Kings Place Jazz Orchestra books Matt Carmichael for its 20 September concert

Kings Place Jazz Orchestra plays its next concert on 20 September 2026 with the Scottish saxophonist Matt Carmichael as guest, a Sunday afternoon show starting at 4:30 in Hall One at the King's Cross venue. Callum Au, the trombonist, composer and arranger who runs the band as creative director, and Hannah Hutton, its producer and the jazz programme manager at Kings Place, laid out the plan in an interview with Charlie Rees for UK Jazz News on 25 August.

The band is barely a year old and its claim is a specific one: it is the only large jazz ensemble in Britain resident in a concert hall, a model borrowed from Jazz at Lincoln Center. It sold out its debut in November 2025 and played two more concerts in 2026. Au's argument for why nobody built this before is that large-ensemble jazz sits awkwardly between commercial and subsidised music, and that the concert hall establishment has not caught up with the fact that it will not survive on its own.

His comparison is with the classical calendar. London supports several orchestras playing Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and Au wants a room where audiences get to know Duke Ellington's writing and the Count Basie book the same way, alongside newer material. He listed the range the idiom actually covers, from Glenn Miller's In the Mood, written for a dance floor, to Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige, written for a concert hall. Hutton's version of the same point is about infrastructure: a hall, a rehearsal schedule, a network and somewhere for the music to grow.

The other half of the model is who sits in the chairs. Au and Hutton have been putting emerging players next to established ones, a practice Au traces to his own development sitting in trombone sections beside Andy Wood, who is about a decade older. At a recent Summer Sounds date, students Au had taught at the Guildhall played in the band; Hutton called the chance to sit beside a player like Tom Walsh gold dust. Au's blunter version is that the London scene risks losing that transfer of knowledge unless somebody deliberately arranges it.

Tickets are priced with that in mind. About 50 of the hall's 420 seats go to under-30s at 10 pounds and, according to Hutton, sell out within days. The orchestra also runs free open rehearsals for young musicians in the daytime, and books concerts at weekends and at hours a family can manage, which is why the Carmichael show starts in the afternoon rather than late at night.

Carmichael himself is the reason Au thinks the programme works. He described the saxophonist as someone writing modern but accessible music, folk-based, with a strong melodic sense that will not lose a listener from the opening bar. Most of what the orchestra plays on 20 September will be arrangements Carmichael already made with the WDR Big Band and Bob Mintzer, with some edits for this lineup. Commissioning a bespoke set is an ambition rather than a budget line, and Au said very few people in Britain have heard the WDR versions.

That places it in a small but growing bracket of British large-ensemble jazz work. Charlie Rees, who conducted this interview, also arranged the Martin Speake Big Band album Hidden Vision, and Ronnie Scott's Jazz Orchestra headlined Battersea Park in Concert at the end of August. The repertoire Au keeps naming is being worked over elsewhere too, most recently on Jason Moran's album of Duke Ellington pieces. Dates as they land go into the tour guide.

Asked where the band should be in five years, Hutton wanted commissions, more shows and bigger risks; Au wanted quarterly concerts to become monthly ones and the young players who have guested to hold permanent chairs. He also named a target: the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands, the band a visiting artist calls when they want an orchestra. Before any of that there is a Christmas concert in December, and some of that music gets a preview on 20 September.