Jim Simpson honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Birmingham man-about-music, Jim Simpson, received The Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 Birmingham Awards presentation on Saturday 9th November at Eastside Rooms. Press release attached.

We have received the following press release;

Birmingham Music Man Honoured With Lifetime Achievement Award

Birmingham man-about-music, Jim Simpson, received The Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 Birmingham Awards presentation on Saturday 9th November at Eastside Rooms.

The Award acknowledged Jim’s “decades-long influence in the music industry and his work with The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival and Big Bear Music, which have been instrumental in shaping Birmingham’s cultural landscape”.

This award is most timely, coming in the same year that The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival celebrated its successful 40th year with 239 performances, 230 of them free admission, in 120 venues, attracting musicians from Estonia, Spain, Norway, Italy, France, Singapore and the U.S.A. This year Jim Simpson also became an Honorary Doctor of Music, awarded by The University of Birmingham.

The Jazz Rag, the nationally distributed magazine published by Big Bear Music was winner of The 2023 Parliamentary Jazz Award while the Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival previously received The Lord Mayor’s Award “in recognition of outstanding achievement and exceptional service to the city of Birmingham and its people through inspirational and dedicated work which has enhanced and promoted the reputation of jazz in the city and internationally”.

The 9th year of the prestigious Birmingham Awards, organised by Anita Chumber and Ifraz Ahmed, “honours Birmingham’s outstanding individual, businesses and organisations, shining a spotlight on those who make the city a vibrant and inspiring place to live in and work”.

The full citation of Jim Simpson’s Lifetime Achievement can be read below:

Jim Simpson has been involved in music most of his life. He bought his first record when he was nine, formed a jazz record club at school when he was 14 and started teaching himself trumpet, formed his own band while serving in the RAF in Gibraltar. Back in Birmingham in the early 1960s, working as a photographer and moonlighting as a musician, he was leading his own band by 1964, soon quitting the day job and supplementing his income as a musician by freelancing as a photographer and focussing on developing his band, Locomotive. In 1968 Locomotive had a hit record with “Rudi’s in Love”, Simpson stopped playing to concentrate on band management, also taking on Tea & Symphony and Bakerloo, both of which he signed to EMI Harvest. That was the year he set up Big Bear Records, now the longest-standing UK independent recording company and also opened his Henry’s Blueshouse, every Tuesday at The Crown on Station Street. Here he discovered Aston band Earth, name-changed them to Black Sabbath, and taking them to two hit albums, “Black Sabbath” and “Paranoid” as well as the hit single “Paranoid”. When he lost Black Sabbath he turned his attention to finding important, yet neglected, American Bluesmen, invariably doing menial jobs in Detroit and Chicago. Over the following decade Simpson brought over a series of 35 U.S. bluesmen on extended tours of the UK and Europe and recorded them for his Big Bear Records.

In 1979 he signed Birmingham band The Quads to Big Bear, releasing the single “There Must Be Thousand” which charted with John Peel naming it his favourite single of the decade. This was a period when he recorded a string of Birmingham bands, enjoying particular success with Muscles and Garbo’s Celluloid Heroes.

In 1985 he launched The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival, which this year celebrated its 40th consecutive year with 239 performances, 230 of them free admission, in 120 venues throughout the region.

Simpson still runs Big Bear Records and the artist agency Big Bear Music, publishes the nationally distributed Jazz Rag magazine, presents free live music at Snobs Bar with Henry’s Blueshouse on Tuesdays and Birmingham Rocks on Sundays and edits the weekly free Henry’s Bluesletter to a emailing list of nearly 16,000 people worldwide.

With his brother Ron, he has written three books, “Don’t Worry ‘Bout The Bear”- a biography, “Dirty Stop Outs Guide To 1970s Birmingham”.

Their third book, “Dirty Stop Outs Guide To 1980s Birmingham” will be launched at a free event, open to all at Henry’s Blueshouse at Snobs Bar on Tuesday 19th November at 6:45pm.

Jim Simpson was also a finalist for the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ category.

The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival was a finalist for the Arts & Culture Award.

The full list of Award Winners can be found here;
https://www.birminghamawards.co.uk/birmingham-awards-2024-winners-announced/