Since Michelle Obama and the NEA drew my attention to the status of jazz last month (link), with festivals being cancelled and audiences shrinking, I’ve been paying much closer attention
to it. The other day, a news item about the Newport Jazz Festival and impressario George Wein caught my eye. Wein, who helped found the Newport Jazz Festival 55 years ago and the Newport Folk Festival five years later, told the Providence Business Journal that he plans to create a non-profit organization to present the two events after this year’s offerings.
But as I looked into that, I found something much more interesting: a company interested in the arts-health link.
First, Wein’s thoughts:
It is my hope in the next few years that I might be able to make [the festivals] into a 501(c)3 nonprofit and have local people in the state and the city involved in it. That’s the only way it will last forever.
Pointing out that most cultural organizations are nonprofits, he said the festivals “really belong in that arena now,” adding that subsidies wouldn’t have to be that steep. You can read the rest of the article here.
That’s where I grew intrigued by CareFusion, the San Diego medical technology company that earlier this month agreed to sponsor next month’s Newport Jazz Festival. CareFusion had already agree to sponsor what used to be the JVC festival in New York next year.
It’s also sponsoring jazz festivals in Chicago, Monterey, Sydney and Paris this year.
The company is being spun off from Cardinal Health, and will be independent on Sept. 1. The jazz sponsorships seem to be a way of building its brand. Marketing consultant Ronda Thomas Farrell, the CEO of The Exordium Group, which advises CareFusion, earlier this year explained them this way to the Associated Press:
We saw how jazz was being used to teach listening skills in medical schools like Baylor, and that a significant number of clinicians and administrators are also professional-level jazz musicians.
And CareFusion’s CEO, David Schlotterbeck, who once played drums, told the AP (here):
I’m a musician myself and I’m really looking forward to participating in these festivals…The fact that jazz represents a stream of complex information really plays into how medical practitioners have to process information so that they can improvise a solution.
Believing in “the healing power of music,” CareFusion plans to transmit live feeds from festival concerts to hospitals, which they can air on their own network for patients and professionals. It has its own jazz website, which says:
There is a clear connection between jazz and medicine. Music is medicine and has the power to heal. Medical care and music are also fundamentally human, driven and forever changed by the interaction between caregiver and patient, musician and listener.
Quite a proselytizer! Although there’s a lot of unproven mumbo-jumbo about the connection between the arts and health care, there are also many promising theories and experiments. As I’ve mentioned before (here), exploration in the area is well worth pursuing.
It will be worth watching, when — Aug. 7 to 9 — the Newport festival takes place, featuring Chaka Khan, with the George Duke Trio, Tony Bennett and Branford Marsalis, among many others, and hospitals tune in. CareFusion is taking applications from hospitals on its jazz website.