Jazz Rag: Birmingham's Award-Winning Magazine at the Heart of British Jazz

The Jazz Rag is a British jazz magazine published in Birmingham, England, by the Big Bear Music Group. Established in 1987 and published bi-monthly ever since, it is a 36-page, nationally distributed magazine of jazz news, reviews, interviews and features, available in print and online at jazzrag.com. In 2023 it won the Jazz Publication Award at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards, with the judges describing it as a magazine that has been at the heart of the British jazz scene since 1987.

Few specialist magazines are as rooted in a living music scene as the Jazz Rag. It comes from the same Birmingham stable as Big Bear Records and the Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival, is edited by the festival's founder, and exists to serve the clubs, festivals, record shops and listeners who make British jazz happen.

Origins: Launched by Big Bear in 1987

The Jazz Rag was launched in 1987 by Big Bear Music. The date was a significant one in the Big Bear calendar: the same year saw the first British Jazz Awards, also founded by Big Bear, marked by a ceremony at Birmingham's Grand Hotel and an album of the poll winners' jam session. The magazine and the awards grew up together as twin institutions of the company's jazz work.

Big Bear itself reaches much further back. Big Bear Music Group has been based in Birmingham since 1968, and Big Bear Records is described as probably the UK's longest established independent record company, with more than 100 album releases across jazz, swing and blues. Its founder, Jim Simpson, had managed the Birmingham band Earth — soon renamed Black Sabbath — to their first hit albums and single before parting from them and turning his energy to blues and jazz. Simpson opened Henry's Blueshouse in Birmingham in 1968, recorded and toured American bluesmen through the 1970s, and returned in the 1980s to his first love, mainstream jazz and swing. The Jazz Rag, with Simpson as publisher and editor, is the publishing expression of that lifetime in the music.

The Publisher and Editor: Jim Simpson and Team

The magazine's masthead has been remarkably stable. Jim Simpson is publisher and editor. Ron Simpson has been responsible for news and features, Charlie Moore has served as reviews editor and handled subscriptions and accounts, Yue Yang has been international editor, Tim Jennings commercial director, and design has been by Nerys James. The magazine operates from PO Box 944, Birmingham B16 8UT, in the Edgbaston area of the city.

That small, long-serving team produces a magazine with an unusually personal voice. Simpson's editorials draw on direct involvement in the scene the magazine covers: the festivals he promotes, the bands his agency represents, the gigs his venues host. When the Jazz Rag reports on the health of British jazz, it does so as a participant, not a spectator.

Inside the Magazine

Each bi-monthly issue of the Jazz Rag runs to 36 pages, published six times a year. Its contents, as summarised by the Parliamentary Jazz Awards citation, span news, reviews and features on both the rich history of jazz from across the globe and exciting new album releases, tours and festivals.

Issues are packed with the latest news and upcoming events from the UK and abroad, features and interviews with well-established and up-and-coming jazz musicians, and a substantial reviews section covering the latest jazz releases on CD, DVD, video and in print. Festival coverage is a speciality: issues round up and review the British festival circuit — Birmingham, Brecon, Swansea, Upton, Bude, Southport, Newcastle and London among them — alongside international reporting from its international editor. Obituaries and appreciations mark the passing of major figures, profiles look back over long careers, and historical features revisit the music's past, from the club scene of the 1950s to centenaries of great names.

The magazine's tone is famously lively. Big Bear has long billed it as Britain's liveliest jazz magazine, and its pages mix scholarship with the gossip, humour and strong opinions of club culture.

Circulation and Distribution

The Jazz Rag has published its distribution model openly. Its print run of 6,500 copies has been described as always fully distributed, with a circulation of 5,000 across the UK and into Europe and America, and more than 3,000 copies mailed directly to subscribers. The balance is distributed through jazz clubs, record stores, theatres, music stores and festivals, and used in promotional campaigns to build circulation.

Retail distribution has been handled by Worldwide Magazine Distribution, covering high street chains such as WH Smith and Waterstones, and the magazine is listed in the Magazine Distribution Catalogue that supplies newsagents nationally. Its subscriber base is national, and its readership has been profiled as aged 25 and above. A cover price of £3.25 was recorded in the magazine's established years — a deliberately accessible price for a specialist title sustained by subscribers and advertisers rather than newsstand margin.

