Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival

In August 1969, several thousand blues lovers gathered in a small athletic field in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival. Blues icon B.B. King closed the show. The festival continues to this day.

In 1972, the festival was expanded to include jazz and it became the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Jazz stars like Miles Davis, Count Basie, Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor have played the festival, as well as headliners like Ray Charles, Maceo Parker, Etta James, James Brown, Booker T. & the MG's, Taj Mahal, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, and Al Green.

Although started with the support of the University of Michigan, the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival has, over the years, become an all-volunteer, non-profit 501(c) event, supported by community volunteers working with the city administration.

What began as an outdoor concert has become a full weekend of blues and jazz events. In addition to the daytime festival, evenings offer festival goers a choice of indoor (seated) concerts and live jazz in a club setting.

The festival organization has been expanded to include activities for children, educational outreach programs, and the "Meet the Artist" program, which gives the audience a chance to meet and speak with performers.

Festival events and venues

Although the outdoor festival continues to be the major focus, it is a daytime event. Where before, there were always evening shows outdoors, these have been moved inside to other venues. The public is now given a choice for evening entertainment, featuring major artists, including indoor numbered-seat concerts held in the Michigan Theater. Overlapping, but running much later into the evening, festival-goers can hear live blues and jazz artists at a local jazz club, the Bird of Paradise.

The venues

Gallup Park outdoor concerts – the festival's Saturday and Sunday outdoor concerts take place in Gallup Park, a unique 70-acre (280,000 m2) park straddling the Huron River in northeast Ann Arbor. The site can accommodate over 10,000 attendees and features a main stage, a tent to shelter attendees, sponsor booths, a kid's tent, food and vendor booths, arts booths, the Meet the Artist tent, and a backstage hospitality area reserved for artists, sponsors and their guests.

The Michigan Theater – the largest evening concert takes place in the restored art deco jewel. Headline jazz and blues artists appear.

The Bird of Paradise Jazz Club – This intimate club, operated by jazz artists in downtown Ann Arbor, attracts jazz aficionados to two Friday night and two Saturday night concerts.

History

The first North American all-out festival for the blues was the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. It featured artists like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, B.B. King, Otis Rush, J. B. Hutto and the Hawks, Howlin' Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Magic Sam, Freddie King, and other modern-electric blues players. The festival also featured traditional blues artists like Son House and those in between, like Clifton Chenier and Roosevelt Sykes.

The Ann Arbor Blues Festival was created and organized by a group of University of Michigan students led by Cary Gordon. The first two festivals were sponsored by the University Activity Center of the University of Michigan and Canterbury House, an Episcopal Church. This came about when the University of Michigan would not approve the $40,000 budget, and Gordon recruited Canterbury House as a cosponsor.

Late in 1968, Gordon, John Fishel and a small group of students traveled to Chicago where they met with Bob Koester of Delmark Records and heard some of the great blues men in the South Chicago bars and clubs.

Their chief worry was whether, in the commotion of returning to school, students would have time to grasp what a blues festival was all about. Therefore, they decided to hold a warm-up concert in the spring of 1969, so that everyone on campus could preview the music and build an appetite for the coming festival. The preliminary concert was held in the University of Michigan Union Ballroom, featuring the Luther Allison Trio, a young blues group from Chicago. It was very much a success and the larger festival was scheduled for the fall.

1969

The first Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1969 included blues artists as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Freddie King, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Big Mama Thorton and many others. The festival made a small profit. It was an artistic success and it was decided to make this an annual event.

1970

Cary Gordon left the university after graduating, and John Fishel took charge. The program for the 1970 festival included artists like Howlin' Wolf, Albert King, Bobby Blue Bland, Otis Rush, Son House, and dozens of other performers.

However, the 1970 festival ran into stiff competition from a large rock concert being held at the same time nearby. The Goose Lake International Music Festival drew attendees away from the blues festival, with the result that the festival lost $30,000. John Fishel went on to create four additional blues festivals in Miami from 1972 through 1974.

Expansion: The Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival

After the loss in 1970, the university was not willing to fund an unprofitable event, with the result that the 1971 festival was never held. Peter Andrews, who co-produced the '72 and '73 festivals, wrote:

In 1971, I was appointed to the position of Events Director for the University of Michigan and asked by the Vice President in charge of student affairs to try to recreate the festival for the coming year. I told them that it would be impossible to have a festival that summer and that they should aim toward 1972.
The university administration asked me to look into reviving the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, because everybody saw that it was a great artistic success, which it was.

