It`s 10 o`clock the morning after, and jazz great Gerry Mulligan is recovering in his North Shore hotel room.
”Let`s just say I`m slightly tired,” moans Mulligan, who has every right to be.
For 10 days straight, he has emceed, performed in and otherwise looked after the new Jazz in June series at the Ravinia Festival.
As artistic director of the series, which featured such legends as Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, Mulligan has been worrying over the weather, the crowds, the artists, even the Chicago Bulls (whose championship series directly affected the size of audiences).
Sharing the headaches and triumphs has been Zarin Mehta, Ravinia`s new executive director and the daring fellow who first dreamed up Jazz in June.
So, today, the Monday morning quarterbacks are sipping coffee and assessing the game.
”All in all, I would say we were pretty lucky,” says Mehta, whose jazz series drew more than 50,000 people for 10 concerts. ”We didn`t get rained out, and people came to see the shows.”
Adds Mulligan: ”We got this thing up and running, which wasn`t so easy.”
Indeed, though Mehta and Mulligan had less than a year to organize the massive event, they managed to book some of the foremost artists in jazz, several of whom hadn`t played Chicago in years (particularly Peterson, Fitzgerald and Lionel Hampton).
More than that, Mehta did no less than redefine the Ravinia Festival, which traditionally has opened with classical music at the end of June.
For the first time, the opening sounds at Ravinia were not European classical but American jazz; a park that had sat empty for most of June was overflowing with crowds several weeks earlier; and a large black audience turned up at the North Shore music festival.
”The question on all our minds was whether the public would even come out-you never know for sure until you try something,” says Mehta, who nevertheless played his hand boldly.
By hiring Fitzgerald, Peterson, Hampton, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Mel Torme, Marcus Roberts, Ellis Marsalis and other brand names, Mehta and friends were betting that famous jazz artists could launch an unfamiliar product.
But superb musicians do not come cheap. It`s a fair guess that the talent fees alone for Jazz in June ran approximately $500,000, not to mention the heavy costs of advertising a new event via TV, magazines and newspapers.
Yet when the series opened on Friday, June 7, success seemed elusive. The Ravinia pavilion was about half filled, the picnic grounds were sparsely attended-a grand total of only 3,400 people showed up (the pavilion alone seats 3,500).
The reason for the slim opening-night attendance can be summed up in a word: Bulls. As Mulligan`s quartet and Billy Taylor`s trio took the stage, it was clear that the Los Angeles Lakers weren`t the only ones getting trounced by Chicago`s basketball team.
”Actually, I didn`t get too depressed when I saw the size of the audience on opening night,” says Mehta. ”Considering that the Bulls were playing, I felt lucky to have 3,000 people on the lawn.”
More to the point, ”When we were planning this thing, there was no Bulls card in the deck,” says Mulligan. ”So here was another example of a primary rule of show business-anything can happen at any time.”
For those who doubt that the Bulls game decimated the jazz series`
opening-night crowd, consider what happened the next night, June 8. The Bulls weren`t playing, the Oscar Peterson Quartet was on stage, and roughly 10,000 people packed the park.
The next night, as Lionel Hampton was taking the stage, the Bulls were hitting national television with Game 4. The audience plunged right back to 3,400.
So by this point, the future of the Jazz in June series became interwoven with the future of the Bulls. In other words, if the Bulls were to lose Game 5 on June 12, Ravinia could look forward to another weekend of smallish audiences.
”Wednesday (June 12) was the critical night,” says Mehta, who was in the audience at Ravinia`s Murray Theatre listening to the Dorothy Donegan Trio.
”As soon as Dorothy finished, I ran backstage to ask one of the technical guys, `Did you hear anything?`
”He just gave me the thumbs-up sign, and I ran over to Gerry and gave him thumbs-up.”
Immediately, ”We started running around the house congratulating ourselves,” quips Mulligan, ”as if the Bulls` win on Wednesday (the last game of the championship) was somehow our doing. But we were relieved not to be competing with those games anymore.”
Sure enough, Ella Fitzgerald`s show on June 14 drew a whopping 15,200 fans, likely one of its biggest nights for the season to come.
So did Jazz in June break even?
”As I`ve said before, this event, like most of what is done at Ravinia, ultimately loses money, if you measure only by the box-office receipts,” says Mehta, underscoring another truism of the performing arts: Even sold-out houses generally cannot cover all the costs of major classical and jazz concerts.
”But that`s why we have things like the Gala Benefit concert with Luciano Pavarotti on Friday (with tickets up to $150), and volunteers and fundraisers. This year, we`ll have to make up $4 million in expenses not covered by the box office (Ravinia`s annual budget is approximately $10.5 million).
”But we`re here to make great music, not great profits.”
There`s no question that, artistically speaking, Jazz in June was a major triumph. Fitzgerald sang magnificently; Peterson was characteristically brilliant at the keyboard; Hampton, an octogenarian, seemed to defy the passage of time; Torme sounded more sophisticated than ever.
Further, the superstars were not the only successes. An evening of traditional jazz featuring bassist Milt Hinton, pianist Dick Hyman and reedmen Kenny Davern and Bob Wilber set new standards for performing jazz of the `20s. A duo-piano recital by Ellis Marsalis and Marcus Roberts was a joy. Pianist Dorothy Donegan offered a typically ingenious combination of keyboard virtuosity and slapstick humor.
Virtually all the players seemed to outdo themselves, perhaps owing to what Mulligan calls the ”Carnegie Hall factor.”
”When you play in Carnegie Hall,” says Mulligan, ”it feels very, very good, and that comes across in your playing. Well, when a jazz musician gets to play Ravinia, it feels quite good, too, and that comes across.”
And though jazz players typically are subjected to the noisy crowds in nightclubs and the beat-up pianos therein, at Ravinia the artists enjoyed a remarkably attentive audience and the best pianos money can buy.
Still, at least one crucial question remains: Will Jazz in June be back next year?
”Well boss?” says Mulligan, looking inquiringly at Mehta.
”Everyone seemed to like it,” says Mehta, ”so I would say yes, we will be back. And Gerry will be back.
”And I think maybe we`ll be even a little better at this next year.”
