The man who has kept live jazz playing in Swansea for half a century has been awarded the British Empire Medal in His Majesty The King’s Birthday Honours.
Dave Cottle — pianist, trumpeter, bandleader, and the artistic director of Swansea Jazz Club — receives the BEM for services to jazz music, recognising a lifetime spent at the heart of the city’s music scene.
“I’m delighted to receive the award — I’m not sure who nominated me!” he told Swansea Bay News. “It has been a labour of love for me for so many years, but it has given me the opportunity to both meet and get to play and share the stage with so many incredible musicians.
“I continue to enjoy my music — and will continue as long as I can in keeping the jazz club going, along with composing and performing music.”
Dave was born into a musical family in Swansea, starting piano at five — taught first by his grandmother Elsie — and passing Grade 8 at 16. His father Peter, a dance band organist and comedian, passed on the chords, the improvisation and the busking; by 15, Dave was depping for him in local dance bands, having taught himself the trumpet from 13.
As teenagers, Dave and his younger brothers Richard and Laurence took a Dixieland cabaret act to theatres including the London Palladium — and in 1975, the Cottle Brothers played Swansea Jazz Club, then the Swansea Jazz Society, at its weekly home in the Liberal Club. It was Dave’s first visit to the club that would shape his life.
He was soon a regular, playing alongside house band stalwarts like pianist Russ Jones, drummer Derek Morgan and trumpeter John Ham — musicians who had been playing together since the club first presented jazz in 1949.
While his brothers headed to London for professional music careers, Dave built his life in Swansea: theatre shows, dance bands, and from 1985 the Dave Cottle Band with his great friend, saxophonist Berry Ray — a partnership that played thousands of weddings and functions over almost 30 years. By the 2000s his own sons had joined him on stage, Andy on saxes and Tom on drums.
In 1996 he took over programming the club’s full weekly programme — then known as Swansea Jazzland, still at the Liberal Club, by then the St James Club — and has been arranging Swansea’s weekly jazz ever since: booking the acts, running the website and social media, designing the brochures, even booking the musicians’ hotels.
The club stayed at the St James until the venue closed in 2018, and now presents across several Swansea venues including the Arts Wing at the Grand Theatre, The Swigg and The Observatory — billed as the UK’s longest-running weekly jazz club, now in its 76th year.
In 2014 he founded the Swansea International Jazz Festival, inviting Gower-born composer Sir Karl Jenkins to be its patron — a role he returns to Swansea for every year.
The festival quickly became the biggest in Wales and is now managed by Swansea Council, with Dave as artistic director; he has just finished programming around 70 events for this year’s edition, which runs from 3 to 6 September.
The playing has never stopped either. His party band has performed at more than 3,500 events; his Louis & Ella show with jazz singer Sarah Meek tours clubs, festivals and theatres across the UK; and his 18-piece Power of Gower big band is packed with some of the country’s finest players.
A composer too, his latest album Meet Me Back in Langland was released last year — and his new jazz suite based on Richard Burton’s short story A Christmas Story, premiered at the Grand Theatre in December, returns in 2026 in a double bill with his setting of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
He is one of more than a dozen people from across Swansea Bay and Carmarthenshire recognised in this year’s honours list — led by an MBE for the late Swansea councillor Robert Francis-Davies — with the full local list in our round-up.
Increasingly supported by a growing committee of volunteers, Dave’s hope is a simple one: that the legacy of the UK’s longest-running weekly jazz club plays on for many years to come.
