Monday, September 8, 2008

Casualties of the Economy: PDX Jazz and Maybe Vancouver Fireworks


Downtown Portland will no longer be the lively scene it has been in the middle of February during the past five years. The Portland Jazz Festival featured top name artists in concert halls, hotel ballrooms and clubs during each of its two week long festivals since 2004. Thousands of hotel rooms were filled each year with out of towners who made up about a third of the attendees. The festival, it was announced today will cease to exist because of lack of sponsorships. Qwest, who used to put in 50k per year has pulled out, other sponsors have also scaled back, and no new sponsors have stepped up to the plate in the past year.

Luciana Lopez/s article in the Oregonian today has made me a little bit sad and cranky. I appreciate what artistic director and founder of the festival Bill Royston was able to accomplish, but I think he is being elitist by not scaling back and revising his vision to keep the festival alive. In Lopez's article he states: "If we decided to reduce it to four or five ticketed shows, that's not a festival, that's a series of concerts." No, Bill it could be called a scaled back festival. And one could be put together in such a way that people who live in this town (attractive deals on flat fee or smorgasboard ticket packages) would have an incentive to come and support the festival. Why are you being all Ross Perot my way or the highway on us here?

"The festival's annual $686,000 budget had, at minimum, a $100,000 hole in it." stated Lopez's article. Couldn't there still be a class act festival with a 500,000 budget?
Make it one week instead of two. Couldn't a festival be built on two or three class musicians (maybe Joe Lovano, Ron Carter, Kenny Baron or a Marsalis) and give the public a chance to see them in a variety of settings rather than one single concert? Last year's Classical Jazz Quartet was a perfect example. It was great to see Baron, Carter, Stefon Harris, and Lewis Nash together but it was all over in less than 90 minutes. I would have gladly forked over another twenty or more to see Baron play solo or Carter play with some other musicians in a nice setting later that evening.

I have been to several sold out events at the festival. Last year's opening weekend of Ornette Coleman on Friday and Cecil Taylor on Sunday with the Classical Jazz Quartet in between will always standout as a highlight. But I have also been to some where things seemed a little bit stretched. One was the closing night at the Hilton Hotel ballroom of the 2006 festival that featured Donald Harrison and a tribute to Glen Moore. The event was marginally attended and there was a real been too long at the midway kind of feel to the evening.

The 70th Aniversary Blue Note theme for 2009 that Royston announced at last year's festival seemed to hold some promise, even after one does a mental roll call of all the artists associated with Blue Note's history who are no longer with us. But curiously enough, I noticed recently that Blue Note has assembled their own all star band to tour in conjunction with their anniversary. Weirder yet is the fact that they (Bill Charlap, Ravi Coltrane, Nicholas Payton and others) will be playing in Portland at the Newmark theater, the site of many Portland Jazz Festival events on Friday, January 9. Interesting. Wonder if there is a backstory on how the date couldn't get synched up with the Jazz festival's schedule.

Meanwhile, the Vancouver Fourth of July celebration is on uneasy ground because one of the fireworks vendors is apparently unable to contribute a quarter of a million as he has in the past according to Tony Bacon's Daily Insider.

I'm saddened about the end of the Portland Jazz Festival. And although I have always had reservations about the Vancouver Fourth of July, I recognize it as a tradition that this community is closely identified with. But clearly we are going to see more of these kinds of stories regarding events and institutions that need subsidies from businesses that are more likely to give it up, obviously, when times are not so tight.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:25 PM
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