About
Welcome to Midhurst Jazz, Food & Blues!
Last November, something extraordinary happened in Midhurst. Over three days, more than five thousand of you joined us across forty-two events in fourteen venues. Jazz standards filled the pubs. Blues rolled through the old coaching inns. Kitchens opened late, musicians sat in with each other past midnight, and the town found a rhythm I don't think any of us had quite heard before.
This year's Festival - November dates to be announced soon - will be bigger and braver and we'll announce artists over the clming weeks. And I'll say this: some of the names will surprise you. A few are among the very best doing this work anywhere in the world.
But the biggest change is this. MJFBF is no longer just a festival.
From May onwards we're opening a year-round programme of events across Midhurst, in multiple venues, each associated with a specific format: “The Sofa Sessions” at the Lion's Den, “The Cellar Sessions” at Fairview Wines, “The Half Note Club” immersive - peirod dress - evenings at Fratelli's, drawing on the great jazz rooms of 1940s through 1960s New York. Sunday afternoon Tea Parties at Kemaellis. A quarterly vinyl fair for jazz, blues and soul collectors (the first of its kind in the country). Each month brings something different, and each carries the same commitment to craft, hospitality, and the feeling that you've walked into something that couldn't happen anywhere else.
And who knows, if you come shopping here on the weekend, you may well find yourself surprised by a lone bluesman strumming in one of our cafes, or a sax player blowing cool in the greengrocers!
This matters for the town. Midhurst sits in one of the most beautiful pockets of Sussex, between the North and South Downs, and it deserves a cultural life that runs all year, not just one weekend in November. The way these days and evenings come together, with local venues, local producers, and an audience that feels more like a community than a crowd, is how places like Hay-on-Wye and Aldeburgh built what they built. Over time. With patience. Together.
So this is an invitation. Come to a Sofa Session on a weeknight. Bring a friend who's never been to a jazz gig. Come back in November. Become a regular face at Fratelli's. Join us as a sponsor, a volunteer, or simply as someone who believes a small town can build something beautiful.
Last year I signed off by saying we were just getting started. I meant it then. I mean it more now.
So, with gratitude and excitement, Midhurst looks forward to welcoming you!
Adam Page
Festival Director, Midhurst Jazz, Food & Blues Festival
Adam Page
Festival Director
Midhurst's Secret Jazz History…
In the 1940s and 1950s, North American jazz and blues musicians were regularly crossing the Atlantic. Artists like Sidney Bechet, Adelaide Hall, Lonnie Johnson, Dexter Gordon, Sarah Vaughan often played prestigious clubs as London, Paris and Copenhagen - still recovering from war - offered them both grateful audiences and relative freedom.
How many US airforce flights that should have continued to Paris but which "had to refuel" at nearby airbases like Westhampnett or Tangmere - dropping off mysterious figures dressed in zoot suits and two-tone spectator shoes, clutching oddly shaped luggage, to be whisked away in the night - may never be known.
But it turns out they were all coming to Midhurst, where some of the 70,000 US and Canadian military personnel based within a 30-mile radius of this sleepy rural town, would discreetly gather late at night to get a taste of the music from home.
The locations of these illicit midnight jam sessions is the stuff of legend. But rumours t
ell of secret cellars under the Cowdray ruins, of the upstairs room in one of the ancient local pubs, and even of the Old Town Library being co-opted for the use of these unlicensed speakeasies...
Midhurst, it would seem, is the dark horse in the history of jazz and blues in Europe...