For 1972 there was an expanded festival. The expansion of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival was primarily the work of Peter Andrews and John Sinclair, two local personalities with extensive musical experience. Andrews had managed bands and promoted music in Ann Arbor for several years, both on his own and under the auspices of the University of Michigan in his position as events coordinator. Andrews had business experience and promotional skills to bring this off. Sinclair had experience as the manager of the MC5 and an international reputation as a controversial political figure and poet. Sinclair provided the creative side of the equation and Andrews the business and booking skills.

Together they hatched a plan to continue the festival, but with some modifications. First, they expanded the festival to include jazz as well as blues, so it became the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Secondly, while preserving the great (but often unknown) blues acts of the times, they added enough headliners to the bill to up the attendance, pushing the profitability of the festival into the black, or so was the plan.

They had no backers but John Sinclair found a friend willing to put up $20,000 in seed money and they built from there. Sinclair and Andrews wrote in the 1972 program:

The Blues and Jazz Festival was conceived last winter by Rainbow Multi-Media president Peter Andrews as a revival of the original Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which, after two incredible years (1969 and 1970) of artistic (but not financial) success, was laid to rest by the University of Michigan before a 1971 festival could struggle into life.

The 1972 and 1973 festivals were also artistically, if not financially, successful. The addition of some headline acts like Ray Charles, Miles Davis, and others drew more people. Both the 1972 and 1973 festivals were well attended, with attendance estimates ranging from 12 to 20 thousand people.

...in which about two dozen blues and jazz artists played for crowds estimated at times to be as high as 16,000.
—Rolling Stone, October 12, 1972
Silver-haired Count Basie stepped up to the microphone Friday night, smiled a beneficent smile and welcomed 14,000 cheering young people to the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz festival… By last night more than 20,000 young people had streamed into this college town from all over the country…
—The New York Times, Sept. 9, 1973

The 1973 festival incorporated a Detroit blues review, and Bobo Jenkins was one of the headline acts. Music from this was issued in 1995 on the Schoolkids Records label, with Jenkins having two of his numbers included.[1]

1974

In 1974, with a change in city government, Sinclair and Andrews ran into problems getting a permit. The festival promoters were denied permission to hold the event in Ann Arbor, and the fate of the festival became an issue in the press and about town. So the 1974 festival was held at small college in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Preparations included a carpool system for busing enthusiasts from Michigan to the site in Canada. However the organisers failed to anticipate that the FBI and other law enforcement officials would prevent the thousands of would-be attendees from crossing the border. They refused to let concert goers from the states cross the border, ordering them to turn back.

Even worse, they refused to allow John Sinclair, who was co-producing the festival, to cross into Canada, forcing him to retreat to a temporary headquarters in the Shelby Hotel in Detroit. No reasons were given at the border for turning the cars back. Cars were searched and any with drugs were detained and their occupants arrested. At the gates in Windsor anyone found smoking marijuana or carrying it was arrested and taken to jail. The effect was to ruin the festival, causing over $100,000 in losses.

The festival in the 1990s

After the 1974 fiasco, the festival was inactive for a number of years. Peter Andrews, co-founder of the 1972 festival, continued, year after year, to approach the city about reinstating the festival. He was sent, each year, to the Parks Department, where he was habitually turned down. In fact, success did not come until he teamed up with Lee Berry, an Ann Arbor music promoter. Berry had been considering creating an entirely-new blues and jazz event, but decided that the legacy of the original festival was worth saving.

Berry had a different plan and, together with Andrews and Eric Cole, persisted until the festival found supporters. Berry bypassed the parks commission and took the question directly to the city council. It took some 80 private meetings and a number of public ones to bring the council around. The city council voted eleven to nothing to reinstate the festival.

With the 1992 festival approved, preparations began to revive it, but with some differences. The main difference was the introduction of alternate venues to the all-day/all-night outdoor concerts. The outdoor night concerts were replaced with indoor evening events, including sit-down concerts at the Michigan Theater and night shows at the Bird of Paradise.

The Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival was once again under the direction of Peter Andrews, and was scheduled to appear as a free festival, in the fall of 2007. The Festival and the City attempted to work together to continue the event. However, the festival has been on hiatus since 2008.[2]

References

  1. ↑ Reif, Fred. "Bobo Jenkins". Allmusic. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
  2. ↑ Alan Glenn: Singin’ the Ann Arbor Blues, The Ann Arbor Chronicle, 8 October 2010

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