June 11, 2004

Jazz Impresario Tries New Idea: Jazz, Just Jazz

eorge Wein is giving jazz a chance this year. For the 50th anniversary of his Newport Jazz Festival in mid-August — now called JVC-Newport, since the Japanese electronics company for which it is named started sponsoring a number of his festivals in 1974 — the titan of American jazz festivals is trying out a full schedule of the real acoustic thing.

For the uninitiated, this may seem like the opposite of news. A jazz festival putting on all jazz? Isn't that what jazz festivals are supposed to do? In fact, jazz festivals in general, including Mr. Wein's annual JVC Jazz Festival in New York, which opens on Tuesday, have slipped farther and farther afield, booking everyone from Led Zeppelin to James Brown under the comfortably adult (and sponsor-friendly) "jazz festival" umbrella.

Mr. Wein accepts blame as the prime offender. Just as he originated the idea of the jazz festival, he also originated the idea of mixing up genres, both to reflect a shift in jazz listening tastes and to keep sales afloat. By the 1970's, when his company, Festival Productions Inc., became economically secure thanks to JVC, he had a year-round staff to support.

To celebrate this year's milestone in Newport, R.I., Mr. Wein had the idea to go serious: to categorize, to essentialize, to devote a whole festival to what put him on the map in the first place, in the days when Ellington, Monk, Miles and Mulligan regularly created a stir. And the idea is really winning: put jazz's best talent on the line — leave the salsa, R&B, pop, rock and other genres to other festivals and see if the public appreciates the gesture. If the experiment goes wrong, if ticket sales are a disaster, then it goes wrong. Something has definitely been proved, and as he says, putting on good jazz is fun. It doesn't feel so much like work.

At 78, Mr. Wein (pronounced WEEN) pays more attention to jazz in particular, and music in general, than most aficionados half his age. He is a musician himself, a pianist, and this does matter in treating his kind fairly: it is rare to come across anyone who has serious business quarrels with him.

He has been a legendarily fair boss in the jazz business, keeping a number of employees on the payroll even after they stopped working for him. His company president, John Phillips, has been with the company for 26 years. His director of public relations, Charlie Bourgeois, at 85 still handling press tickets to the festivals, is working for Mr. Wein for the 53rd year.

He understands the compounded importance of each jazz performer over time — as with wine, another of his great interests. But Mr. Wein is also interested in what's new, and often asks his younger connections to keep him current. He doesn't care what he goes to see: a few months ago, he went to hear Tord Gustavsen, the young Norwegian pianist whose music is all stagey ebb tide, minor keys and crawling tempos. Mr. Wein got a kick out of it, marveling at the pious, docile vibe in the crowd.

"In the old days," he said, leaning over to whisper in his Boston accent, "Erroll Garner and Art Tatum would play, and the music would just roll over the audience like waves, spreading joy all over the place. Now people just want to go to church."

The other day at the Café des Artistes, a regular lunch spot not far from the four-floor brownstone on West 77th Street where Festival Productions keeps its New York offices, Mr. Wein talked about the problems of spreading his company too thin.

Each year, it produces 50 music festivals or aspects of concert halls' yearly programming. This includes JVC-New York and JVC-Newport, of course, but also the JVC Jazz Festivals in Seoul, Warsaw, Paris and Chicago. It also includes the Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles; the Verizon Music Festivals in Washington, New York and Tampa Bay; and the enormous New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

"Survival is the only thing that counts in the long run," he said, working on his customary lobster salad. "If you can survive with your credibility, then you've accomplished something. I mean, look, I could have been a rock promoter and made a lot of money. I didn't want to do that. I made enough money, thank God. I earned it basically on my own terms. But I never realized that you could make money until sponsors came along. The credibility we'd been working on all those years always brought media notice. And then the opportunity for media notice was picked up by sponsors."

One-Stop Booking

JVC has been an unusually loyal, nondictatorial sponsor since 1974. The company does want the major events to be presented in large spaces, however, and in New York City that generally means Avery Fisher Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Beacon Theater and Town Hall. (In jazz, big concerts often tend to be medium-size affairs, but apart from the 1,100-seat Alice Tully Hall, which can be prohibitively expensive to rent, there is a shortage of medium-size theaters in New York.)

To increase the number of events, JVC-New York has increasingly worked with jazz clubs and small concert spaces around the city like the Village Vanguard, which from June 22 to June 27 has booked the pianist Uri Caine with six different bands. By joining up with the JVC Jazz Festival events, the Village Vanguard gets exponentially increased promotion.

Because Festival Productions can in some cases make eight offers to a band at once, for different high-paying festival concerts, many jazz musicians have become dependent on it. In some cases, the gigs fall in a neat sequence on the calendar. This year, a new all-star quartet materialized, with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland and Brian Blade. Festival Productions booked it for JVC-New York, then immediately afterward for Freihofer's Jazz Festival in Saratoga, N.Y., and then a month later for JVC-Newport. Festival's contract does not stipulate that the band accept more than one of the offers, but it makes an artist-manager's job easy to do business for three festivals with only one concert producer.

Booking at such high volume, Festival Productions has done less and less hands-on producing in the curatorial sense of creating bands that didn't exist before or setting up special concerts. This trend has led to a kind of starchiness in the festivals, try as the organization might to offset the Big and Expected with smaller, potentially more groundbreaking acts in opening slots or on second stages.