The 2023 Parliamentary Jazz Award

In July 2023 the Jazz Rag won the Jazz Publication Award in the Parliamentary Jazz Awards, organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Jazz Group, a body of 116 members drawn from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, whose awards aim to encourage a wider and deeper enjoyment of jazz.

The citation praised the magazine's 36 pages published bi-monthly by Big Bear Music Group, its place at the heart of the British jazz scene since 1987, its mixture of history and new releases, tours and festivals, its interviews with established and emerging musicians, and its reviews across CD, DVD, video and print. Chi Onwurah MP, deputy head of the parliamentary group, described that year's recipients as a who's who of names that had made a real impact and helped make the UK one of the world's leading jazz territories. For a magazine produced in Birmingham by a handful of people, the award was national recognition of nearly four decades of continuous service to the music.

Sister Institution: The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival

The Jazz Rag is part of the Big Bear Music Group alongside the Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival, organised by Big Bear every July since 1985 and described by the group as Europe's biggest free-admission jazz party. The festival grew from a successful open-air jam session at Cannon Hill Park in August 1984; the first Birmingham International Jazz Festival followed the next summer.

The festival and the magazine feed each other. The festival brings international bands to venues across the West Midlands — parks, libraries, hotels, restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, streets, museums and historic buildings — employing large numbers of musicians; Big Bear has calculated that the number of gigs at its Birmingham festivals comfortably exceeds 6,000. The Jazz Rag previews, reviews and argues about that scene across the year, and its pages are full of the festival's favourite bands, several of which, including King Pleasure & the Biscuit Boys, Tipitina and Lady Sings the Blues, are also represented by Big Bear's agency. Lady Sings the Blues itself made its debut at the 1987 festival — the year the Jazz Rag was born.

Big Bear: Records, Gigs and Photography

The magazine's authority comes partly from the company around it. Big Bear Records released 21 albums of American blues during the 1970s by artists including Champion Jack Dupree, Cousin Joe and Eddie "Guitar" Burns, and further albums by the count given in later tributes, and in the 1990s released British jazz names including Kenny Baker's Dozen, Bruce Adams and Alan Barnes, as well as Lady Sings the Blues fronted by Val Wiseman.

Big Bear also runs weekly live music, including Henry's Blueshouse, Birmingham's home of the blues since 1968, and holds a rich photography archive stretching back to the early 1960s, featuring illustrious names from rock and roll, jazz and blues, much of it shot by Simpson himself, including early photographs of Black Sabbath. The Jazz Rag draws on that institutional memory: its history features are written from inside the story.

British Jazz Awards and the Wider Scene

Alongside the magazine, Big Bear launched the British Jazz Awards in 1987, the poll-based honours whose first ceremony at Birmingham's Grand Hotel was recorded and released as an album. The awards, the festival, the record label and the magazine form a single ecosystem for mainstream jazz and blues in Britain, and the Jazz Rag is its journal of record: the place where tours are announced, albums are judged, festivals are reviewed and careers are celebrated or mourned.

The magazine's readership — club-goers, festival audiences, collectors and musicians themselves — is the audience for all of it. Its reviews section, covering releases on CD and DVD as well as books, functions as a buyer's guide for a readership that still buys physical music, and its listings and news pages function as the scene's noticeboard.

Format and Availability Today

The Jazz Rag continues to be published bi-monthly, in print and online, with recent full issues made available as PDFs through the Big Bear Music website and subscriptions handled directly by the magazine. Its contact point remains Birmingham, its publisher-editor remains Jim Simpson, and its page count and format — 36 pages, six times a year — have proved durable across nearly forty years in which many larger jazz publications have folded or gone digital-only.

That durability is itself the story. Jazz in Britain has always depended on a small number of committed promoters, labels and publications. The Jazz Rag has outlasted most of its contemporaries by staying close to the music's grassroots: clubs, festivals and record shops, reported by people who also book the bands and run the venues.

Significance

The Jazz Rag's significance was summed up by Parliament: a magazine at the heart of the British jazz scene since 1987. Produced in Birmingham but nationally distributed, winner of the 2023 Parliamentary Jazz Award for jazz publication, and twinned with one of Europe's largest free jazz festivals, it is both a magazine and a piece of infrastructure for British jazz.

For its readers, an issue of the Jazz Rag is news from their own world, written by their own people. For historians of British music publishing, it is a model of how a small, stubborn, scene-led magazine can outlive conglomerates — by never pretending to be anything other than what its name says: a rag, in the best sense, for jazz.