Being an unashamed jazz fan, I must confess to spending too much time wondering why my favourite music has apparently failed to catch on as a popular theme for hotel bars and restaurants throughout the Gulf.
An outsider could be forgiven for thinking that we’re all mad about jazz in this region. I point as evidence to the annual Dubai Jazz Festival - one of the top musical events in a city that stages ever more of them, which took place last month — and other jazz festivals, large and small, in Lebanon (Baalbek and Beiteddine) and Oman (Sohar).
There are working big bands (you know, the large, brassy jazz orchestras like the ones you see on American black and white films from the 1930s and ‘40s) in Abu Dhabi and Doha, although the one in Dubai — of which I was once a proud member — alas stopped gigging some years back.
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And of course, the most exciting news for our music was the opening in 2012 of a branch of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) at the St. Regis Doha.
JALC is a not-for-profit organisatiGuon set up by Wynton Marsalis, probably the world’s most famous living jazz trumpeter and a man famous for liking old-style melodic, swinging jazz, rather than the more frenetic or avant garde stuff.
Jazz-loving friends of mine report finding it hard to drag themselves away from the venue after a great evening of live jazz direct from the US, and some good food and drink to boot.
I understand through the grapevine that the JALC exists in Doha largely thanks to the personal enthusiasm for the music of the hotel’s owner, Omar Hussein Alfardan, who took advantage of St. Regis’ global tie-up with the JALC brand. I have to wonder whether without his impetus, an objective analysis of local demand would have merited such an investment.
The truth is that most people like the general image of jazz, rather than the actual music. Jazz conjures up pictures of alluringly dark and smoky clubs, snappily dressed musicians in the spotlight, pouring their hearts out through their shiny trumpets and saxophones, or hunched intensely over the piano or double bass, and hip and elegant clientele digging the vibe.
In reality, there’s only a handful of us who are real enthusiasts, who know the history of the genre and the names of the artists to look for. That’s why the Dubai Jazz Festival (surely it’s time to rename it?) is headlined by pop and rock artists, without whose presence each year it would surely have failed.
That’s also why there are so few hotel jazz outlets of any longevity in our region — I’m thinking of the jazz club in the Hilton Abu Dhabi and in Dubai, the Blue Bar at the Novotel DWTC and the Music Room at the Majestic Hotel. A number of other hotel jazz venues and jazz-themed promotions have come and gone in Gulf hotels over the years, but to be honest, it’s much cheaper to get a Filipino pop band (and boy, can they play!).
When it comes to jazz and F&B venues, with a heavy heart, I would say it’s important to recognise that one is dealing with a tiny, rarified niche market interest, and not to let oneself be mesmerised by glamourous associations into thinking that it is somehow still a mainstream music or even considered ‘cool’ by many people.
But I must admit, I still dream of those days when it was. As the Genius Guide to Jazz put it: “Musicians in the fifties were the very epitome of everything cool. Just the presence of Miles Davis and John Coltrane lowered the earth’s average temperature by 2.4 degrees....”
About the Author:
Guy Wilkinson is a director of Viability, a hospitality and property consulting firm in Dubai. For more information, e-mail: guy@viability.ae
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