Midstream, Crossing That River: Ruth Griggs on the Northampton Jazz Festival

For this episode of The Buzz, Lawrence Peryer talks with 2025 JJA Jazz Hero Ruth Griggs, longtime director of the Northampton Jazz Festival, about 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.

(The musical excerpts heard in this episode are “So You Want to Be a Woman” by Somi featuring Lakecia Benjamin, and “RonJackRuba,” an unplanned improvisation from Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s 2021 album Skyline. A companion playlist for this episode featuring those songs and other artists mentioned is available on Spotify.)

Buzzworthy Notes

Guest & Host

Ruth Griggs — director, Northampton Jazz Festival

Lawrence Peryer — host; managing editor of The Buzz

Discussed

Northampton Jazz Festival — official site

Lakecia Benjamin — this year's headliner; saxophonist, six-time Grammy nominee

Academy of Music — Northampton's 800-seat theater, festival's largest venue

BOMBYX Center for Arts & Equity — Florence, Massachusetts venue, where Bill Charlap performed after the festival

Bill Charlap — pianist; praised the festival's hospitality after a BOMBYX performance

Miki Yamanaka — pianist; performed a solo set at last year's festival

Bonnie Johnson — WICN's Colors of Jazz host, Worcester; interviewed Yamanaka after her festival set

Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival — the single-stage model Griggs says she's studying

Max Roach and Yusef Lateef — among the jazz musicians who taught at UMass Amherst, part of the festival's regional lineage

Ron Carter — cited alongside Lakecia Benjamin as an example of the festival's range

Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.

This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need. Visit jazzfoundation.org.

This podcast is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Lawrence Peryer: Hello and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers, and broadcasters focused on jazz.

I'm Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member and managing editor of The Buzz.

Every festival built around a single genre eventually hits the same problem: the audience that got you started isn't the audience that keeps you alive. Ruth Griggs runs the Northampton Jazz Festival, now in its fifteenth year in western Massachusetts, and this year's headliner forced the question early. Saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin’s music is a modern blend of jazz, hip hop, R&B, and funk, and booking her means Griggs has to find listeners who may not think of themselves as jazz festival people. We talked about how a festival that started as a food fair with a jazz problem became one of the more distinctive, walkable events in the country, what she's actually trying this year to reach a new audience, and what she considers a win a year from now. Here's our conversation.

Tell me about Northampton, the music scene, and the festival's role in that milieu.

Ruth Griggs: The Northampton music scene is coming back after COVID, after the Iron Horse being shuttered, after just the stuffing getting knocked out of us. As you may know, Northampton is known for a number of different things, but one of them is its music, and the music is very broad in genre.

Smith College is right here in Northampton, offering more classical performance opportunities for audiences and students. But downtown we're known more for indie, Americana, bluegrass, and singer-songwriter, and, in a much more up-and-coming way, jazz.

The Northampton Jazz Festival, now celebrating its fifteenth year, is one of the reasons jazz is really taking hold in Northampton. It's still not the primary genre people flock to. I think that's probably true of jazz in most cities around the world. But we have, of course, a wonderful legacy of jazz from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, right over the river from us, with Max Roach and Yusef Lateef and all sorts of incredible jazz musicians having played there, taught there, and developed programs there. That's still an important feeder for us, the faculty and students coming out of the UMass jazz program, and Amherst College as well.

So jazz is definitely an important part of Northampton, and having an annual jazz festival, and now music all year round, is a really important message to the world. I had one young, jazz-adjacent person move here, and they were like, "Whoa, Northampton has a jazz festival? That is so cool. I'm really psyched about that." We've had other long-standing, regular jazz happenings here outside of the festival that have also been major contributors to the jazz scene.

Lawrence Peryer: Tell me about the identity of the festival. Part of what I'm curious about is what a jazz festival is in 2026. That runs the spectrum from small regional single-day festivals up to multi-day, multi-weekend festivals that have very little actual identity with jazz in terms of the talent they book. Purism aside, which I'm not interested in being about, I'm more curious about how Northampton has chosen to identify itself as a jazz festival, and what that means in terms of booking, evolving, and reaching new audiences.

Ruth Griggs: Yeah, it's a big question, and I'm going to see how I can tackle that. The Northampton Jazz Festival was started in 2011 by, frankly, five white guys who had just as much interest in bringing back the Taste of Northampton, a food fair that had died out for twenty years, as they did in having a jazz festival, probably more so.

But based on the type of guys they were, they brought in the beer tents, the food, the food trucks, and the food competitions. And voilà, there was the Northampton Jazz Festival, which, again, was a compilation of a number of different activities, and jazz was just one of them.

That lasted about five years, and then it died, because it wasn't pure in its focus. It wasn't pure in its mission.

