In February 2023, we faced a huge choice as a business – acquire Gent Jazz or watch a festival we loved disappear forever. The decision was like taking a bungee jump, you don’t know if the elastic is going to hold or not, but the team was unanimous about wanting to do it, and it is one of the best decisions I have ever taken.
One of the founding fathers of the festival, Beda Ntibanoboka, was my very best friend from childhood. We were like brothers. When cancer took him in 2011, it was one of the biggest traumas of my life. In the following years, the festival lost its direction, and by 2022, the game was almost up.
But we were convinced that there was both an audience and industry demand for a successful Gent Jazz and took a leap of faith. We are a large independent promoter in the Benelux region, so the first decision we made was to focus on quality. We introduced the standards that we use for the work we do with big superstars. So the production, safety, audience experience, ticketing, marketing – everything needed to be boosted to the level of a high-end international event instead of a local jazz festival.
In the first year, we succeeded in getting an exceptionally strong lineup with Herbie Hancock, Norah Jones, and Gregory Porter. Those are dream names for a jazz festival, and we went for it, with my whole team doing an amazing job led by Mathilde Van Geertruyden.
We also benefitted from huge support from media, artists and, most importantly, from our audience – like us, they wanted the festival to survive. That first six months was a race – and at the end of it, we put on ten days of festival. This year, we increased that to 13 days, selling more than 50,000 tickets, enabling us to amortise the basic production costs over more days to make it more financially viable.
Like other jazz festivals, we have to be creative with our programming to thrive. We had Air play two nights and that certainly isn’t really jazz, but overall, 100 artists played the festival, of which 60% could be classed as pure jazz.
“We were convinced that there was both an audience and industry demand for a successful Gent Jazz and took a leap of faith”
And that Air fan wouldn’t automatically buy a ticket for a jazz show in a jazz club, but when they’re on the spot and they see this amazing jazz band, they fall in love with it. You don’t help jazz by narrowing its own audience day by day.
We are also broadening the geographical reach of our audience. We don’t take our brilliant local audience for granted – but to succeed at scale we have to tap into regional, national, and international fans. We now advertise actively in The Netherlands and across Europe.
On a personal level, the key benefit of this journey has been revisiting my roots of getting into music and wanting to promote the music that I like. Artistically, it is absolutely a joy for us that we can have the freedom to dive into all this music and put our own stamp upon it. We were all very creative people when we started out in this business but, with the international touring model that has been developed in the last few years, we’ve become more and more like distributors of concerts and accountants.
With the festival, I love deciding what the artwork looks like, how much you want to spend on the acoustics, how you want the dressing rooms to be! It has helped me get back to the original energy that that made me get into the music business in the first place.
As part of this, we reinstated a second stage at the festival as soon as we took over and use it to promote young and upcoming acts. We film them and give them all the recordings so they can use it in their promotion on social media and YouTube. We’ve been doing well with the wider company for a number of years and something I learned from my family was that if you are going well, you have to be generous as well. You have to give something back.
It’s been an exciting journey; we’re grateful for the industry’s support, and we’re well underway working on 2025. Through it all, my team has been amazing – I may be the steering wheel but there’s a whole engine working away, and the last two years has been thanks to them.
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Saving Gent Jazz was the best decision I’ve made
Pascal Van De Velde, head of Gent Jazz and the founder of Greenhouse Talent, discusses his decision to acquire the international jazz festival
04 Oct 2024
In February 2023, we faced a huge choice as a business – acquire Gent Jazz or watch a festival we loved disappear forever. The decision was like taking a bungee jump, you don’t know if the elastic is going to hold or not, but the team was unanimous about wanting to do it, and it is one of the best decisions I have ever taken.
One of the founding fathers of the festival, Beda Ntibanoboka, was my very best friend from childhood. We were like brothers. When cancer took him in 2011, it was one of the biggest traumas of my life. In the following years, the festival lost its direction, and by 2022, the game was almost up.
But we were convinced that there was both an audience and industry demand for a successful Gent Jazz and took a leap of faith. We are a large independent promoter in the Benelux region, so the first decision we made was to focus on quality. We introduced the standards that we use for the work we do with big superstars. So the production, safety, audience experience, ticketing, marketing – everything needed to be boosted to the level of a high-end international event instead of a local jazz festival.
In the first year, we succeeded in getting an exceptionally strong lineup with Herbie Hancock, Norah Jones, and Gregory Porter. Those are dream names for a jazz festival, and we went for it, with my whole team doing an amazing job led by Mathilde Van Geertruyden.
We also benefitted from huge support from media, artists and, most importantly, from our audience – like us, they wanted the festival to survive. That first six months was a race – and at the end of it, we put on ten days of festival. This year, we increased that to 13 days, selling more than 50,000 tickets, enabling us to amortise the basic production costs over more days to make it more financially viable.
Like other jazz festivals, we have to be creative with our programming to thrive. We had Air play two nights and that certainly isn’t really jazz, but overall, 100 artists played the festival, of which 60% could be classed as pure jazz.
And that Air fan wouldn’t automatically buy a ticket for a jazz show in a jazz club, but when they’re on the spot and they see this amazing jazz band, they fall in love with it. You don’t help jazz by narrowing its own audience day by day.
We are also broadening the geographical reach of our audience. We don’t take our brilliant local audience for granted – but to succeed at scale we have to tap into regional, national, and international fans. We now advertise actively in The Netherlands and across Europe.
On a personal level, the key benefit of this journey has been revisiting my roots of getting into music and wanting to promote the music that I like. Artistically, it is absolutely a joy for us that we can have the freedom to dive into all this music and put our own stamp upon it. We were all very creative people when we started out in this business but, with the international touring model that has been developed in the last few years, we’ve become more and more like distributors of concerts and accountants.
With the festival, I love deciding what the artwork looks like, how much you want to spend on the acoustics, how you want the dressing rooms to be! It has helped me get back to the original energy that that made me get into the music business in the first place.
As part of this, we reinstated a second stage at the festival as soon as we took over and use it to promote young and upcoming acts. We film them and give them all the recordings so they can use it in their promotion on social media and YouTube. We’ve been doing well with the wider company for a number of years and something I learned from my family was that if you are going well, you have to be generous as well. You have to give something back.
It’s been an exciting journey; we’re grateful for the industry’s support, and we’re well underway working on 2025. Through it all, my team has been amazing – I may be the steering wheel but there’s a whole engine working away, and the last two years has been thanks to them.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.
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