A Sad Sad Song
Owen Hawkins is running out of time. It’s April 24, 2002, and a minimonsoon has just washed his press conference off the steps of the Liberty Memorial. He’d been planning to announce his intention to resurrect the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival, an eleven-year Kansas City institution organizers had just pronounced dead. Working on their feet, Hawkins and his publicist, a recent import from the West Coast with an impressive résumé that includes major entertainment events and stints with medical firms, concoct a makeshift solution. Hawkins, rain-ruffled but still dapper in a mouse-hued suit and pale fedora topping oil-slick curls, hurriedly addresses a score of skeptical reporters in the Union Station lobby while his counterpart distracts the building’s management.
Yes, Hawkins says, his group — the Kansas City, Kansas-based U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce — will be able to succeed where the larger, much better-connected Blues and Jazz Festival board of directors failed. Music fans will rally to save Kansas City’s showcase summer event, he predicts, and sponsors will pick up the $100,000 tab. “Our civic fathers will step up and help us out once they realize the interest is there,” he concludes.
Two months later, Hawkins is facing another race against the clock — but this time, the stakes are significantly higher. Hawkins and Steve Miller, his longtime friend who flew in from Las Vegas to help with the upstart event, are pressing ahead with plans to host a blues and jazz festival in Penn Valley Park the weekend of July 18-21, the same time and setting for the Blues and Jazz Festival the past eleven years. With three weeks left, Hawkins and Miller have no set lineup, no prominent sponsors and little on-the-record support from city officials. Their brochures for potential sponsors are amateurish, filled with clip-art graphics and typographical errors. On the plus side of the ledger, the pair boasts an eager and ample workforce of local musicians looking for a stage and desperate volunteers who are willing to help anyone put on a reasonable facsimile of Kansas City’s once-glorious event.
Perhaps still clinging to hopes of a resurrected world-class affair, many area artists have supported the efforts of Hawkins and Miller. Healthy turnouts are common at Sunday-night fund-raising auditions at the Mill Creek Brewery, where hopeful players jam and optimistic patrons buy “early-bird” festival tickets for $5. (The fact that Mill Creek has always been popular on Sunday evenings makes it difficult to gauge what percentage of the overflow crowd has actually come for the blues, though the thinly padded donation bucket and the packed second-floor pool room offer two clues.) Acts such as Danielle, Cotton Candy and Millage Gilbert have made sparkling contributions to the talent pool, and a few unknowns have sparked a buzz, standing out among the bar-band regulars and cover artists usually attracted by the open stage.
Similarly, some media outlets have greeted Hawkins and Miller with open airwaves. On June 7, Mark, Victor and Phil, hosts of the MVP Power Hour on Liberty-based KCXL 1140 (“Radio Free Liberty!”), congratulated the “Blues Brothers,” as Hawkins and Miller have dubbed themselves, for “bringing the festival back.” Upon hearing that the price of a three-day ticket would be $12, the radio personalities gushed, “That’s the price you’d be paying for one or two of these artists at the clubs.” After Hawkins explained his focus on finding “stars in our backyard,” the DJs cheered that “hometown flavor makes it more exciting.” Toward the end of the softball session, interviewers and subjects alike agreed that they felt “a lot of love in this room.”
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Hawkins and Miller are an easy duo to embrace. They occasionally high-five each other while intoning their Blues Brothers nickname, and they seldom appear in public without donning the blazers and headgear sported by their big-screen counterparts. There are a few crucial differences between Hawkins and Miller and Aykroyd and Belushi, though. For one, these Brothers don’t perform; Hawkins, a guitarist, might jam with the Mill Creek crew, but Miller says he “shuffles papers off to the side.” For another, Hawkins is African-American, and Miller is ruddy-faced with a burly moustache that looks as if it’s swallowed his mouth. Interracial work relationships are hardly a novelty, but Hawkins makes this pitch: “It’s the story about how a black man and a white man became best friends. Truly amazing.”
