George West, who founded the Birmingham Jazz concert series, has died

George West, the man who started Birmingham Jazz and ran it on volunteer labour for decades, has died. UK Jazz News published a tribute by Dr. Alan Musson on August 27, giving his dates as 1935 to 2026 and his death as July 18, 2026.

West was an engineer by trade, proud of the complicated projects he worked on, and active in politics besides. Before he came to the West Midlands he sat on the board of the Jazz Centre Society in London, and that experience travelled with him when he moved to Birmingham in 1974. The city had traditional jazz in reasonable supply and almost nowhere regular for the modern strain.

After a few one-off promotions he decided to fix that properly. He gathered six friends around his dining table in 1976 and asked each of them to put 25 pounds on it as working capital. His own account of the meeting is unsentimental about the odds: "Never thought it would last." The agreement was that if the money ran out they would shake hands and call it a good time.

The money did not run out. West talked his way into rooms at Birmingham's Grand Hotel, using the smaller Warwick and Barwick suites for modest bills and the ballroom for the bigger ones. The first concert, on September 26, 1976, was Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia. Six weeks later the saxophonist Mike Osborne played with Harry Miller on double bass and Tony Levin on drums, and the musicians let West record it. The tape sat almost forgotten until he found it again in 2009, and it came out on John Jack's Cadillac Records label in 2012 as The Birmingham Concert.

Birmingham Jazz turns fifty this September, and the events built to mark it now double as mourning. Brian Homer, who served on the board until 2018, died on July 10, weeks before West. Musson's tribute frames both losses through the ordinary, unglamorous work volunteers do at clubs like it: selling tickets, loading in, setting up the stage, running the committee, chasing the advertising.

That work is the reason a country the size of Britain can carry a jazz circuit at all. This desk has been marking a heavy run of losses in the same music, among them saxophonist Plas Johnson and the singer Sandra King. More from the same field sits on the jazz hub.