In adding the three Verizon Music Festivals around the country to its roster, the company has waded into today's true mass-pop tastes, sometimes with negative results. It booked Missy Elliott for Carnegie Hall on April 29 in a Verizon-New York festival. It would have been the first hip-hop show at Carnegie Hall — something for the books.

But Ms. Elliott's fans had already had four opportunities to see her in the New York area this spring on tour with Beyoncé and Alicia Keys, and perhaps they weren't so impressed by the idea of hip-hop in that rarefied atmosphere. Ticket sales were disastrous, and Ms. Elliott canceled two days before the show. Festival Productions had to absorb its rent and advertising losses, but it saved money by canceling the show and not having to pay the full hall fee.

But JVC-Newport's programming has been reinvigorated this year, and JVC-New York seems firmer as well. The New York festival, which ends June 26, has fewer events and a higher percentage of them are noteworthy.

On June 20, Ornette Coleman's quartet will play a double bill with the singer Abbey Lincoln, a program that reflects some of the best and most lasting changes in jazz from the early 1960's. Whereas the festival in past years has perhaps leaned excessively on tributes to the deceased, the one explicit multi-artist tribute concert this year is to Nina Simone, whose importance in feminism and black liberation stretched beyond jazz and beyond music; the participation of the new R&B trio Floetry as well as the author Toni Morrison underscores the point.

The two big pop acts at JVC-New York are K. D. Lang and Lou Reed, significant artists in the adult-music continuum whose names have the ring of good taste. And then there's the fourth JVC-New York performance at Carnegie Hall in six years by the bossa-nova pioneer João Gilberto, who has become a perfect match for both that theater and JVC's target audience.

The Number Crunch

Mr. Gilberto's concert illustrates some festival economics. For the last eight years, JVC has provided around $2.7 million in sponsorship annually for all the JVC festivals produced by Festival Productions, Mr. Wein said. Around $800,000 of that tends to be allotted to the New York festival, which always loses money. The less the festivals lose on concerts, the more Mr. Wein's company, with 70 full-time employees in four offices, can keep for its own overhead.

Including travel and lodging expenses, Mr. Gilberto's fee works out to around $70,000. The gross take on ticket sales, for a full house, would amount to around $150,000. If the hall sells out, as it could, Festival Productions will make money. It takes around $40,000 to rent Carnegie Hall, and advertising costs are about $25,000. That could leave $15,000 profit — not much, but better than the usual red ink.

Ornette Coleman also charges in the range of $60,000, Mr. Wein said. But despite through-the-roof critical approval, Mr. Coleman isn't always a sell-out artist in New York. "We know we'll not make money," Mr. Wein said. "If we gross $100,000, I'll raise a flag."

Mr. Wein has made some wise financial decisions since accepting sponsorships. For the company and himself, he has bought real estate in New York, Connecticut and near Vence, France, as well as paintings by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and other black American artists that have risen steeply in value over 30 years. And some good years for the various festivals, including a record-breaking 2002 because of Bob Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival (which Festival also books), have sweetened the company's central fund.

A `Blaze of Glory'

From planning to finished schedule, Newport 2004 has been different. Right at the end of last year's Newport festival, Mr. Wein started imagining what he wanted for the 50th-anniversary year. "If this is my last year, I want to go out in a blaze of glory, the way I came in," Mr. Wein said. "I hope it's not my last year, but I'm acting like it is."

So the company's producers assembled a wish list of performers. Mr. Wein approved some and vetoed others. Some of his vetoes are based on practical experience. And certain artists have rules. Keith Jarrett and Oscar Peterson usually don't like to play outdoors. Sonny Rollins usually doesn't like to play on multiple-artist bills. Pat Metheny plays his own concerts, with his own sound and lights. And so on.

But the idea of a special Newport festival that was all "real jazz" caught on with many other artists. Dan Melnick, artistic director at the company, who is responsible for most of New York and Newport's bookings, said he waited an unusually long time — until December — to fax out offers to artists and received commitments unusually quickly. Tickets for the festival went on sale in late March, six weeks earlier than normal.

The festival will cost the company a great deal more to mount than the usual Newport festival, in artist fees, advertising, on-site staff and stages. But its strict focus on jazz could impress audiences, and perhaps it could have consequences for other jazz festivals around the world. (Switzerland's enormous Montreux Jazz Festival, for example, gives its jazz bookings a decidedly lower profile than its pop acts.)

The Newport bookings are mostly first-tier names: the Hancock-Shorter group and Ornette Coleman, but also Peter Cincotti, Dave Douglas, George Shearing, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Lee Konitz, Dave Brubeck, Dianne Reeves, Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. A third stage of solo-piano sets will be added to the customary two, with performers like Jason Moran, Mulgrew Miller, Peter Martin, Bill Charlap, Geri Allen and Jamie Cullum. Several special groups have been assembled, including one organized around the pianist McCoy Tyner; it includes the drummer Roy Haynes and the saxophonist Michael Brecker, playing John Coltrane's music.

At his large desk on West 77th Street, poring over proofs of the book of essays and program notes to be published for the Newport festival, Mr. Wein looked up and chuckled. "The only thing wrong with my business," he said, "and I guess one of the problems with life in general, is the inevitability of the same problems that come up every year. You could write a book about the problems: the rain, some artist's a pain."

"That inevitability is always there," he said. "It gets very boring sometimes." He smiled and looked contented.