As they look toward early summer and the launch of another season, Canada’s major jazz festivals find themselves squeezed between rising costs and funding uncertainty. But, rather than singing the blues, they are finding new ways to cope.
“There are a growing number of entertainment options and money is harder to come by,” says Ken Pickering, artistic director for Coastal Jazz, which produces the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. “We have to face the fact that the good times might not come back. There isn’t much option except to try to be proactive and turn the negatives into something positive.”
Across the country, promoters have seen artists’ fees rise by an average of 500 per cent in the past decade, while transportation and staging costs have also spiraled upward.
“The same artists who charged $2,500 when I started in 1997 are now demanding $25,000,” says Catherine O’Grady, executive producer of the Ottawa International Jazz Festival and head of Jazz Festivals Canada, which represents 18 of country’s festivals. “It’s part of an artificial model we have to reconcile. Part of it is that those artists deserved to be making more than $2,500. The other part is that we’ve been subsidizing low ticket prices, and that can’t continue.”
Ninety Miles, the Cuban jazz project of David Sánchez (sax), Christian Scott (trumpet) and Stefon Harris (vibes), will be featured at the Ottawa International Jazz Festival on June 22, 2012.
In Vancouver, the fallout has been 40 fewer individual concerts during the festival’s 10-day run, and a decrease in the number of large projects that Pickering has traditionally booked — one of the event’s defining characteristics.
“We’ve had to tighten our focus on the essentials,” he says.
It’s the same story in Halifax, where Lulu Healy, artistic director of JazzEast, says she has cut back on booking for the Halifax Jazz Festival what she calls high-risk acts.
“As well as booking more local artists, we’re looking at cutting costs by using venues with existing infrastructure,” says Healy. “For example, Halifax has a lot of beautiful churches, so we’re using them more as performance spaces. The challenge is to cut costs without cutting performances.”
“That’s the hardest thing to balance,” agrees O’Grady. “How do you keep your audience engaged, and hopefully grow that audience, without either raising prices or offering them fewer shows?”
In Ottawa and at numerous other jazz festivals throughout North America, promoters have used the strategy of opening their stages to different musical genres, with mixed results.
In 2011, O’Grady’s decision to showcase Robert Plant, k.d. lang and Daniel Lanois’ Black Dub on her festival’s main stage drew howls of criticism from some hardcore jazz fans. But, when the festival closed the books on 2011, it had a surplus of more than $162,000, despite paying seven per cent more in artist fees over 2010. Overall, box office receipts increased 30 per cent over the previous year. Of the non-jazz performers, only Elvis Costello — who performed outdoors 70 minutes after a record-setting storm swept across the city — failed to draw a large crowd.
“Critics may scoff at these booking choices, but the fact is that they are subsidizing jazz artists with smaller fan bases and attracting audience members who might not otherwise ever come to our festival,” says O’Grady.
Festival organizers in Ottawa, Halifax and elsewhere are also diversifying artists and audiences by scheduling outside the traditional summer setting. O’Grady’s organization ran a successful winter mini-festival in early February, and Healy is preparing for the third edition of Out Like A Lion, its four-day March showcase of music in genres ranging from big band swing to contemporary bluegrass.
“The event helps us build new audiences and show a different side of what we do,” says Healey. “With the level of uncertainty today, you can’t afford to sit still.”
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