Name: Bart Vanvoorden
Nationality: Belgian
Occupation: Artistic Director of the Brand! Jazz Festival
Current event: This year's Brand! Jazz Festival, its 10th anniversay edition, will take place from November 26th to 29th 2025 at the nona arts center in Mechelen. For more information and tickets, go here.

For a deeper dive, read the first part of our interview with Bart about the Brand! Jazz Festival 2025.



On the one hand, Brand! is an international festival. On the other hand, it is hyper-local. Tell me about that.

We have the ambition of becoming a festival of the city. Which isn't easy. Right from the beginning, with every edition, I try to involve different venues and different spaces in Mechelen - including spaces, where people wouldn't expect jazz music music or a festival per se.

So it's about this idea of trying to connect with different venues or different people, or churches or pubs or whatever within the city. So that has always been part of the festival as well.

But another approach which is part of our philosophy is that we want to give the stage to another country, to another improvisation scene, because we think that's what makes the experience so interesting and rich. The Netherlands were the first country in 2016. And then, in 2018, we invited a lot of very good Portuguese musicians and later, had a Norwegian edition.

In these country specials, we focus on the music scene, specifically the jazz and an improvisation scene. And we look for a connection with Belgian musicians. It's surprising how many connections there naturally are. And, of course, it's a way to build up a network and build relationships which extend beyond the festival, and also flow into the programming of Nova Express, for example.

So even today, if you dive deeper into the bands we invite there, you still have the Portuguese connection, you still have the Dutch connection, and you still have the Norwegian connection as part of our year-long events. So the connections with these musicians result in a long term relationship.

We want to follow these musicians throughout their careers, not only in the context of this specific festival edition, and this is another way of approaching the Brand! Festival as an international network.

Is the smaller size of Mechelen more of an opportunity for the kind of festival you want to do, rather than a disadvantage?

It's always an opportunity. We're stuck between Antwerp and Brussels, and they have their big festivals. So why should we in a smaller village have the ambition to do the same? I think it's a chance to organize something different, perhaps something that's not as easy to organize in a bigger city.

I was preparing for this interview yesterday, and it was fun to do, because then you go back in time for 10 years, and you see what you were trying to build up. The concept of allowing select artists to realise their dreams is a core part of the history. The last time we did this was in 2022 with Vitja Pauwels and Lara Rosseel.

Vitia wanted to create a new band, which is now called Early Life Forms, which is really, really good. And he wanted to invite Mark Ribot, initially not to record in the studio, but specifically for the concert.

It was a long, long process but in the end, we made it. So Mark did a solo concert, and then afterwards he was a guest in this new band, and they recorded it, and it also ended up on an album. So it was a huge success. For me, it's like the best memory from these 10 years. When Vitja started out with that project, he was not that famous, but now he's a big name in our scene, both with his own projects, but also as a guitar player in other bands.

So it really gave him this push, also in the the Belgian music scene, to grow as a musician. So this is the kind of role we want to have as an art center, not only for music, but also in other art forms.

What about the artists for this year's edition?

This year, I invited Hanne De Backer and Mattias De Craene. Mattias went to Essaouira in Morocco several times, during the annual Gnaoua Festival Essaouira, amongst others, to just really dive into and get to know Gnawa musicians before he started to work with Gnawa musicians from Brussels and to record his music. In the end, he also wanted to include Jan Bang to do live sampling. For me, it's a really crazy combination.

But it all started out, two or three years ago, just talking about Mattias's research into Gnawa music and in the end, it became his dream project for the Brand! Festival. Now they're also recording in the studio, and after that, in spring, I think, they will do a tour with Jazz Lab, which is also part of Nona. So they get to tour and perform a lot of concerts in Belgium and in Flanders and Brussels, basically.

And with Hanne De Backer, it's the same. We've been following her work for a long time now and worked together and now felt like the time had come to give her a bigger stage than she already had here in Belgium.  

[Read our Hanne De Backer interview]
[Read our Mattias De Craene interview]
[Read our Jan Bang interview]

I love the idea of working on something for a long time, and then the festival is merely the culmination of that process.

The reason why we don't do it every year is because it really takes time.

It's it's an investment, it's not a gimmick.