How Did This Small Town Get So Big on Jazz?

Youth culture and jazz don’t exactly go together. For many people our age in the UK, jazz is the soundtrack to their parents’ living rooms, or the kind of music 60-year-old musicians play to half-empty pubs on a Saturday night. At the jazz afters (jafters), however, which opened the 2026 St Andrews Jazz Festival, condensation built on the windows of a student house as it filled with heat and sound, and the line between band and audience became less and less clear. Many in the audience were members of JazzWorks, the student jazz society, and took turns performing jazz standards throughout the set. Behind them, Ewan Riddell used a cereal bowl as a trumpet mute, while pianist and bassist Euan Bond handed out beer glasses of semi-skimmed milk to those playing. In that house, youth culture and jazz were inseparable.

This, however, isn’t new. Post-war America saw the Beat Generation, a youth culture drawn to the impulsivity in which jazz is rooted. Saxophonist Charlie Parker’s insistence that ‘Now’s The Time’ was not just a demand for improvisation and spontaneity amongst musicians, but the cultural mood. Whilst St Andrews isn’t even a pale imitation of 1950s New York, jazz still represents the same thing: resistance. “There’s always been that rebellious edge to it,” said saxophonist and violinist Hilary Michael when we spoke on Saturday after her jazz workshop, one of many events in the festival lineup. Many musicians arrive at St Andrews with little jazz experience. They’ve heard it, been drawn to its nonconformity, and want to recreate that sound themselves. The weekly workshops that run throughout the semester give that curiosity direction, offering not just an alternative to prescriptive music lessons, but a community. “No one’s here to eat your lunch, or catch you out,” responded Theo Robinson, president of JazzWorks, to the hesitation some students may have about joining the workshops. “We're just here to do something that we enjoy.”

It hasn’t always been so accommodating, however, as jazz’s “rebellious edge” was in fact a double-edged sword. In 1966, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, an interviewer asked composer David Amram, “How can you equate bar-room entertainment with the treasures of European culture?” after Amram listed Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and jazz pianist Thelonious Monk amongst his influences. This racialised question, driven by the divide separating 'low' from 'high' art, wasn’t uncommon. Now, when I tell my friends at other universities about Thursday’s jazz night at the Union, they call what was once considered bottom of the barrel “posh.” In 1968, Richard Michael was almost expelled from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music for playing jazz. Now Honorary Professor of Jazz Piano here at St Andrews, his title symbolises how attitudes towards jazz have changed. This begs the question, how can a genre so deeply rooted in counterculture preserve its freedom once institutionalised?

Institutions, however, aren’t necessarily a ball and chain. In fact, institutions have brought jazz to the fore. What began as quiet sessions in now-long-gone pubs, preserved only through the ‘back in my day’ stories of former students, has now taken centre stage. Sunday’s student jazz showcase was JazzWorks in full swing, St Andrews Fusion playing Mario Kart classics, original compositions from Buzztet, and the Laidlaw Music Centre Jazz Scholars. Richard Michael said it is this enthusiasm, this appetite for jazz amongst students, that makes his time at the Royal Academy and 35 years of teaching feel worth it. Robinson mentioned, “You can see younger people getting more into jazz, or even participating, and that’s reflected in institutions like the Union and the Laidlaw Music Centre opening themselves up to it.” He also noted that recognition is not the same as accessibility. The pursuit of music is expensive. “If you want to study music at a conservatoire, you need money. You need money to afford quality lessons, to take part in residential courses like the National Youth Orchestra, or even just to purchase an instrument,” said Hilary Michael. She explained that, mainly due to government cuts, “music education has become a lot smaller, and at the grassroots level, it is sometimes non-existent.”

It’s clear that the financial burden of music education doesn’t fall on the wealthy. As part of a call for change, the proceeds of this student-run jazz festival go to Sistema Scotland, a charity offering children across Scotland free music education. Whilst St Andrews’ relationship with jazz, and music more broadly, is unfortunately not reflective of the wider UK, St Andrews offers a glimpse of what’s possible. With charities like Sistema Scotland, the music community that feels so distinctive to St Andrews may, one day, no longer be distinctive at all.

Illustration by Kyla Biesty