When I came back to restart the jazz festival in 2017, the folks I knew were totally focused on jazz. They were more purists. They loved jazz, they loved the jazz form, more traditional jazz, I'd say. We brought together a new board and decided that instead of staging the music behind Main Street in a parking lot for one day, we'd have it all over town, in different venues throughout Northampton, which is a very walkable, accessible, friendly community.

We have it in everything from the Iron Horse to the Unitarian Society to Edwards Church to a gallery to a major arts center, and then Pulaski Park, which is outside, and the Academy of Music, an eight-hundred-seat theater. We deliberately have it all over town so that people walk to get a coffee, walk to get a bite to eat, walk to enjoy the galleries or the merchants. We don't have food trucks. We don't have vendors, because Northampton is just that: it's right at your fingertips, and you can get whatever you want there. So part of our success, financially, honestly, is that we are there for the community. We support the merchants, we support the restaurants. We have a Jazz Strut on Friday night at eight different breweries, bars, and restaurants where we place jazz musicians. We're there to add vitality and positive energy and spirit to Northampton, and that's been a winning combination for us.

The challenge is that we're putting musicians in spaces that hold eighty people all the way up to spaces that hold eight hundred. But what I've heard from audience members about the Northampton Jazz Festival is that it's accessible, it's intimate, it's manageable. People feel comfortable and safe here. It's not one of these big, flashy events where all you can really see are the musicians on a screen. It's the exact opposite. Every single performance, you have an opportunity to meet the musician, because it's in a church or a gallery, so of course you're going to meet them. Even at the Academy of Music, you meet the headliner afterward. So there's that sense of interacting not only with your fellow audience members, but with downtown, with the merchants, and with the musicians. I think, in this day and age, that's a little more unique.

Lawrence Peryer: That sounds like a beautiful model. There are plenty of towns I visit, maybe tertiary markets, that are very walkable, have a sense of history in the architecture, that at some point were thriving industrial towns, or just older, early-twentieth-century environments well suited for the model you just articulated. There are local restaurants, galleries, an art scene. Using music to tie all that together, to attract people, is a wonderful kind of civic outreach. Before we move on to some of the business questions I have, I think I have a question about booking that may get us there. Could you talk about the challenges the producers face in terms of the venue portfolio they need to fill, and about the strategy behind booking and its relationship to financial success? How do you think about audience outreach? Are you thinking about the demographic coverage you need? How strategic is the thinking and planning behind booking, as opposed to being opportunistic?

Ruth Griggs: I think that's the next major mountain we need to climb. My board is quite diverse: we have a ten-member, all-volunteer board, an all-volunteer organization, no one gets paid. It's diverse in terms of age, but not ethnicity. I think the challenge we're definitely leaning into now, as we enter a strategic planning process, is our relevance in the musicians we book going forward.

We've leaned quite traditional, and that's been successful for us, but we need to do more. This year our headliner is Lakecia Benjamin, who you probably know as a rising, edgy, forty-something-year-old out of New York who plays the alto saxophone like she's going to burn the place down. She's incredible, but she plays hip hop, she plays R&B, she plays funk, and she plays jazz. Our audience is an older, more traditional audience, and we need to find some new members out there.

Being a marketing strategist by trade, one of the things I'm recognizing with Lakecia Benjamin as our headliner is that we're challenged now to find a new audience, and we'd better get out there and do it. So I want to talk to people like you, and digital marketing experts, and my radio stations, and all the colleges and universities, and figure out how we nurture a new audience. It's not just for Lakecia Benjamin, it's for the future of the jazz festival, because jazz is changing. Jazz isn't just what was played in the fifties anymore. You've got to lean into hip hop, into funk, into R&B, because the Lakecia Benjamins of the world are what jazz is going to be.

It's not easy to convince everyone of that, but as a marketing strategist, I embrace change, and I recognize that change is a constant. I think that's a difficult challenge for any festival that wants to nurture a new audience to come and hear these new, rising flavors.

Lawrence Peryer: It's very interesting that you frame it that way, because that's, to me, always a historical central tension in the jazz universe: artists don't sit still. They push the envelope. They barely recognize genre. Some artists don't even want the word jazz applied to them; some hate it. All that aside, the artists are going where the artists go, yet there's a commentariat, whether journalists, fans, or business people, who all have their own notion of what jazz is, and it's a fascinating interplay. But if you're going to ride the wave and follow the artists, which I think is always the key, that's just my perspective, you have to adapt and change, as you said. Can you talk a little about channels, platforms, or tactics? What are you doing differently? What are you trying?

Ruth Griggs: We are literally midstream, crossing that river as we speak. At my call at one o'clock, I'm going to talk to our digital marketing folks and pose that challenge to them. We're talking about asking other jazz festivals that maybe appeal to a more diverse audience whether they'd be willing to help us promote Lakecia to their audience. I'm also hiring an intern this week, tomorrow, and I'm going to ask her to do all the research she can to find out about the radio stations and newspapers at the colleges and universities in our area, especially those in Albany, New Haven, Hartford, and Worcester, let alone UMass, because it's the younger audience that's going to appeal to Lakecia, given the range of music she's tapping into and expressing.

I'm also looking at other radio stations in terms of what they can do. I'm talking to my social media folks about how we can bend our audience, how we can bring in new followers who are a different demographic. How can we lean more into Instagram as opposed to Facebook? Instagram has a more New York, urban following relative to our Facebook page, which is very local. Things like that. Newspaper, it's like, I can't really advertise in the newspaper anymore, because that audience just isn't about newspapers. So I'm trying to get really creative, Lawrence. That's part of what I'm trying to do, talking to different people and getting a sense of their ideas, because it's new territory.

Lawrence Peryer: You emphasized digital in a number of ways, and you mentioned radio a few times, and it seems to me, as an outsider looking in, that those are the channels. Print is harder, like you said, it's very uncertain. But is it safe to say that if it's not happening on digital and radio, digital meaning everything from email blasts to social media and everything in between, it's not going to happen at all?

Ruth Griggs: Yeah, absolutely. And word of mouth. But again, I think, hopefully, and we'll find out, that meeting people where they are is the most important thing. So it's going into the colleges and getting on their radio stations and into their newspapers, because they're obviously broadcasting and they're around where those students are. Social media is also incredibly important. But you have to be willing to go to where your audience is, and that's not in a strip ad at the bottom of the daily paper. It's just not.

Lawrence Peryer: At what point...

Ruth Griggs: I think online calendars, by the way, there are countless online calendars where you can post things, whether it's Jazz Near You or something more local. Digital calendars aren't only their own calendars; oftentimes other websites will feed that calendar into their website. So when you put an event into one, you're automatically putting it into many. Online calendars are terribly important.

Lawrence Peryer: It's really interesting that you say that, because I'm on the art commission in my town, and one of my roles is co-producing our summer concert series in the park, a free concert series. Nothing like the scale of what you do, but every Sunday we have a concert in the park. Last year we started putting the events into the local and regional event listing guides that feed the local newspaper and the local independent thing-to-do websites, and our attendance exploded. It was really fascinating; in some cases it doubled or tripled over previous years.

Ruth Griggs: Wow, that's good. Good to know. I hadn't seen that, just because I've been doing this ever since I've run the festival. But I do think people are looking for efficient sources of information on the arts. It's interesting, Lawrence, one of the things I've learned of late, because I do a lot of advocacy work for the arts in the state of Massachusetts, is that when companies bring in new employees, the employees are like, "Okay, tell me about the cost of living, and tell me where I can find stuff to do." Those are the two questions: where am I going to live, what's the cost of living, and where can I find something to do? So they're actively looking for art, for music, for entertainment, and that's not going to be in the newspaper. It's going to be digital. It's going to be on their phone.

Lawrence Peryer: It's really fascinating, because I think it speaks to something I've been toying with, which is that the audience is out there. It's just never been harder to get through the noise and reach them. But the audience is out there. There's no death of this music. In fact, when I talk to artists in other work I do, something I find incredibly gratifying is how prominent jazz is, maybe to overstate it a little, in popular culture. Jazz is in modern music. It's in pop music, it's in hip hop artists integrating it into their music. If you'd told me, even twenty years ago, that I might have participated in one of those discussions about whether jazz is dead, I don't think there's anything further from the truth in 2026.

Ruth Griggs: Look, we're in a major higher-ed region here in Western Mass, with Smith College, Amherst College, University of Massachusetts Amherst. I'm sorry to say, not Hampshire College anymore, but Mount Holyoke College, right? The number of students coming out of those institutions who play jazz is phenomenal, and that's the feeder for jazz in this area, and we capitalize on that at the jazz festival. I'm so proud to say that, for the first time, it hasn't been easy, but for the first time we're going to have a Smith College jazz ensemble kicking off the festival during Jazz Strut on Friday night. We regularly have UMass students performing, students from Amherst College. This year we're also going to have students from Northampton High School performing, because we have a whole jazz program with Northampton High School and Northampton Middle School, since part of our mission is making sure future generations embrace jazz, and we want to do anything possible to make that happen. So we have everybody from the Lakecia Benjamins, the Ron Carters of the world, to high school musicians performing at the festival, because we do not believe jazz is dead, and we're going to do everything possible to prove that's the case.

