Most planners of jazz festivals make decisions based on their budgets. Then, grants, sponsors, ticket sales, and venues have to be considered. Once the decision-making is resolved, other problems might occur. For example, Elkhart has a strong population of Black citizens. After the first day, I realized during the first festival in ’88 that I had more Black musicians on the stage than in the crowd. I made a quick call to the ministers of two of the largest Black churches and invited them to bring their choirs to the festival in ’89. When they performed that year, I gave all of them free tickets to the festival, along with tickets for their families. It worked!
To get younger musician involved in the festival, I asked several high school band directors if they were interested. Most of the directors who had jazz bands had their players tune in to my jazz program and that helped. The biggest problem related to the fact that the jazz festival is held several days past the end of the school year. That’s when we agreed to using the high school jazz bands, but, of course, some of those students were not available because they had other plans for that time.
Over the festival years, we were able to use the high school big bands a couple of times. That involved from 60 to 70 band members. They played on Saturday morning and early afternoon. I gave them all musician passes as well as reg
