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.