Blue Note gets "Fest-ive"

In honor of its 30^th anniversary, the institution will host the first inaugural Blue Note Jazz Festival during the month of June, the club announced this past week. Throughout the month, more than 80 shows featuring established jazz legends and rookie experimentalists will take place across the city.

The club is hosting the Festival to fill the void left by promoter and producer George Wein’s New York Jazz Festival, which usually occurs in June but which is on hiatus this year. Wein himself will perform at the Blue Note’s Festival in mid-June.

Programming runs the gamut from more traditional legends like Dave Brubeck and Chaka Khan to edgier picks like Duncan Sheik, The Roots, Igmar Thomas & the Cypher. The Harlem Gospel Choir will also perform. Blue Note hopes to promote cross-pollination of music by mixing different acts in hopes of appealing to varied demographics. Both Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco have hosted shows at the club, a testament to the gradual fusion of jazz with other genres and subsequent interest of younger audiences.

“Over the past five years, we’ve adapted to changes in music,” said Steven Bensusan, president of Blue Note.  “We’ve paired hip hop and jazz, for example. We want to mix up the elements.”

The Festival events will take place all over the city, including Highline Ballroom, B.B King’s, Terminal 5 and Mercury Lounge. There will also be an act at Central Park’s Summerstage, which has yet to be announced.

While Bensusan hopes to attract diverse audiences, he doesn’t believe jazz has been relegated solely to the milieu of the 50-plus set.

“This isn’t a dead industry,” he said. “Our audience is a mix of college students, people in their 30s, tourists and the 50-plus.”

If the Festival is successful this year, the Blue Note hopes to roll it out on an annual basis. You can see the show schedule here.

Financing a JazzFest: Marciac reveals

As the following from NPR shows, financing a major jazz fest like France's annual Marciac Festival really comes down to one thing: keeping an army of volunteers happy.

• Jazz in Marciac generated over 7 million Euros' worth of economic benefit for the Marciac region.
• The festival's overall budget is 3,455,000 Euro. Public financing makes up 421,000 Euro, while private sponsorship provides 354,000 Euro. Thus, the festival is 72.1 percent self-financed, accounting for additional revenue.
• 225,000 people came for the festival (up 2.3 percent), and 66,500 tickets (up 8.46 percent) for paid shows were sold.
• The festival depended on its 800 volunteers. They would have cost 950,000 Euro to employ at minimum wage alone. However, the festival did host 400 of those volunteers on site for a total of 6,000 person-nights.
• 17,500 meals were served in all, including musicians, technical crew, staff and volunteers. The volunteers accounted for 11,190 meals alone.

Currently, one Euro is worth around 1.31 U.S. dollars, which is about the exchange rate at the time of the festival this past summer.

 

I've never studied the accounting sheets in depth for other festivals, but one element looks to me to be rather extraordinary. For a festival of such magnitude to generate 72.1% of its revenue by itself — largely in ticket sales, one imagines, though "l'autofinancement" isn't exactly defined — is a serious achievement. Even Jazz in Marciac says that 2010 was a banner year (an "année record") for them.

But it isn't shocking that these sorts of things bring in so much money for their communities. The arts seem to require a lot of money, especially when you bring in Wynton Marsalis, Diana Krall, Chick Corea, Jamie Cullum, Chucho Valdes, Ahmad Jamal and Esperanza Spalding, plus tons of other artists. (That was just in 2010.) But the arts can also be even more massive economic engines; in this case, the economic benefit to the area far outstrips taxpayer cost. Plus, how do you put a value on human creativity? [La Dépêche du Midi: Festival Jazz in Marciac tient la forme (French) / Jazz in Marciac festival takes shape(automated English translation)]