It's that time again! The time when almost anyone who's anyone in the jazz world, along with the most zealous old vinyl collectors to even the casual fans head down to the Monterey County Fairgrounds to attend what is perhaps the greatest celebration of all spectrums of the jazz genre on Earth.
The Monterey Jazz Festival will kick off less than a week from now on the 19th, and it certainly has not lost any of its luster. It now boasts 10 stages besides the main Arena stage, and well over 50 performances during its three-day run. Among those who will be playing at the festival will once again be Herbie Hancock and the Wayne Shorter Quartet, although Brubeck is conspicuously absent. Read more »
Fans taking in the sounds at a previous, quite sunny Sedona Jazz On The Rocks Festival.
The 27th edition of the Sedona Jazz On The Rocks Festival, the best and most thorough jazz celebration in Arizona by a significant margin, will start off with a pre-film dinner at 5:30 p.m on Tuesday, September 23rd. The film to be shown immediately afterwards will be a jazz documentary, entitled Trying to Get Good: The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon, with the first night finally being capped by a performance by local band Soundscape Sedona.
From there, the festival will claim restaurants, clubs, and resorts across the small north-central Arizona town of Sedona, including a full day of jazz on Saturday, the 27th, at the festival's traditional home base venue, the Radisson Poco Diablo Resort.
The Anguilla Tourist Board and BET Event Productions, the producers of the Sixth Annual Anguilla Tranquility Jazz Festival, have nailed down the basic four-day logistical framework for the festival and have come up with a list of major international jazz instrumentalists and vocalists who will be included in its overall lineup, which is TBA at this time.
The event will begin at the interestingly-named CuisinArt Resort & Spa, which is located on the shore of southwestern Anguilla's Rendezvous Bay, on Thursday, November 6th. This first evening will focus on dinner and a show by the perennial jazz-r&b crossover favorite, Patti Austin.
Producer cites pinch to local economy and critical mass of fall events in the local area as reasons for abandoning the Columbus Jazz and Blues Festival's September dates and postponing the event until Spring 2009.
Citing the continuing recession that faces both the entire U.S. economy as well as that of the host city, the chief organizer of the Columbus Jazz and Blues Festival has announced that the event will be postponed until the spring of 2009.
The event, which was to take place at Riverside Park in Columbus, Mississippi, would have had its second annual fall run had it proceeded as planned, initially being scheduled for September 26th and 27th. The first edition of the festival was considered by most involved to be a definite success, and the Columbus Convention and Visitors' Bureau had set aside $7,500 for this year's Jazz and Blues Festival, with half of that already given to the festival's organizers. Since the announcement of the postponement, the Bureau has requested that this first installment of its grant be paid back, and the organizer has stated that he will comply with the Bureau's request and conditions.
With a very small amount of fans expected to show up even in a best-case scenario and a trend of belt-tightening appearing among individual as well as corporate donors throughout this summer, both the executive board of the Foundation that acts as the festival's own private bank and the organizers' advisory committee decided that giving the final green-light to the festival's September dates would create a responsibility for them that would by prohibitively irresponsible from a social standpoint. Read more »
When Mayor Ray Nagin, the mayor of the City of New Orleans, stepped up to the podium for a hastily-fashioned press conference three days after Hurricane Katrina's passage through the city, he said that the city was, "In a state of devastation."
Being one of the five deadliest storms in America's history, the substance of the Mayor's statement goes without saying, and the economic damage (the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the storm would slow the growth of inflation-adjusted U.S. GDP by up to 1.5%, or keep the country from about $161 billion of purchasing power; according to a later report). It was also estimated by an agency with a similar level of authority, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), that more than 20% of New Orleans' citizenry at the time-- up to 105,300 people at one point-- was left officially unemployed by the storm.
While few are fundamentally unaware of the high cost to both the nation and the city as a result of Katrina, few are also aware of exactly why so many residents lost their jobs and why the economy of New Orleans in particular was so susceptible to the storm's damage.
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