It turns out there’s a strategic reason Hawkins is playing up this angle. Later, he admits, “We brought in Steve so people wouldn’t think this is just a black thing” (Using the same logic, Hawkins has given his newly created KC Blues Fest Inc. top billing as the event’s presenter, moving the U.S. Black Chamber to a less prominent sponsorship role.)
Miller has spent the past fourteen years in Las Vegas. While working as a general contractor for cable and fiber-optic companies, he says he observed the tourist-trap strategy he hopes to transfer to his new music-promotion career. “They have figured out how to get people from all over the world to come into their town, and when the people leave, their money stays,” he explains. In April, when Hawkins called and told him about the festival’s demise, he flew in immediately, eager to put this philosophy into practice in Kansas City.
Despite the years they spent apart, the two old buddies maintain a charming rapport, finishing each other’s sentences and congratulating each other on points well made. Their presentation on the festival is well-prepared, hitting a lot of push-button phrases. “We would like to call upon the people of KC to help us keep Kansas City’s blues-and-jazz-capital reputation alive and well and kicking,” Miller says. “And it’s $5 a day for up to eight hours of music by local artists — how can you go wrong? Plus, the money spent at the festival remains in the area and stimulates the economy of the city.” Hawkins nods.
But not everyone is taken with the pair — Hawkins in particular. The publicist who orchestrated the April press conference (and who spoke to the Pitch on the condition that her name not appear in print) later quit working with Hawkins and Miller after, she says, they failed to take rudimentary steps toward ensuring the event’s viability, such as hiring consultants and establishing a separate checking account for auditing purposes.
“I’ve seen some of [Hawkins’] grand ideas — he’s always been a dreamer — and they’ve never come to fruition,” says a Kansas City, Kansas, commissioner who also asked not to be named. This public official would not comment on Hawkins’ specific dreams.
One example might be his ill-fated effort to pump life into the moribund Indian Springs shopping center. In 1998, Urban WallStreet, a group Hawkins created (and whose name he originally attached to his festival resuscitation efforts), aimed to raise as much as $2 million to assist small businesses willing to lease space in the dying mall at 46th Street and State Avenue. The group fell well short of its goal. Urban WallStreet did manage to lure a few small businesses to the half-empty space, but Hawkins says conflicts with mall management squelched the project. As with the blues and jazz fest, Hawkins said at the time that he planned to seek funds from private institutions and government. “Our goal is to revitalize Indian Springs and help save the shopping center,” Hawkins told The Kansas City Star on May, 7, 1998. (This May he offered the Pitch a nearly identical quote, with “the festival” and “the city’s blues and jazz heritage” replacing the references to Indian Springs.)
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Another of Hawkins’ ambitions was to be elected to the Board of Public Utilities, the body that oversees Wyandotte County’s government-owned municipal waterworks and electrical plants. The BPU’s six board members each receive $250 a month to serve; they hire the utility’s general manager, control a $230 million budget and set policies for BPU operations that affect 60,000 electricity and 50,000 water customers. In 1999, Hawkins ran for an at-large seat. When eliminated from the race, he accused incumbent Tom Lynch of racism, referring to a derogatory comment about the Martin Luther King holiday Lynch allegedly had made eleven years earlier. (Lynch vehemently denied the charge and cited his record, which included a vote for the King holiday.) Hawkins’ third-party agitation led to a narrow victory for Lynch’s opponent, Jim DeGraw. In press coverage of the story, Hawkins is named alternately as president or chief executive officer of the U.S. Black Chamber.
A caller dialing Hawkins’ U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce after hours hears a bombastic voice announce that he or she has reached “America’s most progressive national black chamber.” Replace progressive with mysterious, and this statement bears a certain truth. The USBCC is in no way affiliated with Kansas City, Missouri’s nineteen-year-old, 500-plus-member black chamber, though people at that building know Hawkins’ name. (“I’ve had many experiences with Owen Hawkins, and I can’t say that any of them have been positive,” says one source within the black chamber who declined to elaborate except to add that would-be volunteers and sponsors have bombarded the group with calls about the blues and jazz event.)
