[Dixielandjazz] Strange Festival Schedules

[Steve Barbone]

"Cees van den Heuvel" <heu at bart.nl> wrote:
> 
> Mad Dawg opens up a can of worms here.
> Playing on numerous festivals all over the world I have also noticed
> strange schedules. But it is a very complicated problem.
> Various theories are possible. Most of them plausible.
> And if a theory seems to work, the next year it could
> not work at all.
> My theory, emphasis on theory, nothing more. (If theories
> work then everybody would be succesfull and everybody
> could make a hit record.....)
> Here it comes:
> Make, let's see, 4 profiles of visitors. How would they
> make their schedule of visits, and base the schedules
> on that. This way the customer dictates. My two eurocents...

Another way to clean up schedules would be to charge a separate fee for each
performance like JVC and other professionally run festivals do. Since they
are profit driven, they want maximum attendance at each performance and do
their utmost to insure scheduling that will facilitate maximum attendance.
Amazing what a profit driven approach will do for you.

There is really no excuse for jumbled schedules, missing instrumentation on
All Star sets, etc., etc., except last minute illness, accident etc. And no
excuse for forcing the musicians to run like hell to make the next set at a
far away location. Happened to us once at a major jazz festival and we vowed
it would never happen like that again, even to the point of refusing to
appear the following year when a similar schedule was proposed.

The year after that we did appear again with a relaxed schedule. They had
replaced their original schedulers with some that understood more fully what
to do and how to do it.

Cees hits the nail on the head. Schedule for the customers to which I would
add, schedule for the bands also.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone