Keeping the music alive

There are a whole lot of artists and bands out there who never get their five minutes of fame on YouTube, or become known beyond their niche following. As a composer friend of mine once said about the music he and a collaborator produced: "We give a very great amount of pleasure to a very small amount of people."

I think this is one of things the Jeli Sound Archive is hoping to address: it's a new archive of British popular music, collated through oral storytelling and interviews. I went to their launch night at the Vortex jazz club, and was excited to see how many people were there - they obviously have a bit of a following already.

There were the requisite number of jazz enthusiasts (myself included), taking in the excellent band on stage – a quintet performing music by 1950s multi-instrumentalist Tubby Hayes and led by saxophonist Samuel Evans. Others at the back were perhaps not quite as attentive, but I think it just represents the fact that the musical genres included in the project are pretty widespread.

It will be interesting to see what stories are gathered. In any case, anything that sheds a bit of light on the kind of artists doing it for themselves, who wouldn't be seen dead on X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent or any of those other excuses to line a certain unscrupulous mogul's pockets with silver, gets my vote.