JVC Jazz Festival New York 2008

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April 9, 2008

Changes, and a Constant, for New York Jazz Festival

By BEN RATLIFF

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 Redman on 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.