“What exactly do you mean by ‘jazz’?”

"Except, my fiancee was just wondering…”

I'm on the phone with a groom-to-be who's about to sign off on a nice big party band for his summer wedding in Amalfi, basking in one of those God-I-love-my-job moments and mentally drafting up the email to the guys: "they’re adding a horn section - hooray! P.S. the hotel’s got a pool." (So much of agency life is logistics, these brief punctuations of actual real-life glamour are thrilling enough to never get old.) Except now he's hesitating. There's something worrying him - he's talking about an email from 6 months ago where I agreed to an hour's background trio for the dinner, which sounds like something I would do. And here it comes... I can almost hear the words forming... it's going to be The Jazz Problem, isn't it.

Now begins a game of genre whackamole. People typically mean one of two things when they say they don't like jazz, and unfortunately these two things are the exact opposite of each other, which makes picking your reassurance route hard. Some are referring to elevator jazz, the kind of saxophone schmaltz you'd rather die than be trapped with if the doors jammed. If you listen closely, which no-one ever does, in fact this is usually slowed-down pop or soul with any kind of groove removed and a few curious keyboard reharmonisations to throw you off the scent. OR, they mean free jazz, the virtuosic yet aneurism-inducingly stressful soundtrack of the ‘60s avant-garde that you'd need a degree to follow. They’re right, you absolutely wouldn't want either at your wedding. The problem, though, is how to rehabilitate what lies between (in much the way that Europe lies between Alaska and Samoa): the vast swathes of jazz that are beautiful and uplifting and that make 95% of our jazz-hating clients go "YES - this is what I want!" (The second problem: acknowledging that 5% who genuinely, thoughtfully, viscerally really do hate all of jazz.)

The fact is, when it comes to background music - a term so often unjust to the material - your guests won't take in the set in the same way as if it were blaring through their car stereo or off the Glastonbury main stage. What they'll hear is a vibe, and that's the language I use for this conversation these days: how it will make people feel. Far too many hours (and possibly clients) have been lost to my attempts to define 'standards' or the American Songbook, spoken into a silence so profound I’d wonder whether my phone had died. "Don't worry,” I’d backtrack, “I don't mean jazz jazz. Do you know Norah Jones?”... and then instantly doubt myself, because after all what is jazz if not Don’t Know Why, with its major-seventh harmonies and chromatic jazz-inflected lines? And again I’ve lost them. Nothing useful this way lies!???

If only it ended there. The Jazz Problem is part of a wider Genre Problem, born perhaps of the fact that we all grow up surrounded by music but with a limited language to describe it in, often born in turn of whatever our parents did and didn’t listen to or like. In my case, music was either classical, pop, or Simon and Garfunkel (a higher art). Nothing good was written in the ‘80s, ‘soul’ meant anything heartfelt, and jazz effectively didn’t exist. Studying a lot of Beethoven at uni didn’t help at all. It’s taken me a long time in the business to lock down what I considered a ‘universal’ musical language – x style means x decade and x artists – and then to learn to flex it again, because subjectives are everywhere when you're talking about style. Putting together a selection of bands my client will actually like so often starts with navigating the barriers in a language of which no-one, including myself, has a perfect grasp.?

Below some other unlucky genres widely maligned or misunderstood in the events world.

• Rock ‘n’ roll. Nine times out of ten, people just mean rock, and woe betide us not figuring that out before they’ve signed the paperwork! That said, it could be worse – both make for a banging party
• RnB. Yep, you guessed it. The roots of modern RnB in old-skool rhythm & blues are there if you look hard enough, but I suspect the Oxford Companion to Music wouldn’t be your first port of call if the band struck up and you’d got these two confused.
• Blues. If I had a pound for every time I’ve tried to convince our clients that not all blues is slow and sad, and another for every time I’ve failed. If in doubt, Google Paddy Milner (our go-to blues pianist, godlike in talent and hair) – Unsquare Dance is a personal favourite. Technically speaking, ‘blues’ refers to a scale and a sequence of chords which form the basis of upbeat dance styles like boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll. That said, if you scratch beneath the surface you'll find that core of sadness in the genre's roots in African American spirituals and the suffering of the early 1900s Deep South.
• Motown. When I get a Motown brief, my brain auto-inserts the words “soul and” these days, because typically that’s what people mean – but not always. If we’re being literal, Motown was a record label at its height in the ‘60s and early ‘70s (hence why Motown goes in caps / soul not.) (If you’re still here for the trivia, I just found out the word ‘Motown’ is a portmanteau of ‘motor’ and ‘town’, a nickname for Detroit where the label was born.) A veritable litany of the era’s greats recorded for the label, from Marvin Gaye and Stevie to the Jackson 5 and The Supremes… but, again if we’re being literal, a Motown-only set would exclude such soul greats as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Michael Jackson’s solo career post-17.
• Then again, if we’re opening the brief up to soul, we’re in murky waters again. Most run-downs of the greatest ever soul singers would include the likes of Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan… at which point we’re into disco. Nope, these lines are never clean!

Here are three thoughts which may resonate with event planners passing on style briefs for bands.

1. Use as many adjectives as you like. If you say ‘fun, lively, not too intrusive’ I might think gypsy swing; ‘sophisticated, elegant’ – string quartet. You may well never have heard of gypsy swing (I hadn’t for many years), so you wouldn’t think to specify it if you’re briefing a list of styles, but it might just be perfect for your event. And don’t worry if you know what vibe you’re after but don’t have the technical language to describe it – it’s part of my job to understand what you mean!?

2. If adjectives feel too vague, give example artists. We have five different bands all covering a range from soul/Motown to present day, all with slightly different specialism weightings – if your client loves Queen and Fleetwood Mac more than ABBA or Prince, I’ll know which way to lean.

3. (Stated with the utmost hypocrisy)… try not to micromanage. A big part of what you’re booking a top band for is their expertise, and a big part of that is nailing the set to appeal to the greatest possible range of guests and tastes. Given no set exists where absolutely everyone loves every song, once you’ve picked your band and shared the guidance per points one and two, it generally makes sense to let the band play to their strengths. (This point goes doubly for background music, where it’s all about setting a mood.) The fact is, however confusing the language, it’s pretty much always more-than-alright on the night!