Results tagged “George Wein” from Jazz Beyond Jazz

All is not dismal in Jazzville: Producer George Wein has found a title sponsor -- CareFusion -- for his jazz festivals in Newport next month and New York City summer 2010. SFJazz has announced a stellar lineup including Ornette Coleman for its fall fest, Oct. 10 - Nov. 21. 

Did you miss the "festivity" of June jazz concerts in major Manhattan venues -- or did you find ways of coping without them? There's so much fine music -- jazz and beyond -- in nearby festive settings, many of them out-of-doors, that the absence of a 38-year-old institution doesn't seem to have made much stir. Perhaps you didn't even notice? 

New speculation on the jazz magazine crisis: Having no summer advertorial supplements for JVC Jazz Festivals (which aren't happening) may have hugely hurt JT's seasonal revenues. How could the loss of three consecutive monthly multi-page inserts, all expenses paid for by the client, not shake a publication's income stream?

Complete disclosure: I edited the JVC Jazz Festival program books in the 1990s, when they were inserts into Tower Records' free monthly magazine Pulse!, and for a year when JVC America, responsible for the Japanese owned electronics firms' promotional investment in George Wein's international jazz fests, switched the contract to Jazziz. Ah, those were the days!

No major, mainstream, corporate-supported jazz fest will occur in New York City this summer, according to today's New York Times report confirming my posting of  April 15.

Festival Network principal Chris Shields, purchaser in 2007 of the production company headed by George Wein which staged June jazz concerts at major mid-town Manhattan venues for 37 years, blames the economy and his own over-ambitious plans for the suspension (if not demise) of events which kept New York the focus of the jazz world, first with name sponsorship from Newport and Kool cigarettes and for 24 years as the JVC Jazz Festival-New York. The NY jazz fest was one of a baker's dozen jazz fests supported throughout the U.S. each summer by JVC-America. The company says it is "has chosen to take our promotional activities in a different direction, and one that will no longer include jazz event sponsorship."

With no news confirming -- or denying -- that there will be a mainstream New York City jazz festival next summer like those produced by George Wein since the late '60s and for the past 25 years supported by the JVC Corporation of America, the artist-organized "avant-jazz" Vision Festival stands as the largest and longest concentrated such effort in the city this year, having just released its complete schedule of concerts and panels to be held at the downtown Abrons Arts Center and Angel Orenzanz Foundation June 9 - 15, 2009.

George Wein will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the historic Newport Jazz Festival and the 50th anniversary of his equally renown Newport Folk Festival by producing both a jazz fest and a folk fest in that Rhode Island resort town next August, according to a press release issued on March 3 by publicist Carolyn McClair -- but perhaps without his sponsor of 25 years and independent of the company he helped establish just two years ago.