For 10 incredible days, the musical capital of America was not Chicago, New York or Los Angeles.
With hundreds of acts playing to 370,000 listeners, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival had brought the action down South-at least from April 24 through May 3.
But for Chicago jazz fans, some nagging questions lingered long after the last clarinet had wailed at the New Orleans Fair Grounds.
Why, for instance, can`t Chicago-with a population and economic base many times larger than New Orleans` and a jazz tradition to match-put on a jazz festival of comparable scope?
Why does New Orleans` festival continue to grow in duration, attendance and stature, while Chicago`s event might be dubbed the Great Vanishing Jazz Fest (it has shrunk from seven days, beginning in 1979, to two days this year, Sept. 5 and 6)?
The answers, it turns out, reveal a great deal about how New Orleans has developed the most prominent jazz festival in America.
To begin with, Chicago`s Jazz Festival faces a form of competition that the New Orleans festival does not: other city fests. When the Chicago Jazz Festival was launched in `79, its only Grant Park counterpart was the symphony series.
Since then, the city has shrunk the Jazz Festival while adding the Blues Festival (June 5 through 7), the Gospel Festival (June 13 and 14), the Country Music Festival (July 1 and 2) and Viva! Chicago Latin Music Festival (Sept. 19 and 20).
Funding for all of these events comes out of the Office of Special Events, which also finances the city`s 70-odd neighborhood festivals and Taste of Chicago, and ”all of us compete for the same money,” says Penny Tyler, who has run the Chicago Jazz Festival expertly since 1979.
But by splintering Chicago`s weeklong Jazz Festival (which originally included blues) into so many different events, Chicago has wound up with several short, scattered festivals that are dwarfed by the mammoth New Orleans event.
In other words, while Chicago`s small festivals compete with one another for funds and audiences, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival brings all the regional forms of music together in one sprawling space. Jazz, blues, Cajun, zydeco, traditional New Orleans, ancient African, even hints of rock-the whole glorious mix comes together in one phenomenally successful event.
More local acts
”But that was the idea from the start,” says Quint Davis, producer-director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
”When (veteran jazz impresario) George Wein came down here in 1970 to help get this off the ground, his concept was fully developed: to create a jazz festival using not so many big names but more local, regional acts.
”In other words, he wanted to create a festival that was really about New Orleans music, about the ethnomusicological place this city is,” Davis says.
”What I tried to do, in helping him, was to add a party atmosphere, because if there`s one thing New Orleans understands, it`s a party.
”But this was going to be a party for the whole family, kind of like a traditional New Orleans back-yard barbecue, but with a bigger back yard and authentic music.”
The formula worked, with the festival growing from five days its first year to 10 days this time around.
”But it wasn`t until the New Orleans World`s Fair (1984) that it really became a nationally and internationally known event,” Davis adds.
”Suddenly people from all over started to realize that we have a unique music festival here.
”Actually, they found out it was more like going to a carnival, with food, music, arts and all coming together. But don`t be fooled-ours remains a jazz festival. The related acts are just sidelights to the jazz.”
There`s another critical factor that has enabled New Orleans` event to flourish while those in Chicago struggle: The New Orleans festival charges admission.
A bargain at $10
Entry to the New Orleans Fair Grounds is $10, though that daily fee remains a comparative bargain, since listeners can attend dozens of shows featuring all kinds of music at 11 stages each day the grounds are open
(Friday through Sunday the first weekend, Thursday through Sunday the last).
At night, the more expensive indoor concerts have ticket prices ranging from $15 to $25.
Evidently, New Orleans festgoers don`t mind the fee, considering that attendance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this year was up 33,000 from last year, thanks mostly to an additional day of events.
Multiply the 370,000 attendance by the $10 admission fee-and throw in the evening concert grosses-and you have a festival with an annual operating budget of $4 million (including corporate contributions).
By comparison, all of Chicago`s music festivals combined have a budget of roughly $1.4 million; as for the Chicago Jazz Festival, its budget is only $240,000.
All of which makes one wonder if Chicago should consider charging admission.
”It has been considered, especially this year,” Tyler says. ”But the city doesn`t want to do that right now. They don`t think that, in this economy, this is the right time to start charging admission.
”We`ve also considered charging for seats, but not charging for sitting on the grass,” says Tyler, acknowledging that a similar setup has helped pay for the Grant Park Symphony concerts since 1977: If you buy a membership in the Grant Park Concerts Society ($40), you sit up front (at concert time, unused seats are made available to non-members).
”And we`ve looked at the possibility of maybe having a New Orleans-kind of fairgrounds at Soldier Field or some such place,” Tyler adds.
”But for now, with the city facing bills for the flood damage, those are really just pipe dreams.”
On balance, though, it`s important to note that certain features of Chicago`s Jazz Festival, as well as the city`s other music festivals, succeed well beyond their New Orleans counterparts.
Second-rate sound
For all the pleasure of roaming the New Orleans Fair Grounds, for instance, it remains a second-rate place to genuinely hear music. The speakers at one sound stage compete with those at the next; the most popular acts draw standing-room crowds that often make seeing and hearing difficult; and the carnival atmosphere doesn`t help listening, either.
Grant Park, by contrast, offers an outdoor setting matched in the United States only by New York`s Central Park. To attend a Grant Park concert is to enjoy a spectacular urban skyline and good outdoor acoustics.
More important, the Chicago Jazz Festival surely has been the most intelligently programmed of any in the United States.
With strong input from the Jazz Institute of Chicago, a not-for-profit organization of scholars and fans, Chicago`s event has presented not only the biggest names in jazz (from Miles Davis to Benny Goodman) but several enlightening theme programs and explorations of particular chapters in jazz history.
The consistently high quality of the Chicago Jazz Festival makes it all the more frustrating that, 13 years after the fest began, it stands as a fraction of what it once was.
Tyler says there`s still a chance that this year`s festival may be three days long (if corporate funding can be found), and she hopes the event eventually will return to the four-day length of recent years.
But as of this writing, the budget for the festival doesn`t fully cover even two days. The remaining funds are yet to be raised.
As a result, the ad for the Chicago Jazz Festival, which ran in the program book of the New Orleans fest, announces only the Sept. 5 and 6 dates; even if a third day will be added, many prospective out-of-town visitors won`t know about it.
All these problems point to the most profound difference between the Chicago and New Orleans events: Chicago`s is sponsored by the city, New Orleans` by the not-for-profit New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.
”We don`t get a penny from the city, never have, except in terms of city services,” says Davis, who adds that the festival also pays for police.
Without being at the mercy of city budgets, the folks who operate the New Orleans festival do not have to wonder how long their event will run.
More important, the Jazz & Heritage Foundation has managed the festival well enough to have funds left over to support New Orleans jazz events the rest of the year.
But in Chicago, the festival funds remain at the mercy of the city`s shrinking budget, except for an occasional corporate sponsorship.
So when it recently came time for Mayor Richard Daley to propose a tightened Chicago budget, he called for cuts from most city departments, including the Office of Special Events, which sponsors the Jazz Festival.
Perhaps the time has come to begin looking for a new way of supporting and operating Chicago`s music festivals, particularly since Chicago government has been trying to turn an increasing number of services over to the private sector.
”All I can say is that when you pay your own way, you have the freedom to do what you want,” Davis says. ”But you also need a real strong vision, like George Wein had, about what your festival should be.”
When planners don`t know how long a festival is going to run just months before it starts-as is the case in Chicago-there isn`t much room for a larger vision.
