Jazz Fest Prez Ruth Griggs featured in The Buzz podcast from Jazz Journalists Association

The new episode the Jazz Journalists Association podcast The Buzz features JJA Jazz Hero Ruth Griggs, president of the Board of the Northampton Jazz Festival, talking with Lawrence Peryer. about serving established and new audiences.

Peryer and Griggs discuss the trade-off facing a fifteen-year-old, mostly-free festival built for a loyal, older jazz audience: book an artist who can pull in a younger crowd, or keep playing to the room you already have.

Griggs traces the festival's history from its accidental start in 2011, when five men more interested in reviving a defunct food fair backed into a jazz festival almost as an afterthought, through its 2017 relaunch as a genuinely jazz-focused event spread across Northampton's churches, galleries, and the eight-hundred-seat Academy of Music. No food trucks, no vendors: the festival sends people into the town's own restaurants and shops instead, which Griggs credits as much as the music for its financial health.

This year's headliner, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, is the pressure test. Benjamin plays jazz, hip hop, R&B, and funk in the same set, and Griggs, a marketing strategist by trade, has been restructuring the festival's outreach around her: shifting weight from Facebook to Instagram, hiring an intern to research college radio stations and newspapers across Albany, New Haven, Hartford, and Worcester, and reaching out to other festivals with more diverse audiences to help promote the booking. Griggs is candid that she doesn't yet know what will work, only that the old methods won't.

Griggs also talks about what keeps out-of-town artists coming back, and why the festival's pipeline into UMass Amherst, Smith College, Amherst College, and now Northampton's public schools gets equal billing in Griggs's account of what keeps the thing alive.