The group’s Web site, usblackchamber.org, does little to clarify matters. Though it includes the U.S. Black Chamber’s mission statement (in part, “The U.S. Black Chamber helps to promote business relationships with Fortune 500 companies for economic parity within its community”), the Web site’s content consists mostly of AP-swiped news items about celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and R. Kelly. All of the news is posted by someone called Mrandal101. There are no prompts leading to business-related material, links with Fortune 500 companies or indications that the U.S. Black Chamber is anything but a low-rent news source.
There are occasional indications that the Black Chamber is active in its community. In 1992, a year after Hawkins founded the group, it hosted a Women and Minority Business Expo that drew 500 participants. In 2001, Hawkins, fuming after his utilities were disconnected, led a petition drive and operated a toll-free number to protest what he felt was price-gouging by Kansas Gas Service. Later that year, The Kansas City Kansan reported that the Chamber had given donations to a number of social-service agencies in the area. But such philanthropy has been put on hold; Hawkins says the blues fest has “sapped energy from all our other projects and is receiving our full attention.”
The Web site for Hawkins and Miller’s event (kcbluesfest.org) offers considerably more content, though much of it is either dubious or inoperative. Surfers interested in buying tickets can select the option to do so online, but clicking on the prompt labeled “buy it now” produces no results. At one point, much of the information on the page, including sponsorship instructions and potential media support, appeared to have been lifted verbatim from SpiritFest’s Web site. All such listings have vanished, as has a photo of proposed headliner Oleta Adams that once appeared between shots of remaining attractions Average White Band and Nestor Torres.
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“Average White Band will be on Thursday, Oleta Adams on Saturday, and Nestor Torres on Sunday,” Miller promised on June 20, adding that he and Hawkins booked these artists out-of-pocket. “We have contracts in hand for all of them. We don’t have anything solid yet for Friday, so we’re keeping our mouths shut, because we don’t want to put out anything that isn’t 100 percent accurate.”
On Sunday, June 23, Hawkins addressed Adams’ absence on the Web site. “SpiritFest sent out negative e-mails, and we lost Oleta Adams because of it,” Hawkins contends. “We had the contract pending, and we were just working out the details, like she wanted a certain type of piano in the rider.” Hawkins produces a copy of a message in which a full-time SpiritFest employee warns the William Morris Agency, which handles Adams, to be cautious when dealing with Hawkins. “It’s just horrible,” Hawkins says. “Basically, he’s telling them he doesn’t know me but not to do business with me.”
“Oleta will be in Los Angeles and then the Bahamas during that weekend,” reports her manager, Chevy Nash, who adds that she has sent a cease-and-desist order to Hawkins and Miller’s KC Blues Fest Inc. headquarters.
But Hawkins still holds SpiritFest responsible for many of his woes. He alleges that SpiritFest plans to squash his fledgling festival to clear the way for its own blues and jazz event in the fall and that the Parks and Recreation Department — which he says is “in bed with SpiritFest” — is giving his group the runaround. “It’s a power struggle,” he says. “There’s racism involved and also economics. They want to sabotage it, because whoever holds it this year will have the rights to it next year. If they don’t stop doing what they’ve been doing, we’re going to call a television press conference and call these people out, because these are the conspirators that are trying to kill the Blues and Jazz festival.”
Hawkins reserves some venom for the Blues and Jazz Festival’s previous organizers, claiming that they’re working to undermine his efforts. In response, members of the board accuse Hawkins and Miller of appropriating their name.
“Let’s set the record straight,” Miller says. “We’re not affiliated in any way with the previous promotional company that put on the festival.” But it’s easy to get confused given that, at their public appearances, Hawkins and Miller both make the easily misinterpreted claim that “the festival is back on.” The group’s sponsorship booklet contains sentences such as “The Blues and Jazz Festival’s [sic] is one of the Midwest’s and nations [sic] premiere [sic] events,” implying that Hawkins and Miller’s project is a continuation of its internationally known predecessor rather than a modest first-time festival.
