01.07.2024Jazz and Community in Mumbles – Swansea Bay’s ‘A-Side’ (Jule Wiegmann)

Figure 1: Photo by author.

On the last day of our stay in South Wales, we head for the most south-western point of Swansea Bay. The public bus travels along the coast and we get off at Mumbles Pier. It is late March: The rain drums vertically against our rain jackets and the price we pay for the stunning view of the bay is the wind whipping in our faces. After the search for traces of past and present industrial everyday culture, another facet of the region is revealed to us here as we begin to say goodbye. Mumbles – the “A-side” of Swansea Bay, as it were – is where amusement and leisure infrastructure meet an idyllic and picturesque scenery. What you see here is a Victorian pier on high wooden stilts with the old and new lifeboat stations at the two water-facing ends of the pier. On the mainland side of the pier, there is a café where visitors can get fish & chips and ice cream, an amusement arcade with slot machines and children’s games and a small art gallery as well as a fish & chips takeaway (the last two were both closed during our visit). Below the platform are the stone beach and the lighthouse, which sits enthroned on a coastal promontory and is either washed by the water or connected to the land, depending on the tide.

Mumbles was an early tourist destination thanks to the Oystermouth Railway, the world’s first passenger rail line. It connected Swansea and Mumbles. The latter was popular for its beach and the pub culture. Dylan Thomas was a regular visitor. Since the closing of the railway in 1960 and because of the general downturn in tourism in this area, Mumbles – while still popular – has faced some challenges in remaining a successful holiday destination in the 21st century[1]. Today the Swansea tourism department promotes Mumbles as ‘cosy’ and ‘cosmopolitan’[2] and highlights the seaside, shopping, and food on their website. The data of the latest ward profile from July 2023 show that compared to the other wards of Swansea, Mumbles has a higher proportion of people aged over 45 and especially over 65, a higher proportion of people born in the UK, a higher level of education, and a higher proportion of people in good health. Also, there is more detached and outright owned housing[3]. In the last local election, three Conservative Party candidates were elected by a majority[4], which is a remarkable result given that the Conservative Party only came third overall in Swansea with a 12% share of the vote, behind the historically predominant Labour Party with 55% and the Liberal Democrats with 14%.

My own small field research had already taken me to Mumbles on the previous evening when I attended a jazz concert. I found out about the concert by searching the internet to see what musical events were taking place in Swansea during the days of our excursion. This led me to the website of Jazz Club Swansea, which hosts jazz concerts every Wednesday. The visual communication style of the website didn’t necessarily appeal to me, but I was intrigued by the band that was to play on Wednesday, which stood out a little from the rest of the scheduled concerts. The bandleader, Joe Webb, was introduced as „highly regarded pianist, jazz musician, and London-based composer, originally from Wales. He has emerged as a leading force on the U.K jazz scene today, captivating audiences with his exceptional talent and rockstar-like persona.”[5] When I started to dive deeper into the website and saw that the jazz club presented itself as rich in history, embedded in the tradition of the Jazz Society Swansea founded in 1949[6], I decided to combine the concert visit with the field research project. I wanted to explore who is coming together at this particular place and what draws the audience towards this event – as well as issues and challenges faced by the organisers of this concert series. As a jazz enthusiast, I have observed typical issues and wanted to learn more about how they play out at this event. I bought a ticket online for 12£ and wrote to Dave, the main organizer, expressing my interest. He offered to come to the venue before the concert started and to talk about the jazz club.

