the smaller genres. I addressed that issue three or four years ago with the then head of music. He heard what I was saying—that there was a need to generate performance opportunities in order to protect the music. I came up with a model, which I do not claim is foolproof. The situation means that we have to involve the promoters—the people who are going to take a risk and put on something. They have to be part of the dialogue, but they frequently get left out of it. We are sitting here talking about arts funding, but promoters are very important—they are the people who get art to the public, whatever the art is, so they have to be involved. My band has a base-figure fee. There are eight of us, so it is quite a hefty one. The band members are all new professional players who have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. They cannot go out and work for £20 a gig—they have to get a sensible working wage that reflects their talent, and that is quite a sizeable figure. The approach that I came up with is that, in order to get performances, we would give the promoter a 33 per cent discount if the funding organisation covered that amount. The aim was to get performances back into theatres, which have stopped pushing jazz. They will not programme jazz because they think that there is no audience for it and they cannot make money. There is no audience because people have not heard jazz—they do not know what it is, because it has been pushed off the map by commercial music. Jazz is of the instant, even if musicians are working from orchestrations, as my band does. Every solo is of the instant and will never happen again in that form. 09:30 As I have said, the funding system is complex. Our first two funding applications succeeded, but the third was dismissed as more of the same. That application was to get into certain places in order to expand the music further across Scotland. It is easier to get a job for an eight-piece band in Glasgow and Edinburgh than it is in Inverness, Nairn, Helmsdale or any other place that is outside the central belt, but going to such places was a crucial aim of our project, which could never be for one or two years—it had to be evolutionary. The project was not just for my band; I told other people in the business who have good-quality bands that I had a template that they could use to see whether it worked for them, because it had worked for us. The third year when I applied for funding was crucial, because three members of the band were in their 70s and we needed to get in fresh blood so that the band could continue, because it has an international reputation that is worth maintaining. As I said, that application was dismissed as more of the same, but an element of it was to fund rehearsals to find the right people to fill the three chairs. Two band members have retired, but I have stuck with the band and I am still doing all the unpaid admin. Because that application was dismissed, the band went from expecting to have 25 performances in the third application year—those performances were agreed and ready to be contracted for, subject to funding—to having six performances. Nobody can live on six performance fees in a year. I met Creative Scotland’s new head of music and its jazz representative to go through everything. I was given all sorts of things to address and I was encouraged to reapply, but all those points had been covered in fine detail in my application—Creative Scotland just had not understood that. I question how much knowledge the people who do the assessments have about genres and the lives of working artists of whatever genre.

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Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee 30 May 2019

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