[Dixielandjazz] No JVC Jazz Festival

[Stephen G Barbone]

Sadly for jazz, it looks as if  Chris Shields bit off more than he  
could chew when he bought George Wein's company 2 years ago.



Cheers,

Steve Barbone

www.myspace.com/barbonesttreetjazzband



May 20 2009 - NY TIMES - By Ben Sisario

New York Loses Its Jazz Festival

Around this time of year, posters for the JVC Jazz Festival would be  
appearing on the streets of New York, and jazz tourists would be  
finalizing plans to arrive in the middle of June for two weeks of  
bragworthy shows.

But for the first time in 37 years, there will be no major summer jazz  
festival in New York. Nor will there be related series in Miami or  
Chicago, as the concert company behind them is suffering a financial  
crisis.

At stake is one of the most celebrated legacies in American music. Two  
years ago the impresario George Wein sold his company, Festival  
Productions, to a group led by Chris Shields, a charismatic  
entrepreneur who planned to transform Mr. Wein’s empire through  
aggressive growth. Now that plan has all but collapsed, as Mr.  
Shields’s company, Festival Network, has lost its top sponsor, as well  
as several signature festivals, delivering what many call a painful  
blow to jazz.

In an interview Mr. Shields, 38, largely blamed the economy for his  
company’s woes. “I’ll certainly take criticism for the robust growth  
plan,” he said. “It may have been too robust for the time. I think if  
we weren’t faced with this economy, we would have been just fine.”

But business associates and former employees, many of whom would not  
comment publicly because the company still owes them money, say that  
Festival Network overspent on booking talent and took unnecessary  
risks, including opening four new festivals last summer without  
securing sufficient sponsorship.

“He was ambitious but perhaps overwhelmed with the realities of the  
New York market,” said Michael Dorf, who runs City Winery and hired  
Mr. Shields for the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival in 2000. “There’s  
something that comes from cutting your teeth working day in and day  
out in New York concert promotion. I don’t think Chris had that  
experience level.”

Last year Festival Network presented 17 festivals around the world,  
but Mr. Shields said he has none to announce this year. The company  
lost its contract for the Newport jazz and folk festivals in Rhode  
Island because of late payments for use of state parkland. The  
Freihofer’s Jazz Festival in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., another longtime  
Wein event, has gone to a competitor, and last month JVC said that  
after 24 years with Mr. Wein, it would no longer be sponsoring jazz.

Festival Network’s troubles, however, reach farther than Newport. In  
Mali, the Festival in the Desert — a renowned world-music event each  
January in the remote sands beyond Timbuktu — was almost canceled this  
year after beginning an association with Festival Network.

Manny Ansar, the Malian founder of the Festival in the Desert, said  
the agreement, finalized at Newport last summer, called for Festival  
Network to provide a range of assistance, including enough money to  
produce this year’s event. According to Mr. Ansar’s American lawyer,  
Thomas Rome, that amount exceeded $600,000.

But communication broke down, and most of that money never came, Mr.  
Ansar said. The festival went on, he added, with financing from the  
governments of Mali, Morocco and Burkina Faso. Mr. Ansar spoke in  
French in a telephone interview that was translated by Mr. Rome.

Mr. Shields said that his company had invested $150,000 in the  
Festival in the Desert, but denied that Festival Network had agreed to  
finance it fully. (Mr. Ansar, for his part, said he believed the  
agreements were made in good faith, and he has not filed a lawsuit for  
the money. “In my culture,” he said, “one doesn’t abandon a friend  
because he’s in trouble.”)

Mr. Shields, whose own tastes lean more to folk than to jazz, had a  
modest profile in music before taking over Mr. Wein’s company. After  
graduating from Columbia in 1993, he worked briefly for Mr. Wein, and  
in 1998 he developed a festival on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. In  
2000 he worked under Mr. Dorf as a director of the Bell Atlantic Jazz  
Festivals in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.

But for the Festival Productions deal, he had major financial backers,  
including Richard Sands, the chairman and chief executive of  
Constellation Brands, the beer and wine conglomerate. Festival  
Productions was purchased for about $4 million, according to both Mr.  
Wein and Mr. Shields, and Festival Network announced plans to build a  
portfolio of world-class festivals by presenting “destination” events  
in prime locations.

“The goal of the company,” Mr. Shields said, “was to create enough  
original and desired location-based festivals that the Fortune 500s of  
the world would look at that umbrella of festivals and say, ‘We want  
to come in and sponsor the entire body.’ ”

Acquiring Festival Productions was a coup for the young company. Mr.  
Wein, 83, enjoys a singular reputation as the patriarch of the  
American festival, and he had a history of rebuffing previous offers.  
In an interview he said the deal with Festival Network came along at  
the right time. “I was at a point in my life where I was cashing in,”  
he said.

Mr. Wein stayed on as producer emeritus. Ben Ratliff of The New York  
Times praised the lineup of the 2008 JVC festival in New York, calling  
it “undiminished and newly energized by welcome changes of locations  
and some imaginative bookings.”

By last summer, though, the company was feeling a financial pinch. Mr.  
Shields said that sponsorship had fallen short of expectations; new  
festivals in Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Whistler, British Columbia; and San  
Francisco lacked major sponsors and had weak attendance. Mr. Shields  
says he stopped paying himself a salary in September, as the market  
crashed, and by December he stopped paying staff members. At its peak  
the company had 37 employees, but now is down to 6.

After the company lost the Newport contracts, Mr. Wein announced that  
he would be presenting folk and jazz festivals there in August under  
his own name. (A spokeswoman for the Rhode Island Department of  
Environmental Management, which administers the state parks, said  
Festival Network had paid its outstanding debts.)

The disappearance of several former JVC festivals, particularly in New  
York, have deprived many musicians of some of their most lucrative  
engagements this summer. But more important, many in the jazz world  
say, their loss sends a misleading signal about the health of the music.

“Losing a major jazz festival kind of tells the world that maybe this  
music isn’t marketable,” said Joel Chriss, a booking agent whose  
roster includes Randy Brecker and Freddy Cole. “It’s potentially  
dangerous.”

Mr. Shields says the story is not over. He wants to present a New York  
jazz festival next year. Although his company has been battered, he  
says its underlying model is sound. “This business plan can succeed,  
absolutely,” he said. “You’ve seen it succeed in the promotions  
business, you’ve seen it happen in sports, you’ve seen it happen in  
management. We by no means have given up.”