It took me about 45 minutes to ride from Swansea centre to the concert venue CU Mumbles by bus. The club is located on a steep, lively street that slopes down to the sea, with many shops housed in buildings made of exposed and plastered brick, which become more uniform and narrower towards the hill. The venue appears inconspicuous from the outside. I watch two couples in their late 20s or early 30s as they approach a building that has the letters CU Mumbles written on the outside wall. A small stand with a concert poster, only visible for people walking past, confirms that I am in the right place. The couples discover a person they know in the hairdressing salon opposite the entrance and turn away from the venue again, starting a conversation through the open door. I climb the steep stairs to get to the doors of the venue and go into CU Mumbles alone. Both the staircase and the hall that I enter are designed in a uniform style, characterised by dark colours, dim lighting and artificial plants. The furnishings make a high-quality and new impression. I also notice the thematic use of copper as a colour, material and as a word – and the ambiguity of the venue’s name. On the one hand, CU Mumbles is pronounced like “See you Mumbles” and thus addresses the residents of Mumbles. On the other hand, the name refers to copper, the chemical element, which has the symbol CU. The logo makes the copper connection particularly clear through its allusion to the elementary system. The toilets are signposted with ‘CU gents’ and ‘CU ladies’. Is this just another greeting – or a suggestion that this place is for copper men and copper women – people who see themselves as part of a shared history that has to do with the copper mining in the Swansea region? (See David Jäggi’s report on Kilvey Hill and the copper industry past of the Swansea region).

CU Mumbles’s stage at the end of the room, enclosed by the restrooms, is only slightly raised. The room has larger tables in the centre, benches at the sides and a long spacious bar opposite the stage. At the door, concert visitors meet Dave, who greets everyone with a friendly “Heya!”. He is organising the admission with a print-out of registered guests’ names, where he crosses the written names and engages new arrivals, many of whom he knows personally, in brief conversations.

Dave is the main person behind the Swansea Jazz Club. This evening, he takes care of almost every task: doors, the presentation of the band, hospitality, front of house (sound and light). He also takes care of bookings, the website, public relations, social media and so on. He came to this position after the Swansea Jazz Society split up, taking over its legacy in 1996. In recent years, the Jazz Club had to move several times and only recently moved from Swansea city centre to Mumbles. Jazz is having a hard time, Dave says, and that it was better ten years ago, but he doesn’t seem like someone who would wrap himself in nostalgia. Rather, he is actively working to maintain this niche of live music that he loves. Alongside the weekly concert series, Dave also launched the Swansea Jazz Festival, a three-day event held in the Marina in Swansea with over 70 concerts. He explains that after suffering a burnout and because of the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, he decided to let go of the leading role in the festival project; the Council stepped in and took over its management.

At the entrance and in his introduction to the concert, Dave points out a brochure for voting in the ‘Parliamentary Jazz Awards 2024’ in the category ‘Jazz Venue of the year (including jazz clubs, venues, festivals and promoters)’. He says that he always saw it as a ‘London thing’, but ‘why not’. We speak about criteria that influence the acquisition of funding and awards. He describes how, on occasion, people from interest groups and one individual person have sought contact with him to discuss diversity in programming and audiences – there should be more of it at CU Mumbles, they suggested. In his portrayal of this situation, he doesn’t perceive this approach as creating an opportunity for change, but rather as an attack that criticises the lack of representation of people of colour. This weighs heavily in the context of jazz’s history that is also a history of cultural appropriation of black culture. He comments, however: “I just see musicians, no colours” and that the person approaching him “doesn't know the reality of this place”.

What are the realities of this event? As a regular attendee of jazz concerts who has been to many jazz clubs, all with different atmospheres and rule systems, this evening will remain a special memory for me. What struck me the most was the strong sense of community, mutual goodwill and general cheerfulness that could be felt – and the strongly local orientation of the event.

While I’m talking to Dave, the room has already filled up. The audience is older and almost exclusively white, with a higher proportion of men. Most people are over 40, with a few younger people aged about 25+ here and there. Parts of the audience and the band members are chatting and getting drinks at the bar, where one can find the youngest people in the room – the three bartenders. I do the same and smile at people and get smiled at before I choose a seat. As a single person, the left-hand side of the room with the long bench seems more inviting than the tables in the centre. Also, it allows me to see the whole room. I sit down next to a man in his 20s, slightly older than me, who also seems to have come alone. We start a conversation that reveals that he is the manager of the band’s record label in London. He tells me that the contact for the gig came about through Joe and that the audience is his ‘home crowd’. He himself had come along from London to join the concert because his grandparents live only five minutes away from the club and he took this as an opportunity to visit them. When his grandmother arrives at the club, he picks her up at the entrance and helps her up the stairs. They listen to part of the concert together and leave early.

