Went to Music tank discussion and debate last night. They had Roger Wright (Radio 3 controller) and Lewis Carnie (Radio 2 controller) on a platform with Jazz Services’ Chris Hodgkin, Mykaell Rile Stuart Nicholson jazz author and journalist and German festival/radio producer Peter Schultze.

I enjoyed it though I thought Roger Wright (who seems like a perfectly nice chap) had a very easy ride. Never mind talk of jazz portals, I thought I?d been transported into a parallel universe where it was perfectly reasonable for him to talk about ?getting the balance right?. In reality can you talk about ?balance? if it?s true that jazz has about 3% of the airtime on Radio 3?

I did get to the microphone to talk about all the ‘opportunities’ we jazz musicians now had. I was still feeling the influence of George Clooney – went to see ‘Up in the Air’ night before.
The opportunity to play, practise. compose plus of course the opportunity to produce your own records, sell your own records, promote your own gigs, lead your own band, write up info on loads of different websites, why I probably have the opportunity to put my own music on my own radio podcast. Which of course inevitably leads to not having as much opportunity to play as you might like. People laughed last night “it’s the way I tell’em”…