The jazz festival has become a staple of communities around the world and it’s important that Latin Jazz remains in the mix.  Jazz festivals should represent the broad scope of the jazz world, and as a result, they should include artists from across the spectrum, including Latin Jazz.  All festivals are not created equally – some small local events only feature a couple of acts while major corporate sponsored events bring together multitudes of artists.  These larger festivals generally offer major promotional opportunities for artists, provide important work in tough economic times, and make essential connections with new audiences.  For years, festivals have been skewed towards traditional jazz artists, delving into pop and rock acts to inspire the appearance of younger audience members.  Smooth jazz and fusion dominated festivals for a while, reflecting their surges in popularity.  The position of Latin Jazz at festivals has generally been precarious, with limited inclusion.  When festivals overlook Latin Jazz artists, they make large-scale statements about the importance of the music in its genre.

We’ll be adopting a report card format to keep track of the Latin Jazz presence at major festivals here at LJC.  It’s time to break down the facts and examine the honest support of Latin Jazz at jazz festivals.  I’ve developed ten categories that ensure the success of Latin Jazz at a festival, assigning each category ten points.  I want to be fair and reflect the needs of musicians, audience members, and promoters, realizing that festivals cater to more styles than simply Latin Jazz.  Still, I want to keep an eye on festivals and their use of Latin Jazz, hopefully inspiring some reflection, discussion, and eventually changes in the support of Latin Jazz at festivals.

The categories are listed below; each one will be explained in our subsequent discussion.  Remember, each category involves ten points.

10 – Freebie points for holding a jazz festival at all
10 – Freebie points for simply including Latin Jazz in the festival line-up
10 – Flexible points that can be molded to festival special circumstances
10 – Percentage of Latin Jazz artists in the festival line-up
10 – Inclusion of both local and international Latin Jazz artists into the festival line-up
10 – Inclusion of both established and emerging Latin Jazz artists into the festival line-up
10 – Inclusion of a variety of Latin Jazz approaches into the festival line-up
10 – Scheduling of Latin Jazz acts during the festival to ensure maximum visibility
10 – Special event programming for Latin Jazz acts
10 – A Latin Jazz educational component

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The first jazz festival assigned a Latin Jazz Report Card will be George Wein’s Carefusion Jazz Festival 55 at Newport.  Originally known as the Newport Jazz Festival, this event signaled the start of the jazz festival when Wein organized the first gathering in 1954.  The beautiful outside environment, the community feeling, and the line-up of outstanding artists ensured a successful birth to the event, which has continued in several different forms to the present day.  It inspired promoters across the country, and eventually around the world, to create similar mass jazz festivals, permanently sewing it into the fabric of our lives.  

As a result, the Newport festival carries a huge historical significance and it garners more attention than most other festivals combined.  This saddles the event’s organizers with a great responsibility to the jazz world.  Their choice of musicians for the event makes unspoken statements about audience popularity and artistic relevance.  The massive amount of promotion around the festival ensures that their artists get superstar status.  The audiences that attend the festival or listen to the subsequent broadcast on NPR remember the names of the musicians, pushing their careers forward.  The Newport festival holds a good deal of power, so we need to make sure that Latin Jazz artists are fairly represented at the event.

With that in mind, let us dig into the Latin Jazz Report Card for George Wein’s Carefusion Jazz Festival 55 at Newport.

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Freebie points for holding a jazz festival at all
Freebie points for simply including Latin Jazz in the festival line-up
Flexible points that can be molded to festival special circumstances
Our report card starts by offering 30 points for simply holding a jazz festival, including Latin Jazz in the line-up, and facing any special circumstances.  The Newport Jazz Festival fell victim to a new organizational company and the country’s economic downturn.  In all effective terms, the festival died and most people already considered it a thing of the past.  George Wein, the man that started the festival in 1954, returned to the forefront of the company, found corporate funding, reserved the location, and assembled an impressive cast of artists.  He did this starting in January of 2009, not much time to organize a major event.  This was an amazing task that shows Wein’s dedication to jazz and the Newport festival, an admirable quality in every way.  Newport 55 gets all 30 of these points, hands-down without question.