On my other side sits a friend of Dave’s to whom he had introduced me before. He is a professional drummer and a regular visitor to the Swansea Jazz Club concerts. He offers to give me a lift to Swansea after the concert, as no more buses are going back after 10:20pm. During the second set, he starts to light up the flyer with his mobile phone camera and creates dates in his calendar for the concerts he apparently wants to attend. His wife accompanies him this evening, her daughter joins them a little later. When I start talking to his wife, whose name I did not catch, she tells me, ‘Sometimes I say I’m a singer’. She lived in Spain for a long time and gave birth to three daughters before coming back to South Wales. She now lives near the Big Pit museum where she looks after her grandmother because, as she put it, the health care system was so bad. She jokes that because of this, she tries to be very nice to her daughters, but they gradually move away anyway. When we discuss the structural changes in the region, she remembers that her father used to work at a steelworks and that the family had to move after it closed. With a tragic gesture, she says: ‘We keep on singing and we keep on smiling and we keep on singing’. She leaves the club with her daughter during the second set, because she wanted to spend time with her and talk, as she explains to me later in the car. Also, the music that evening wasn’t really to her or her husband’s taste because there were no vocals. His mother, who came over to her relatives during the concert’s break, also says that the music has too many notes in the lower ranges for her and leaves the concert before the start of the second set.

After the encore song and the applause with standing ovations, a man in his early 40s who stood at the bar with a friend throughout the evening approached me and told me that this place used to be a nightclub with a DJ and that he had only rediscovered it by chance while going out with friends and looking for a place with a rest room. He stumbled into a concert at the jazz club, which he enjoyed. Since then, he has tried to go to concerts here every now and then. He works in Mumbles as a motorbike mechanic and he hired someone the day before who had been affected by the new wave of redundancies at Tata Steel.

Soon after this, I take up the invitation and leave in the car of Dave’s friend and his wife. I left the evening with the feeling that a surprising number of topics from the last few days of the excursion had re-appeared during this evening, although in a very different context. The thematic presence of metal, the regional connection to the Big Pit Museum, memories of closing steelworks and subsequent family relocations, connections to the current redundancies at Tata Steel were probably provoked to some extent by my questions, but they were nonetheless striking. It made a difference to hear this not from tour guides or designated speakers, but embedded in a situation of cultural consumption and community spirit, drinking culture, live jazz, located in a region that is at a certain privileged distance from the rest of Swansea Bay (like us at the moment when we were looking out from Mumbles Pier towards Swansea Bay and the docks of Tata Steel).

One hypothesis that I would develop, based on the organisational context of the concert, the comments on the music in terms of taste and style, and the noticeable decline in the audience after the pause, is that a significant part of the audience does not attend the concert primarily because of the bands and the music played. One motivation for participation in these events that becomes very noticeable during my visit is experiencing and carrying on the sense of community I referred to before. The concert is an opportunity to spend time with family, for meeting friends, and making new ones. Many seem to be willing to travel a longer way to attend the evening, as most seem to have left the venue by car. The sense of community is actively encouraged by a pause that seemed extra-long and led to lively conversation all around the room. The woman who helped Dave at the doors handed out homemade cake to everyone which she seemed to have baked especially for this evening. And Dave also works actively to strengthen the sense of community, for example by encouraging audience members to vote together for ‘their’ jazz club, as this will ensure the continued existence of the concert format and the historic Swansea Jazz Society.

Joe Webb’s stage performance and the audience's reaction to it –  which I would describe as perhaps 'typically Welsh' (or perhaps, dare I say it, British?) – added to this sense of communal belonging as well. The musician grew up in the town of Neath, between Swansea and Port Talbot, and studied jazz piano in Cardiff before leaving South Wales for London, where he started to gain international recognition. During the concert, he was very talkative and engaged with the crowd, giving lots of context about the song titles and talking about his upcoming tour plans. He wore a sporty tracksuit jacket, emphasised his passion for football and took every opportunity to make the audience laugh. At one point he asked the audience to translate the Welsh title of his song ‘Hiraeth’ for him, and after other translations for this famous term came up than the one he had expected, he self-depreciatively joked that he probably needed a Welsh teacher. I had the impression that the applause and the standing ovations in the end were not only to applaud the musical performance, but also to celebrate Joe Webb and with him a certain pride of one of their own, a successful Welshman to whom they remain loyal. In return, the Welsh home crowd won’t be forgotten. It can add another name to the history of Welsh stars who have made their mark beyond the small country. The mutual willingness to establish a good atmosphere can be explained accordingly. Although the technical set-up is a bit of a compromise for both band and audience (no upright piano, a weak PA system), the crowd – those who stayed for the second set – was enthusiastic and Joe Webb described the club as his favourite.

For me, this resonates with the desire for putting oneself in a (constructed) tradition – one where Welshness is full of opportunities for identification, at least for those who understand themselves as belonging. As a clear outsider, a visitor from abroad, I was welcomed with a great deal of openness and hospitality. I was invited into conversations with several people and felt very integrated and cared for.

At the same time, there are noticeable differences in levels of social belonging and factors of exclusion, such as the accessibility of the place in terms of public transport and architectural barrier-free access. Typical for clubs, differences in affiliation are also apparent – whether you have a club membership, how regularly you turn up and how familiar you are with Dave and the other visitors. In terms of space, this is reflected in the seating arrangement, which favours group seating. The two couples I saw in front of the CU Mumbles shared a table of four in front of the stage, while singles (like me) or new acquaintances (like the men at the bar) tended to stay on the sidelines and thus remained more in an observer role in relation to the crowd.

Looking back on the evening at the Swansea Jazz Club, I would summarise that the jazz concert functions strongly as an initiator for people to come together. The space of listening that is created here refers not only to the active listening to the live music presented, but also to mutual exchange and engagement in a community. This community is inviting, even if it is not equally approachable to everyone. The Swansea Jazz Club has had to adapt continually due to its relocations. The current venue fosters a retrospective re-cultivation of a shared history in an “A-side” area of Swansea Bay, characterised by a tendency towards leisure time, tourism and maybe also conservatism. The distance from the rest of Swansea Bay seems to have grown, while the event itself still has the potential to cheerfully continue telling a collective story and – while involving negotiations of exclusion and inclusion – to provide a space for communal encounters. 

[1] Jenkins, I., &  A. Jones. 2001. "Tourism Niche Markets in the Welsh Urban Context: Swansea, a Case Study." In Culture: A Driving Force for Urban Tourism - Application of Experiences to Countries in Transition, 18:79.

[2] Visit Swansea Bay. n.d. "Mumbles." Accessed June 28, 2024. https://www.visitswanseabay.com/destinations/mumbles/.

[3] Swansea City Council. n.d. "Ward Profiles." Accessed June 28, 2024. https://www.swansea.gov.uk/wardprofiles.

[4] Swansea City Council. n.d. "Election Area Results." Accessed June 28, 2024. https://democracy.swansea.gov.uk/mgElectionAreaResults.aspx?ID=305.

[5] Dropbox. 2024. "March, June & Festival Short Promo." Video, accessed June 28, 2024. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/paad0zfi5yxz30yrx9cir/ACHuN71kCvopdsosNBysCKI/2021%20-%202024/2024/MARCH%20_%20JUNE%20%26%20FESTIVAL%20SHORT%20RPOMO.mp4?rlkey=c9gggs4fvblri0kdl1073bjpa&e=1&dl=0

[6] Swansea Jazzland. n.d. "About Us." Accessed June 28, 2024. https://www.swanseajazzland.co.uk/page_3286268.html.

Jule Wiegmann