The name KC Blues Fest Inc. angers members of the Blues and Jazz Festival board, who fear that Hawkins and Miller’s event will wrongly be associated with their group.
With the exception of their claim about Oleta Adams, Hawkins and Miller have generally avoided exaggerating the scope of their fest, noting that its lineup will consist largely of regional artists discovered at its weekly tryouts. “What happened in the past,” Hawkins explains, “is the previous festival booked lots of outside talent, but these acts were no better than the musicians in our own back yard. We need to take care of home first. We have some diamonds in the rough. We could find the next Pat Metheny.”
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The original Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival brought in the actual Pat Metheny, and last year’s event starred an amazing array of homegrown talent, including Karryn Allyson, Myra Taylor, Bobby Watson, Jay McShann and Claude “Fiddler” Williams. But even these local legends didn’t boost attendance, and the lineup Hawkins and Miller are planning offers considerably lower wattage. When Hawkins says, “This is what people have been waiting for: a chance to see the Kansas City Blues Fest focus on Kansas City bands,” or when he claims confidence that city officials will waive mandatory fees and allow him to produce for $100,000 or less an event that usually costs more than $600,000 to run, it’s unclear whether he’s being naïve, delusional or deceptive.
Whatever the case, recent history suggests there’s little reason for his optimism.
In 1991, a massive merger of the Blues Society’s and Jazz Ambassadors’ annual showcase events created the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival. Booking was handled by Grand Emporium owner Roger Naber, who in the previous ten years had taken the Blues Society festival from mid-size indoor venues (the Uptown, the National Guard Armory) to an open-air happening that filled most of Penn Valley Park. A hodgepodge of members from the two organizations, headed by Blues Society president Kathe Kaul, oversaw sponsorship and concessions.
The first Festival was a free two-day event funded by sponsorship (Blue Bunny ice cream, Harrah’s Casino) and city grants. It drew 50,000 people. Naber, one of the Midwest’s top talent buyers and a name so recognizable in the blues community that he pops up in a James Harmon song (I’ve been in tighter places than Roger Naber’s chin), used his connections and bargaining savvy to lure some big names, and attendance mushroomed.
With minimal year-to-year fluctuation, the event continued to grow between 1991 and 1999, under the guidance of a variety of presidents, including Naber, who took the reigns for one year. The sole constant was Naber’s booking expertise. “I was handling it myself with some input from the jazz community,” Naber says. “Being a blues talent buyer on a weekly basis and promoting live blues at the Grand Emporium 200 nights a year, I had my finger on the pulse of what bands were to be paid and a rapport with all their agents.”
In 1996, Rich Carr, who had moved from a soda-toting volunteer in the festival’s first year to chair of merchandising to six years on the board, became president and introduced a new professionalism, alleviating much of the time-wasting infighting between Jazz Ambassadors and Blues Society members. Carr trimmed the number of members on the board, sought fresh voices outside Blues Society and Jazz Ambassadors circles, instituted term limits, focused on fund-raising and increased accountability. The executive director at the time, Peter Horak, who had moved from working in program sales to securing ties with big-money organizations such as Pepsi and CGI Telecom, built substantially on the festival’s sponsorship base. When Horak left in 1997, Naber says the festival was a “smoothly running organization with a pretty loose structure.”
Greg Patterson signed on as executive director of the festival in January 1998, following ten years of involvement with SpiritFest, including four full-time years as a salaried development director. His immediate priorities, he recalls, were “streamlining production that was fat and bringing the level of quality up without going hog-wild on budget.” One of his first major moves was recruiting a committee to vote on talent for the festival, essentially replacing Naber, who had been a “committee of one” in Patterson’s words.
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“Some of the lineups he wanted didn’t cater to the true Kansas City blues and jazz fans,” Patterson explains. “They were more for the Grand Emporium crowd. I wanted the festival to be as eclectic as possible, with every corner of blues and jazz represented.”