Newport’s grade in this category = 30

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Percentage of Latin Jazz artists in the festival line-up
A good jazz festival should represent the diversity inherent in the jazz world, including straight-ahead jazz, avant-garde, world, fusion, Latin Jazz, and more.  The balance between these different styles forms an essential part of any general jazz festival; any sway too far in one direction causes imbalance.  If the festival aesthetically makes a dedication to one style, then we would expect to see one style primarily.  The general jazz festival should include all different styles, providing a wide spectrum of performance opportunities for artists and a diverse listening experience for the audience.  Although I would love to see Latin Jazz occupy most of the festival’s attention, an overabundant share of the performance time would offset the balance.  Considering all these elements, a reasonable amount of festival time for Latin Jazz would be 20% of the performance slots.

The Newport 55 Festival reaches for this number, but falls a little too short.  The festival involves a total of 33 acts, over the course of three days.  Within that time frame, the festival offers 5 Latin Jazz acts, ranging from Claudia Acuña to Miguel Zenon.  After the math has been completed, Newport 55 dedicates 15% of its festival to Latin Jazz, while spreading the other 85% across a range of styles.  It’s a start in the right direction, but a festival with fifty-five years of history under its belt should have a better focus on the jazz world.

Newport’s grade in this category = 7

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Inclusion of both local and international Latin Jazz artists into the festival line-up
Festivals should offer the best of the international jazz world’s talent, but they should also invigorate the local music scene.  Festivals bring musicians from afar into beautiful locations, introducing listeners to new sounds and artistic approaches.  Ideally, musicians from the East Coast, West Coast, Canada, Europe, and beyond converge in one place for a special gathering.  It’s a rare opportunity for everyday working musicians that support the local music scene to interact with artists from outside their regular gigs.  This can result in future collaborations or even long-term mentoring, but in most cases, it builds relationships.  Without this give and take between the local and international, the festival basically rents a facility, uses a community’s culture selfishly, and then leaves with money in hand.

Newport 55 falls flat in this category, revealing missing opportunities at several turns.  The festival organizers completely abandoned the idea of “local” when programming the event, so the lack of Rhode Island based Latin Jazz groups fits the festival’s model.  This is an unfortunate choice; Newport has hosted the festival for decades, and its local music scene should benefit.  On the same token, the festival avoids many “international” or even “national” steps outside of New York’s jazz scene.  Wein’s association with festivals in New York most likely has left him connected with a number of top-notch artists from the area.  Yet those easy connections have left the festival heavily skewed in that direction.  New York does house outstanding talent, but there’s great Latin Jazz on the West Coast and all around the world.  Newport 55 looses points in this category on its complete lack of local artists and a limited representation of international artists.

Newport’s grade in this category = 6

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Inclusion of both established and emerging Latin Jazz artists into the festival line-up
Festivals also offer the opportunity to mix the artists of yesterday, today, and tomorrow into an inspiring melting pot.  Long established artists deserve a spot in these high profile and generally well-paying festivals; after years of dedication to the art form, they deserve these gigs.  They generally carry massive fan bases as well, ensuring a huge amount of ticket sales and additional turnout at the festivals.  At the same time, emerging artists that show potential for future contributions to the Latin Jazz world should also find a place on the stage.  They get the opportunity to see established artists performing and share ideas with them behind the scenes.  They also put their new ideas and concepts in front of a large audience and in the case of a festival like Newport 55, an international audience.  The audience benefits from the young artists, as they find new music and challenges in their listening.  A good festival shouldn’t lean too far in any one direction; they should integrate both established and emerging artists.

For the most part, Newport 55 does a good job presenting a mix of experience levels.  They deliver a number of emerging artists that symbolizes a dedication to tomorrow’s Latin Jazz world.  Artists like The Rodriguez Brothers, Claudia Acuña, and Alfredo Rodriguez all bring new ideas into their music, and they will most likely challenge the audience’s perception of Latin Jazz.  While I wouldn’t call Miguel Zenon an established artist, he certainly serves as a familiar name to both Latin Jazz and modern jazz audiences.  His recent Guggenheim Fellowship puts him on the cutting-edge of the music, definitely a symbol of today.  The only area where Newport 55 falls short is the inclusion of established artists.  Pianist Michel Camilo alone holds this flame, while many popular names in the style such as Eddie Palmieri, Poncho Sanchez, or Paquito D’Rivera miss the list.  This was an unfortunate oversight in programming for the Newport staff.
 
