Snowmass Vilage, CO, Colorado
You could say that Jazz Aspen Snowmass, which is about to conclude its 21st season, has hit the age of maturity. The organization has become an institution in the Roaring Fork Valley and a player on the American music festival scene, and like an enduring family patriarch, its influence is witnessed in ways that are obvious — the upcoming Labor Day Festival, which should attract more than 15,000 music fans to Snowmass Village this coming weekend — and not so apparent — like the JAS In-Schools Summer Camp, which, over three sessions this season, provided instruction to the area's advanced young musicians.
Jim Horowitz, a pianist and artist manager who launched the organization with a small, exclusively jazz-focused festival in 1991, has said that, if Jazz Aspen had disappeared after that first outing, no one would have noticed. That's no longer the case; if Jazz Aspen were to fold now, there would be a glaring absence of a stage in the Aspen area for the likes of Neil Young, the Black Eyed Peas and Jack Johnson, and for Widespread Panic, Herbie Hancock, Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, all of whom have made multiple appearances on Jazz Aspen stages.
Yet for all its history and the widespread roots that have taken hold, Jazz Aspen can also seem like the typical 21-year-old: though he has been granted all the privileges that bestow full personhood (”I drink, therefore I am!”), he is nevertheless still searching for an identity and direction.
Take, by comparison, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which, at 38, has some years on Jazz Aspen. Fans intent on taking in that festival know to show up the third weekend in June in Telluride's Town Park. They can buy their tickets well in advance, knowing with certainty what kind of music will be presented. They will even know that a handful or two of core Telluride pickers will be in attendance as festival anchors.
Jazz Aspen is not like that. Due to geography, finances, the organizational mission, personalities, shifting relationships, the changing landscape of American music festivals, and the distinctive characteristics of the upper Roaring Fork Valley community, Jazz Aspen has had something of a fitful existence. The June Festival, the organization's first festival, has traveled from the Aspen Music Festival's tent, out to Snowmass, and into downtown Aspen's Rio Grande Park, before settling once again, three years ago, back into the Aspen Music Festival's borrowed quarters, where it seems likely to stay.
The Labor Day Festival seems relatively grounded in Snowmass Town Park, though it, too, has wandered, from its original perch a ways up the Snowmass ski area, and to Buttermilk for a year, when there was construction on the Snowmass Club's golf course. As recently as two years ago, Jazz Aspen was floating the idea of relocating Labor Day for good to Buttermilk, which could accommodate larger crowds. Outside of its festivals, Jazz Aspen has seemed willing to try most any ballroom, conference hall, club and theater in the vicinity; of late, it seems to have found a suitable home for its intimate jazz shows in a downstairs room at the Little Nell hotel.
Jazz Aspen has been similarly hard to pin down on musical style. But in this, instead of jumping around, it has been more of a continuous widening of the embrace. In the years when the June Festival was its only event, and Horowitz was trying to emulate the Jazz in Marciac festival, in the South of France, the sounds were almost pure jazz, with quick dips into the blues and New Orleans funk.
But the Labor Day Festival was added in 1995, and among the headliners was Willie Nelson, which busted open the doors of genre. Jazz Aspen has since presented hip-hop (Kanye West), jam bands (Phil Lesh & Friends, a pair of two-night stands by Widespread Panic), country (LeAnn Rimes, Clint Black), reggae (Ziggy Marley, Alpha Blondy), and no shortage of older icons of classic rock (Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers Band, John Fogerty, Steve Winwood, all of whom have appeared more than once).
“I'd say it's just evolving — like any 21-year-old,” the 57-year-old Horowitz, who serves as Jazz Aspen's president and CEO, said one afternoon this past week outside the Red Brick Center for the Arts, where the organization has its offices.
“The festival has grown in ways that were intentional and unintentional. We've always made an effort to find ways to be fresh and not just: ‘This is who we are and what we do.' At Jazz Aspen, you can see artists we've had long-term relationships with, so there's continuity in the mix. But there's always an attempt to evolve and not just hold onto what we know.”
The rate of evolution seems to have accelerated in the past year. After a Labor Day lineup last year that was generally seen as disappointing — among the headliners was Lynyrd Skynyrd, which features one member from its ‘70s heyday; and there were bands that were spin-offs from the Dixie Chicks and the Eagles — Jazz Aspen formed an alliance with concert giant AEG Live, who will bring their muscle to the booking process. Joe Lang, Jazz Aspen's longtime director of festivals and educational programs, was given the new title of executive director.
The shift that will be most evident to concertgoers at this week's Labor Day Festival (Friday through Sunday, Sept. 2-4) is the youth movement. Friday night has often been skewed for a younger audience, but this has usually meant acts like the folky singer-songwriter Jack Johnson and the funk-rocker Ben Harper — young-ish musicians playing in fairly well-established styles.
This year's Friday bill comprises Girl Talk, a mash-up artist who performs on a laptop computer, and Thievery Corporation, a group centered around two DJs, with a collection of singers from various world cultures. Other acts over the weekend include the Zac Brown Band, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Rodrigo y Gabriela and Fitz & the Tantrums, all of whom play in more or less traditional modes, but whose followings lean toward the younger side of the spectrum.
Away from the mainstage, Jazz Aspen has replaced the Village Stage, which featured mid-level rock and funk acts, with the Electronica Stage, in the hopes that such cutting-edge acts as NiT GriT (not a side project of country's Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but a San Jose artist in the dubstep genre) and the 19-year-old electro-house producer Porter Robinson, will whip up a dance party on the outer fringes of the festival grounds.
“We talked about this after last year's Labor Day Festival. We thought we'd reached a point where Labor Day needed to lean a little younger,” Horowitz said. “This year, the younger audience is the bulls-eye for most of these acts. It was time to move the dial a bit.”
For a certain type of concertgoer — including, possibly, the older crowd who buy patron passes and provide an outsized share of Jazz Aspen's income — this year's Labor Day Festival may produce some head-scratching. The only baby-boomer catnip on the schedule is Steely Dan (an act Jazz Aspen finally landed after a decade of pursuit). Fans who recall fondly Labor Day 1998, when Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal and James Brown were on the bill, might be asking, Is this the same Jazz Aspen?
http://www.snowmasssun.com/article/20110831/NEWS/110839996/1001&parentprofile=1041
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