US Bank St. Louis Jazz Festival announces 2006 lineup

Bassist Stanley Clarke and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band
will be among the headliners at the 2006 US Bank St. Louis
Jazz and Heritage Festival set for June 23 and 24


The US Bank St. Louis Jazz Festival - or make that "Jazz and Heritage Festival," as it has been renamed for this year - has announced the lineup for their 2006 event, which will be held in Clayton's Shaw Park on Friday, June 23 and Saturday, June 24.

Friday night will have a New Orleans theme, with performances from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Dr.John, plus St. Louis vocalist Denise Thimes. Saturday's show will emphasize funk and fusion, with a musical menu including vocalist Lizz Wright; keyboardist George Duke and bassist Stanley Clarke, performing together like in the old days of the Clarke-Duke Band; and saxophonist David Sanborn, plus some additional St. Louis acts yet to be named. Tickets go on sale April 1, and you can read more in a story, apparently given exclusively to Kevin Johnson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, here.

I have reactions to the both the substance of the announcement and the way the announcement was handled. Let's deal with the substance first.

When festival organizers first publicly floated the notion of doing a New Orleans tribute after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City, I wrote that I thought it was not a very good idea, citing the large number of similarly themed events occuring at the time and likely to continue for a while after that. Although it turns out that the St. Louis fest isn't putting all their eggs in that particular basket, I still feel that the idea is rather stale, and would still much prefer to see organizers begin to try to establish a uniquely St. Louis flavor for the event.

That said, I have no real gripes about the quality of any of the acts announced so far, though obviously there's a lot to New Orleans music, and New Orleans jazz specifically, not represented by either Dr. John or the PHJB. There's no indication in the story that any additional New Orleans acts will be added to the bill, so as tributes go, this one seems rather meager. I mean, if you're going to do a NOLA tribute, at least get one of the city's distinctive brass bands on the bill, and include some of the fine modern jazz players from there as well.

One also has to wonder, as Johnson does in the Post story, if Wright will actually show up for her gig, since she's cancelled three St. Louis appearances in the last couple of years. Time will tell on that score, I suppose. And given that the story positions Sanborn as the headliner and biggest potential draw, festival organizers can't be overjoyed that he's just joined Chris Botti's current tour and thus will be co-headlining a show here in St. Louis on March 3. Granted, there's roughly four months between the two events, but there's always the possibility that at least some Sanborn fans will get their fix in March at the TouPAC and forgo the trip to Shaw Park in June.

On a more positive note, I'm looking forward to seeing Dr. John, a personal favorite, and I'm excited about the possibility of seeing George Duke and Stanley Clarke again, too. I've enjoyed the recorded work of both men, separately and together, and seeing them in concert back in the day, both delivered the goods in a big way. Clarke's appearance at the old Mississippi River Festival in Edwardsville in the late Seventies still stands out in my mind as a truly great live show.

However, while I can't find fault with the individual acts on their own merits, I don't think this lineup makes for a particularly well-balanced festival, as there's not a single major act playing swing, bop, hard bop or any of the offshoot styles that one commonly associates with modern jazz, and certainly nothing as adventurous as recent bookings such as Dave Holland's big band, the Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, or the Dave Douglas Quintet. This is a safe-to-the-point-of-timidity, commercially oriented lineup, more appropriate to a commercial venue like the UMB Bank Pavilion than to a not-for-profit jazz festival purporting to carry on the "Heritage" of a city with a vibrant jazz tradition.

And yeah, that "Heritage" part sticks in my craw a bit, too, given that only one of the announced headliners (Sanborn, a native of Kirkwood, MO) has anything to do with St. Louis. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival truly reflects that city's musical heritage, but it appears the St. Louis festival organizers have simply added the word to the name of their event without really making any substantive changes to their booking approach. In contrast, the BAG events held at Wash. U this week, presumably on a smallish budget a fraction of the Fest's, have done more to explore and celebrate the history and heritage of St. Louis music in a few days than the so-called "Jazz and Heritage Festival" has done in its entire existence.