Patterson’s committee included Chuck Haddix of KCUR 89.3 and UMKC’s Marr Sound Archives, Lindsay Shannon of B.B.’s Lawnside Barbecue, Dick Schulte of Blayney’s, Doug Tatum of the Folly Theater and saxophonist Bobby Watson, among others.
“This is the upper crust of the KC music scene when it came to blues and jazz,” Patterson says. “Everybody knew and understood why they were there. There were no personality conflicts.”
The committee concocted solid, diverse lineups, picking youth-friendly artists such as Robert Randolph and the North Mississippi All-Stars, as well as respected performers such as Louisiana Red and Beverly “Guitar” Watkins. Unfortunately, though these lineups would have made for great mix tapes, less-relevant but better-known bills would have drawn more paying customers. That dark-horse performers such as Watkins and Karryn Allyson sold plenty of merchandise after their fiery performances made the event appealing to artists. But the fact that people who are already in attendance might grow to appreciate previously unknown performers did little financial good for the festival.
Also, though jazz artists such as Diana Krall and Arturo Sandoval pack venues like the Music Hall and the Midland Theater — even with high-dollar ticket prices — their fans are less likely to venture into the heat to catch their sets. Their shows are more appealing as classy dress-up events than as sweaty outdoor showcases. The jazz community’s apathetic response to outdoor events is well established; lackluster crowds greeted masters such as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Sandoval at the 1996 and 1997 International Jazz Festivals at Starlight Theatre, despite mild September weather. Patterson’s committee should have known that high talent quality alone, especially on the jazz stage, wouldn’t result in crowds.
“They’re knowledgeable music people, but they’re not knowledgeable about talent fees or drawing ability,” Naber says. “If [artists] make good records but don’t draw, they’re not worth what they try to ask for. You need somebody who negotiates on a regular business, not volunteers, to run a $650,000 organization. They opted for a committee instead of a professional. They didn’t know what they had.”
Naber booked several artists for 2000, but he parted ways with the festival by mutual decision before that year’s event took place.
The 2000 festival fared well: Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Ravi Coltrane and Medeski, Martin and Wood attracted a young, hip audience. Jay McShann, Claude “Fiddler” Williams and Brody Buster waved the local flag. And Canned Heat and the Fabulous Thunderbirds serenaded the old-school contingent. The weather cooperated. The shuttles ran smoothly. The music drew raves.
After the smashing success of the 2000 event, Patterson says he expected a wax-and-wane cycle to cause a drop-off in attendance the next year. If such a pattern existed, one might attribute it to binge-and-purge booking; overspend one year to pack the place, then cut corners the next year and pay the price at the turnstiles. But Patterson insists this isn’t the case, saying, “It’s just a freakish thing, and it happens nationwide.”
Even if they were waiting for the other shoe to drop, Patterson and the board couldn’t have been prepared for the enormous clodhopper that permanently squashed their event. For 2001, the festival went with its normal blend of local legends (Claude “Fiddler” Williams, Myra Taylor, Jay McShann, Ida McBeth) and touring royalty (Koko Taylor, Arturo Sandoval, Ramsey Lewis). Its organizers introduced innovative features such as the Soul School, at which top national musicians offered hands-on instruction, and a musical petting zoo that permitted novices to try their hands at a variety of exotic instruments. They promoted it well, spending $20,000 on print, radio and television advertisements. Then they watched as temperatures soared into triple digits, attendance plummeted and pundits blamed the low turnout on a lack of marquee headliners — Taylor, Sandoval and Lewis might have been blues and jazz stalwarts, but they lacked broad crossover appeal.
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“People don’t come because they want to go to a festival,” Naber says. “They want to see Al Green or Pat Metheny. There’s so much competition in the entertainment world, with [Verizon Amphitheater] and Starlight, that you have to give them something big.”
“You can have B.B. King and Bob Dylan, and gosh-damn it, if it’s hot as the dickens, people aren’t going to come out until late at night or possibly not at all,” Patterson replies. “There’s just too much air conditioning in Kansas City in July, with the malls, multiplex movie theaters, art galleries and Union Station.”