Newport’s grade in this category = 8

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Inclusion of a variety of Latin Jazz approaches into the festival line-up
Programming Latin Jazz acts at a festival has become a much more complicated endeavor in the modern age.  Twenty years ago the inclusion of Afro-Cuban Jazz and Brazilian Jazz groups would have accounted for the genre’s stylistic diversity.  Today, there’s a variety of Latin Jazz groups that specialize in the music of Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and more.  In addition, young musicians have explored outside the style’s reliance upon bebop and hard bop jazz influences.  They stretch, bend, and mold the rhythmic genres into creative compositions that expand the genre’s reaches even more.  The Latin Jazz artists in a modern festival should represent at least a range of these rhythmic styles and jazz influences.  Otherwise, an increasingly large number of Latin Jazz artists are excluded from the event and the listening audience miss the true nature of today’s Latin Jazz world.

The Newport 55 festival includes some of the Latin Jazz world’s current diversity, but it lacks quite a few areas sorely.  Most of the groups keep their focus upon the Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican traditions.  Surprisingly, the festival sidesteps a Brazilian Jazz group completely, missing one of the Latin Jazz world’s most popular styles.  Acuña integrates a number of South American styles into her music, drawing upon the folk music of Chile and beyond.  Newport 55 delves deeply into the new conceptions of jazz performance in a Latin context, presenting groups such as The Rodriguez Brothers and Zenon.  Strangely, this replaces the more traditional dance inspired Latin Jazz groups, burying the more “Latin” elements of the music. Undoubtedly some of the groups will step briefly in new directions, but that never quite expresses the true diversity of the Latin Jazz world.  Newport gets points for some variety in rhythmic styles and a risk with more cutting-edge groups, but looses points for a number of missing genres and a lack of traditional Latin Jazz bands.

Newport’s grade in this category = 7

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Scheduling of Latin Jazz acts during the festival to ensure maximum visibility
In a concise event three-day event, scheduling becomes an essential part of the festival’s success or downfall.  Latin Jazz artists need to be spread across the event evenly, allowing a constant reference to the style.  Since the festival includes multiple stages, the Latin Jazz acts need to occur at different times.  Both these factors allow the most people to experience Latin Jazz acts and also let the dedicated Latin Jazz listeners travel between these performances.  Latin Jazz artists need to find spaces along the headliners as well as among the supporting acts.  In all certainty, every Latin Jazz artist shouldn’t capture the headliner space – this is a general jazz festival that promotes a number of genres.  At the same time, three stages and two days of music means 6 headlining opportunities.  Certainly a space exists for a Latin Jazz act within that number.  All these elements need to be considered when scheduling a festival.

Newport 55 handles scheduling with a decent sensitivity to the desires of the listening audience and the promotional needs of the artists.  The festival only offers two events on Friday night, which does not involve Latin Jazz.  The bulk of the festival occurs on remaining days, with two Latin Jazz acts on Saturday and three on Sunday.  On Saturday, the acts are spread apart by a few hours, making them both easily accessible to Latin Jazz listeners.  On this evening, Miguel Zenon headlines one stage, giving him the best possible promotion.  On Sunday, things get a bit more complicated, as the acts overlap each other by 15 minutes on different stages.  Latin Jazz listeners need to decide whether they want to see The Rodriguez Brothers and Alfredo Rodriguez or Michel Camilo and a bit of the others.  All three of these acts also occur earlier in the day, burying the effective distribution and publicity of Latin Jazz.  It’s a balance, and Newport spreads things out decently.  They get points for finding a headline spot for one Latin Jazz artist while loosing points for congesting the Sunday schedule.