I'll have much more to say about the musical lineup later, but let me now address the second point alluded to above, namely the way the announcement was handled. If you're detecting a slightly peevish tone in my words here, you're not wrong. As a journalist trying his best to cover local jazz through articles in the Riverfront Times and on this Web site, I'm angry that I had to read about this announcement in the Post-Dispatch instead of being included in whatever procedure the Festival organizers used to announce the news. I don't know if they sent out a news release or had a press conference; if so, I wasn't included on whatever list of local media they used.

I know for a fact that they're aware of my work, given that I've written feature stories (with their explicit cooperation) about the last three festivals for the RFT, have received press credentials for the Fest, and have ongoing dealings with the publicity firm that handled media relations for last year's event. I also wrote extensively about the 2005 festival here on StLJN, posting a half-dozen items during the festival week alone.

Granted, not all those writings were filled with unalloyed praise for the organizers; indeed, in the past I've been quite critical of their booking policies and the thought process, or lack thereof, behind them. And in early May 2005, I also used information gleaned from the annual festival issue of down beat magazine to write about the 2005 lineup before it was officially announced to local media.

So perhaps giving someone else an exclusive on the announcement of the 2006 lineup is some sort of payback for perceived sins. Or perhaps Festival organizers have decided that not only am I not important to them (no big surprise there, I suppose) but that the readers of the RFT and this site are not important to them either, which seems rather short-sighted. Or perhaps they just think that Kevin Johnson and the Post are more important, enough so that going out of their way to snub others covering the local jazz scene will somehow ultimately be worth it. Or perhaps they just weren't thinking of me at all, which also seems entirely possible. I don't know which of these is closest to the truth, but I certainly intend to find out.

Now, I realize that this sort of ranting probably comes off a bit egocentric and/or whiny to some people - "Who really cares who got the story first?" - but believe me, in the journalism business, being first is important, very important. I've broken news on this site a number of times in the last nine months, and intend to continue to do so whenever possible. More to the point, I wanted to discuss this openly so that you, O valued reader of StLJN, can understand the context of my future writings on this subject. In the coming weeks and months, I'm going to do my best to report news on the festival as completely and objectively as I possibly can, but, given that I'm a flawed human being just like anyone else, being blatantly snubbed and/or ignored in this fashion is likely to affect my take on the subject, at least for a while.

So, caveat lector.You can make your own decisions as to whether you think those writings are valid or worth reading, and if you think I'm being a baby about this, feel free to smack me around in the comments section. But I wanted to get all the cards out on the table, because maintaining an honest relationship with readers is very important to me. In the meantime, it looks like my first reporting task with regard to the 2006 US Bank Jazz and Heritage Festival is going to be to try to find out more about how and when the lineup was actually made public. Stay tuned...

(Edited immediately after posting to fix the photo caption.)

Update, 5:30 p.m., 2/18/06: I now have what I consider to be very reliable information that the announcement of the 2006 Jazz Festival lineup was, in fact, deliberately done in such a way so as to exclude all media other than the Post-Dispatch. And I've also heard from some other media professionals expressing displeasure at the way this was handled by Festival organizers, all of which leaves me with two thoughts to add to those expressed above:

1) In much the same way as the attempted coverup of the recent shooting incident involving Vice-President Cheney could be said to embody the current Administration's penchant for secrecy, obfuscation and stonewalling the media, this incident seeem to me to indicate a certain "top-down" attitude on the part of Festival organizers, suggesting that they are unconcerned with what goes on in St. Louis' jazz scene during the 51 weeks of the year that they are not producing.

2) In the Internet age, news exclusives and embargos are not quite as exclusive as they used to be; for example, yr. humble StLJN editor already had blogged, dissected and commented on this particular story even before most St. Louisans had had their morning coffee today. Making the announcement an exclusive didn't really give Post-Dispatch readers that much of a leg up on the actual news; all it did was antagonize other media folks who might otherwise be among the Festival's natural constituency of support.

(edited 2/18/06 to correct a typo)