Whatever the reason for the attendance collapse, the festival limped away from its eleventh annual event in critical condition. Soon after the initial numbers were tabulated, Patterson says, he knew the festival was in serious trouble. “We tried to take some urgent measures, but the president at the time, Allison Luthi, wanted to wait and see. It was a crucial time, and we had a lack of leadership. She closed her eyes to a lot that needed to be done.” (Luthi, a former banker who had risen from volunteer greeter to treasurer to vice president to president, did not return phone calls for this article. Naber says her financial knowledge was an invaluable asset to the board and that her eventual unpopularity was because of her demand for accountability.)
As Luthi vetoed suggestions, Patterson says, dissension in the board grew, and by November 2001 the climate was ripe for a coup. Luthi was out, and Carr, who had been spending the year on hiatus because of the term limits he’d instituted five years earlier, was reinstated. “By that time, though,” Patterson says, “it was too far gone.”
When Carr considered becoming president in November 2001, he knew there were problems, but he wasn’t completely aware of the grim nature of the situation until he actually signed on and became involved. He says that even if he’d known there was a good chance the event would die on his watch, he wouldn’t have rejected the nomination. “I would have thought about it a little more,” he admits, “but my heart would tell me to take it anyway.”
By January of this year, Carr realized the festival was doomed. “In hindsight, we could’ve announced it earlier, but nobody wanted to let it go,” he says. There was some slim chance of a reprieve: Carr notes that first-time sponsors often scouted the festival heavily, waiting until six months before the event to get involved. But when new commitments never surfaced, Carr and the board publicly announced the festival’s financial woes, though doing so might have severely hampered revitalization efforts. “We’re heavily in debt, and nobody wants to give money to a dead horse,” Carr says with a sigh. “But the board is ethical enough not to mislead anybody, and our honesty hurt us.”
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On March 15, 2002, the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival board officially canceled this year’s event, citing lackluster revenue from the 2001 show and waning corporate support (attributed to post-9/11 malaise, though a source within the organization notes that big-business donations had already fallen $100,000 from last year’s event). In documents mailed to potential sponsors, the board noted that attendance had dipped from 48,000 to 43,000, but Connie Humiston, former assistant director for the festival, estimates the actual total at 28,000 and says that many of those were comp tickets. By April 5, the organization was clearing out its Westport office, holding a “garage sale” at which it sold its office equipment and furniture as well as festival memorabilia to pay off outstanding debts.
Humiston, who had been assistant director since 1997, was dismissed without severance. Under most circumstances, the firing would provide ample fodder for the blues. But Humiston describes her downsizing as “stress-relieving” and “a blessing in disguise,” perhaps because she had sometimes worked fourteen-hour days for five weeks at a time without a day off.
In addition to dealing with sponsors, supervising the event’s 1,400 volunteers and managing details, Humiston, along with Patterson, had made the talent decisions. Their $220,000 talent budget had once gone a long way, but these days, Humiston says, two name acts could kill that total. “Most major artists ask for $75,000 to $150,000,” she says.
Rising behind-the-scenes fees tested budget constraints, too. Last year, the Blues and Jazz Fest shelled out $15,000 for artist transportation, $7,000 for artists’ lodging, $10,000 for artists’ instrumental rentals and $4,500 for artists’ catering. The bigger the name, the more frivolous the concern — Bobby Womack, Humiston says, pouted when he didn’t receive his preferred color and make of limo. The always-blunt Ike Turner told Womack, “Shut up and ride.” Humiston says jazz artists were more likely to make high-maintenance “wine and cheese” requests.
Naber agrees that competition among festivals has led to “astronomical step-ladder asking prices,” which, he says, make it even more important to secure a mammoth headliner. “Bands that were getting paid $3,000 or $4,000 in 1993 are now asking for $15,000, and they don’t have a bigger fanbase,” Naber explains. “Their fanbase is just ten years older. It’s more of a complex puzzle, but you’ve got to pay more, raise ticket prices and get a group like Widespread Panic that would pay for all the other acts. You’ve got to add some crossover names.”
