[Dixielandjazz] JVC Jazz Festival - NYC

[Stephen G Barbone]

George Wein is usually credited with being the reigning mavin of Jazz  
Festival producers. While the schedule is not yet complete, OKOM (or  
close to it) events include the following musicians: Bucky Pizzarelli,  
Ken Peplowski, Dick Hyman, Howard Alden, Wycliffe Gordon, Jay  
Leonhart. Eddie Locke, Tierney Sutton, Anat Cohen, Les Paul.
For more info, see their website: festivalnetwork.com.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

NY TImes - April 9, 2008 - by Ben Ratliff
Changes, and a Constant, for New York Jazz Festival

Last year when George Wein sold Festival Productions Inc., jazz fans  
worried about what might happen to the programming of his JVC Jazz  
Festival New York, the city’s biggest and longest-running such event.

But this year’s edition, which takes place from June 15 to 28 and  
whose details were announced Tuesday, turns out to be undiminished and  
newly energized by welcome changes of locations and some imaginative  
bookings.

Mr. Wein has been running a jazz festival in New York since 1972, and  
before that, in 1954, he started the Newport Jazz Festival. His New  
York festival has rarely been vanguardist. It has often relied on  
formula or genre crossovers that have diluted its aesthetic integrity.  
Yet now it appears to be edging closer to a truer reflection of  
serious jazz, with one of the more promising lineups in recent years.

Mr. Wein’s sale of Festival Productions was more like a merger. He and  
most of his employees went to the new company, the Festival Network LLC.

JVC-New York and about 15 other music festivals around the world are  
now under the aegis of the new company, and Mr. Wein is no longer the  
chief executive. (His new title is chairman of the company’s Live  
Events Division.) At the time of the sale he said he intended to keep  
acting in a managerial role, but there was a natural assumption that  
Mr. Wein, now 82, might step back from the day-to-day business.  
Instead, starting last fall, he got more involved, especially once his  
main festival booker, Danny Melnick, left to start his own company,  
Absolutely Live Entertainment.

“I just jumped in and did it,” Mr. Wein said. “In the past I always  
made the final decisions, but this was as I hadn’t done it in 25 years  
or more.” Together with Jason Olaine, a 40-year-old producer hired in  
November by Festival Network, he booked this year’s event.

Mr. Olaine — whose résumé includes six years of booking Yoshi’s, the  
Bay Area jazz club, and working as a record producer at the jazz label  
Verve — explained that he was given a mandate by the company, for this  
festival and others, to find combinations of A-list artists that fit  
well together for exclusive festival events. “It isn’t really about  
making the concerts skew younger,” he said. “It’s just an attempt to  
reach new audiences.”

Mr. Olaine added that it was initially daunting to work with Mr. Wein.  
“He’s very direct, and he has so much knowledge of tickets and  
audiences and scaling,” he said. “He’d say that clubs are different  
from festivals, that the West Coast is different from the East Coast.  
But then he said, ‘O.K., kid, whaddya got?’ ”

Mr. Wein said simply, “We speak the same language.”

As in the past the JVC festival will use Carnegie Hall’s Stern  
Auditorium for a string of larger shows. They include the bossa nova  
pioneer João Gilberto on June 22,Herbie Hancock’s new band on June 23,  
the pop-jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on June 24, Al Green and Dianne  
Reeves on June 27 and the Mos Def Big Band with Gil Scott-Heron on  
June 28. Four concerts will be held in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall: the  
pianists Brad Mehldau (June 22) and Dick Hyman (June 23), the singer  
Tierney Sutton (June 24) and the French accordion virtuoso Richard  
Galliano, with his Tangaria Quartet (June 28).

But another set of concerts has been scheduled at the New York Society  
for Ethical Culture, whose auditorium has never been used by the  
festival. On June 17 it will be the site of a tribute to Alice  
Coltrane, including her son Ravi Coltrane, Geri Allen, Charlie Haden  
and Jack DeJohnette. Two pianists of radically different stripes play  
solo performances in a June 20 double-bill: George Cables and Cecil  
Taylor. On June 24 the Bad Plus, a trio, will for one night add the  
guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel as a fourth member. Another double-bill, on  
June 25, presents two new young bandleaders, Anat Cohen and Esperanza  
Spalding, and Charles Lloyd’s new quartet, with the pianist Jason  
Moran, plays on June 28.

And finally, instead of hanging the festival’s banner in different  
self-programmed jazz clubs through the city, Mr. Wein and Mr. Olaine  
have fully programmed the music in one club, Le Poisson Rouge, a new  
space occupying the site of the old Village Gate, which closed in  
1993. (The club, which holds 200 seated and 750 standing, will start  
its own regular programming in the fall, Mr. Olaine said.) The shows  
include Charlie Haden’s Quartet West on June 18, Bill Frisell’s trio  
on June 19, the Swedish group E.S.T. with the New York band Aetherial  
Bace on June 21 and the jazz-funk band Soulive collaborating with the  
saxophonist Joshua Redmanon June 26 and 27. In recognition of the old  
club’s groundbreaking Monday night Salsa Meets Jazz series, the Latin- 
jazz conguero and the bandleader Poncho Sanchez will perform there on  
Monday, June 23.

Other concerts will be held at the Rubin Museum of Art, the Schomburg  
Center for Research in Black Culture, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the  
Studio Museum in Harlem and the Prospect Park Bandshell. Tickets go on  
sale Wednesday at 10 a.m. through the concerts’ respective box offices  
or the festival’s Web site,festivalnetwork.com.