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The world’s largest and oldest festival for Traditional Jazz

The Traveling Janes

Great Britain
Early blues and jazz songs from vaudeville tents and the age of the railroads, sung and played by musicians from several countries. Banjo, tuba, piano and woodwinds accompany a voice that takes the legacy of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey seriously.

Before the Traveling Janes played their first note, one word was already in the air. Around 1900 in America, a Traveling Jane was what people called women who worked for the railways or in the vaudeville tent shows and travelled from place to place. In 2023, Scottish-American singer Ali Affleck founded an international women’s ensemble in London and adopted this slang term as its name, with confidence and a wink.

The music comes from the same era. Ragtime, early American pop songs, blues and Traditional Jazz form the core – the songs with which Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith won over audiences, and which Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet helped make famous. The Janes are not out to create a pastiche. They sweep aside the Gatsby gloss and play these pieces raw, funny and cheeky, just as they had to work in travelling tents.

The line-up is flexible. Katie Cavera from the USA plays banjo and guitar. Amanda Lee from Singapore is often at the piano, Danielle Price on tuba, and French musician Aurélie Tropez on clarinet and saxophone. At JazzAscona 2026, Emily Asher joined them on trombone. Affleck herself sings, plays washboard and percussion, and guides the programme with wit.

The sound thrives on this blend. Tuba and banjo provide the buoyant two-beat pulse of the 1920s, the piano fills in with ragtime figures, and the clarinet weaves around the vocal line. Affleck’s singing carries the blues material of the great female singers as well as the playful novelty numbers of the era.

A second project grew out of working on early American repertoire. The musicians discovered links between North America, the Celtic countries and England, and presented old folk songs from the USA, Canada and the British Isles at the Edinburgh Tradfest, with Gill Hunter on accordion and Hannah-Rose Dexter on double bass.

They performed an early concert at the London bar Nightjar with Enrico Tomasso as guest trumpeter. Since then, the Traveling Janes have been playing in clubs and at festivals between Shetland, Glasgow and Ticino. Their programme tells a story of jazz in which the women of the travelling stages play the leading roles.

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