KENNY MATHIESON looks at the work of KEN RAMAGE in establishing the Nairn International Jazz Festival
 

LONG BEFORE I ever actually attended a concert in the Nairn International Jazz Festival, I had been regaled with tales of superb mainstream jazz gigs in a marquee overlooking a beautiful stretch of the Moray Firth. Ken Ramage, who launched and runs the festival, has moved indoors again this year, and even if old Nairn hands will tell you that the atmosphere was never quite the same in the bigger indoor venues, the music remained equally excellent.
 

Ken launched the Nairn International Jazz Festival in 1990 largely because he wanted to hear jazz on his own doorstep. Love of the music remains his primary motivation, although the festival itself has grown into one of the leading events devoted to traditional and mainstream jazz in the country. Ken readily admits that, to the dismay of his accountant, he routinely subsidised the festival out of the profit from his successful fruit and vegetable business over the years.
 

That avenue closed when he retired from business, and the core funding must now come from a combination of box office income, sponsorship (Hawco, the Inverness-based car dealership, is the principal commercial sponsor again this year), the Scottish Arts Council, and some local authority funding.
 

In the early years of the festival, the late Lachie Shaw (then running Inverness Jazz Platform) booked the artists, but Ken took on that responsibility, and does all of the booking for the festival himself.
 

“I listened a lot to jazz when I was young,” he explained. “I used to hear my brother’s Jelly Roll Morton records at home, and I remember going to hear Norman Granz’s famous ‘Jazz At The Philharmonic’ touring shows in Glasgow, with people like Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie.
 

“Those were fantastic experiences, but when I started my business and was working round the clock, there just wasn’t time to listen. Eventually, though, I got back into it. I remember specifically coming to hear the great guitarist Herb Ellis in Inverness, and then saxophonist Scott Hamilton.
 

“I decided then that I would love to bring these artists and others like them to Nairn, and that is what I have done. I had an excellent team around me in the business, and they took on the jazz with the same kind of enthusiasm, or I would never have been able to do it.”
 

The main venues this year will be the Conference Centre at the Newton Hotel, but a number of events will also take place at the Knockomie Hotel in Forres. The Brodie Countryfare and The Stables at Brodie Castle will also host events, and there will be special performance from the New York-based Gully Low Jazz Band – back for the third year running – with Warren Vache and John Allred at Fort George.
 

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