Newport’s grade in this category = 8

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Special event programming for Latin Jazz acts
Corporate sponsors and a larger budget behind a festival opens the possibility to one-of-a-kind special event programming.  An existing group might explore a new or unusual repertoire that pushes them into a challenging performance situation.  An established ensemble might find the funding at a festival to invite a guest artist into their performance, introducing new interactions into their performance.  A special ensemble might come together just for one performance, eliciting the excitement of hidden potentials.  An artist might recreate an album that included a wide spread of musicians, a larger group, or an unusual repertoire.  There are numerous possibilities in this type of special event programming. These kinds of events stimulate the artistic community and excite the general listening audience with the opportunity to experience a one-time musical product.

Newport 55 misses the boat completely in this category.  One might think that current economic struggles and the festival’s late organizational schedule could effect this category.  Still, Newport 55 offers a Branford Marsalis-Joey Calderazzo duo performance, the Cedar Walton All-Stars with special guest Lew Tabackin, Chaka Khan with the George Duke Trio, and others. How about Bobby Sanabria & the Manhattan School of Music revisiting Kenya again?  How about Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra inviting a number of guest artists?  How about a vocal showcase with Sofia Rei Koutsovitis, Venissa Santí, and Magos Herrera?  Newport 55 could have easily incorporated interesting Latin Jazz special events, but somehow they chose to skip this option.

Newport’s grade in this category = 0

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A Latin Jazz educational component
Festivals bring many things into the world, from high quality jazz programming to a celebratory atmosphere, but in every act, they need to remember and inspire their community.  With the increasing age of the jazz audience, they need to find a connection between young people and jazz.  The artistic community will suffer, and the festival organizers will be looking for new jobs.  The answer can’t lie in the inclusion of pop and rock acts at jazz festivals, it needs to happen through education.  Corporate sponsors mean bigger money, some of which can be dedicated to educational outreach.  This can mean lectures, demonstrations, private lessons, or youth ensembles.  Cutting one act and dedicating the money to educational activities might mean a few less tickets sold, but it ensures an audience for future festivals.  Its basic logic that dictates the survival of the festival over the long haul.  

Newport 55 skips any type of educational outreach and only focuses upon performances.  After years of existence, the festival organizers should understand the dynamics of the changing audience and reach towards young people.  Unfortunately, they don’t include this in their event, cheating themselves and the local community.  The Newport festival began in 1954 – although it left Rhode Island for 9 years and didn’t occur in 1970 – still, the festival presented some of the most important figures in jazz for forty years.  If they had included education into their mandate, Rhode Island would have an amazing and advanced jazz scene.  Someone if dropping the ball here and cheating Newport, Rhode Island out of an amazing cultural connection.  Newport 55 looses all their points in this category and shoots themselves in the foot by avoiding the responsibility of educating their future audience.

Newport’s grade in this category = 0

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Our categories total 100 points, giving us a traditional A-B-C-D-F breakdown.  Based on our above tallies, the Latin Jazz Report Card for Newport 55 looks like this:

10 – Freebie points for holding a jazz festival at all
10 – Freebie points for simply including Latin Jazz in the festival line-up
10 – Flexible points that can be molded to festival special circumstances
7 – Percentage of Latin Jazz artists in the festival line-up
6 – Inclusion of both local and international Latin Jazz artists into the festival line-up
8 – Inclusion of both established and emerging Latin Jazz artists into the festival line-up
7 – Inclusion of a variety of Latin Jazz approaches into the festival line-up
8 – Scheduling of Latin Jazz acts during the festival to ensure maximum visibility
0 – Special event programming for Latin Jazz acts
0 – A Latin Jazz educational component

TOTAL: 66
GRADE: D

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Looking at these details offer some food for thought around Latin Jazz and major festivals.  Remember, this weekend, the jazz world looks at Newport as the festival leader.  The artists will receive a barrage of promotion and thousands of audience members will hear the music presented there.  While all that publicity and exposure occurs, remember Newport’s grade on our Latin Jazz Report Card – the Latin Jazz world is being sorely underserved at this event.  

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Check Out These Related Posts:
Supporting A Growing Latin Jazz Scene: The Jazz Institute Of Chicago
Weekly Latin Jazz Video Fix: Chicago Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble
Latin Jazz At The San Jose Jazz Festival: The Festival Within A Festival
More Thoughts About JazzTimes And Latin Jazz Coverage From Bobby Sanabria

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