Lawrence Peryer: Can you tell me a little about the experience the artists have, specifically the out-of-town artists? How important is the artist experience? Do you want them to leave telling other artists, "You've got to play Northampton"? Could you talk about the experience?

Ruth Griggs: It's interesting that you ask, Lawrence, because last year that's exactly what happened. I have a jazz radio show every Thursday on our local station, and I was interviewing Bill Charlap after the festival. He didn't play at the festival, but he was about to come to a new performance venue called Bombyx Center for Arts and Equity, next door in Florence. So I was interviewing him because he was coming to play there, and after the interview, he said, "Hey, I just want to say congratulations on your jazz festival." And I said, "Thank you." And I said, "We didn't even have you on?" He said, "Yeah, everybody's talking about it. They had such a great time, they loved being there, everybody was so friendly, it was so intimate, they loved the reception, they loved downtown Northampton." And I thought, holy cats. Here's a guy, Bill Charlap no less, who didn't even play at the festival, and the buzz was out there that Northampton is a great place to be. So that just lit my fire. Oh my God, that was amazing.

Lawrence Peryer: I love hearing that.

Ruth Griggs: And Bonnie Johnson, a wonderful jazz hero out of Worcester, was interviewing Mickey Yamanaka after Mickey had a solo performance at the festival last year. Mickey said, "Everybody's so friendly, everybody's so helpful, they just want to be here to make me feel welcome," and that was lovely to hear. I think that's what the audience feels as well, that sense of being cared for, that sense of intimacy. Western Mass has a slower pace. People have time to care, time to ask you things. They'll take the time to really help you navigate the festival or navigate downtown. It's just a helpful, caring place. Help is in our DNA here, honestly.

Lawrence Peryer: You're making me yearn for a visit to Northampton. I miss that town so much. A couple of final things. Might there be a jazz festival, or even some other kind of cultural event, that you look to and say either you admire the way they're marketing and presenting themselves, or you recognize something they're doing that you say, "I'm going to crib that idea"? Anybody else you point to as a good inspiration?

Ruth Griggs: Again, I embrace change, and we've had this walking-all-around-town model for close to ten years now. I think we need to look at the value of having a single stage. It can be expensive, but it's much easier to manage from a production standpoint. Right now we work with six different sound engineers every year because it's spread across all these different venues, all with different equipment. I was just at the Springfield Jazz and Roots Festival in Springfield, Mass, this past Saturday. It's fascinating how a place twenty minutes away that also runs a jazz festival is a hundred and eighty degrees different from what we do. I admire what they're doing: it's very urban, incredibly diverse in age and ethnicity. They have food trucks and beer trucks everywhere, a huge, enormous, gorgeous stage, video, the whole thing. It's exciting, and it's got such incredible energy, and there's no question there's a huge jazz festival going on downtown. Ours, by contrast, is quieter. Most of our performances are indoors, because it's the end of September and you're a little cooler. Ours is a quieter festival. So I'm thinking we might want to switch it up.

Lawrence Peryer: Interesting. All right, my last thing for you. Let's say you and I do this again a year from now. What are you telling me if you're convincing me that this year was a success? What are the measures you're pointing to? What's going to indicate success to you?

Ruth Griggs: That our ninety-percent-free festival, because again, everything I've described except the headliner is free and open to the public, that people were able to get in to hear the music they wanted to hear. We've had some growing pains over the years, because the venues don't hold everyone, they don't hold eight hundred people, so people sometimes can't see the music they want. This year we're changing the model a little so people will be able to hear the music they've come to hear, even though it's free. That we've engaged new audience members through all the things we talked about, that we've brought in younger audience members, new audience members who've never experienced the jazz festival before, and that they believe in it, that they love it, that they'll come again. And also, as we're in our strategic planning process, that we have some ideas and some methodologies for how we're going to improve the festival, whatever those turn out to be. I don't know yet what they'll be, because we're just in the early stages, but that we're embracing change, that we see a pathway to accomplish change. I think that's critical in this day and age.

Lawrence Peryer: I would welcome the opportunity to talk to you again, maybe a few months after the festival, and hear your postmortem, and hear how that's going to inform what you do next year. Thank you so much for your time.

Ruth Griggs: I appreciate that, Lawrence. Thank you.

Lawrence Peryer: Ruth, where can people learn about the jazz festival?

Ruth Griggs: Northamptonjazzfest.org.

Lawrence Peryer: Okay. We'll make sure to link to that in the show notes.

Ruth Griggs: Also Facebook and Instagram, Northampton Jazz Fest, same handle.

Lawrence Peryer: All right. Thank you.

Thank you Ruth Griggs. And thank you for listening.

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

I am Lawrence Peryer, thanks for listening, be safe and stay in touch.