We'll Keep a Welcome in the West Midlands

Good God I must have been bored yesterday afternoon, so much so that I found myself studying an Arts Council spreadsheet detailing current funding and projected funding going forward to 2015. Actually it was interesting, albeit a little disheartening to see what a pitifully small percentage of such monies goes to jazz musicians, promoters and organisations in England.

England. Note that and bear it in mind for a moment please.

The spreadsheet is arranged by region, with said regions listed alphabetically, starting with East and ending with Yorkshire. You get the idea. I was especially interested to see funding allocations for the West Midlands since that's where I came from and I was pleased to see the names of many familiar organisations listed amongst the various grants both large and small. I would quite like to have seen 50 or 100K tossed in the direction of the Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra but that's another topic for another day, other than to note that it is by no means unprecedented for organisations who are encouraging excellence in young jazz musicians to (rightly) receive six figure annual stipends.

Now, back in the dim and distant past of my schooldays I really had no particular aptitude for geography whatsoever. My recollection is that I was worst in my class at it and dropped the subject just as soon as opting out became an possibility. Having said that I do know my way from A to B. Like so many freelance musicians I have spent thousands of hours on British roads, and I tend to know where places are. Some mornings I need GPS navigation to find the bathroom, but that's another story. Mindful of this perhaps you will be as surprised as I was to learn that in amongst those West Midlands arts funding allocations was Welsh National Opera, picking up a total payout of roughly 31.5 million between now and 2015.

Now you can say what you like about regional assemblies, boundary changes or gerrymandering, but one thing of which I am totally convinced is that Wales is not in the West Midlands, nor is the West Midlands part of Wales, any more than Prince Charles is known as HRH the Prince of West Bromwich.

I'm sure that there's a perfectly legitimate reason for this. It's about 20 years since I left the West Midlands. Maybe in the interim Dudley has become a tax haven or something like that.

Seriously though, can anybody explain why arts funding allocated to the West Midlands is going to a Welsh organisation, especially when Arts Council Wales is making a grant of 4.5 million to Welsh National Opera in the current year alone. Which somehow brings me back to the Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra.