Post has post-Fest report

Despite rain that forced a shutdown of the grounds for a couple of hours, the 2007 St. Louis Jazz and Heritage Festival wound up drawing 8,000 people in its first time as a one-day event. Organizers have termed this a success, and are planning a similar approach to next year's festival, which is scheduled for Saturday, May 31, 2008.

Those are the major bits of breaking news from a story in this weekend's Post-Dispatch, based on an interview pop critic Kevin Johnson did with Cynthia Prost, who's executive director of the event's producing organization, Cultural Festivals.

The rest of the piece recounts the troubles with rain at this year's festival, and winds up with Prost quoted as saying, "Our experiment of going to one day and using the funds to really book big acts worked."

It's good news that the event will live to see another year, but for those who think a St. Louis jazz festival ought to be more ambitious, it's a disappointment to hear that organizers are going forward next year with the same approach. Simply throwing money at the two or three biggest names who happen to be available doesn't seem like much of a way to build a coherent, relevant program or a long-term audience.

There's a saying, variously credited to Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result - and as long as the St. Louis festival organizers simply pick programming "off the shelf" from any given summer's offering of touring artists, the event will continue to lack both creative direction and distinction, and the possibilities for growth seem rather limited.

Yes, it takes years of concerted effort and a whole lot of funding to build a jazz festival on the scale of the ones in Chicago or Detroit, but as presently constituted, the St. Louis event pales even in comparison to the jazz festivals in places like Indianapolis and Rochester, NY. Heck, even Iowa City offers a wider selection of music, with no really big names but with interesting musicians like Don Byron, Cuong Vu, Airto Moreira and Ray Anderson, and what's more, it's all free and open to the public.

St. Louis has a significant place in the history of jazz music, a distinguished roster of locals who have gone on to jazz stardom, and an active current community of bands, musicians, students, educators and fans; it also deserves an imaginatively programmed jazz festival that at least attempts to take those factors into account.