Naber became frustrated with Patterson’s decision to hold the talent budget firm, saying it was indicative of a shift away from his ideology that the festival should pay whatever it takes to get the right musicians. But much of the festival’s $667,725 financial allotment was already earmarked for areas other than entertainment. It cost $20,000 to rent Penn Valley Park, effectively canceling out the $20,000 grant the festival received from the city’s Neighborhood Tourism Division. To meet city codes and ensure safety and comfort, the board paid thousands of dollars for fire extinguishers, pay phones, portable toilets, security and fencing.
“With all this production, we weren’t being lavish,” Patterson says. “That’s the way you’ve got to do it. You pay all this money for safeguards and security, things that are necessities rather than wants, and pretty soon, all our budget’s going toward things to protect us and not toward things that people want to come out and see.”
The solution, Patterson says, is city funding, a concept that has allowed blues festivals in Chicago and Tulsa to thrive without charging admission. “It’s a necessity,” he says. “In Tulsa, the city has all its services set up and a discounted rate for security. Kansas City is so far behind the times in doing that kind of stuff. We had a tremendous event that drew about $5 million to $6 million in tourism dollars into the city over the weekend. In return, the city gave us a $20,000 grant that we had to use to pay for the park. It was a little off-kilter.”
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Carr says that given the increasing difficulty of attracting corporate dollars, city support becomes more important than ever. “In a lot of sponsors’ minds, three-day parties don’t rank up with cancer research, and I don’t blame them. In this economy, you have to watch how you spend your charitable money,” he says.
Carr hasn’t been soliciting donations from the city or corporations, though the board still meets every two months. Initial gatherings after the cancellation centered on fund-raising and revival efforts, but current discussions focus on “if [the board’s] even going to do it again,” Carr says. At the time of the Blues and Jazz Festival’s garage sale, the organization’s Web site (kcbluesjazz.org) offered hope, promising that “hundreds of festival volunteers have committed themselves to present events and benefits throughout this year in order to responsibly recompense creditors and, following that, to establish funds toward future festivals.” It also claimed, “We will maintain an active Web presence.” However, in the following months, the page has stagnated, maintaining a minimal “We regret to announce the cancellation of the 2002 Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival.”
At first, Carr says, the board considered holding a small one-day blues festival in September. It withdrew that plan after learning that the SpiritFest was planning a large-scale event for the same month. (Rumor has it that Robert Cray is already attached as a headliner.) “If Spirit does put one on, we’d support them in it,” Carr says. “Our goal is to support blues and jazz in KC. If we’re unable to do it, we’d like somebody else to take it on and do it right.”
In Carr’s opinion, that someone isn’t Owen Hawkins. “If I thought it were a legitimate deal, we’d offer our help,” he says. “But I think he’s just using our name to raise money.”
Another possibility Carr raises is that Kansas City isn’t prepared to support events of the Blues and Jazz Festival’s magnitude. “Is KC done with festivals?” he asks. “SpiritFest was poorly attended this year. Maybe festivals here have had their day.”
Last year’s financial failure did drive home a few uncomfortable truths: Kansas Citians might not be musically knowledgeable enough to attend a show headlined by anything other than household names; KC residents care little about preserving the city’s “place where the blues and jazz met” reputation; and if it’s hot or otherwise inconvenient in any way, many Kansas Citians will dismiss even the finest collection of local talent with an “eh, they’re always here.”
But evidence suggests that big names could again fill the coffers. Like the Royals, which drew admirable crowds until the team lost its winning ways, festivals packed the house in the past. Kansas Citians don’t provide an all-weather fanbase, but give them a winner (or a hall-of-fame musician like Bob Dylan or B.B. King), and they’ll produce standing-room-only support.
Another summer festival with Buddy Guy might be years away, so smaller events might provide a temporary solution for die-hards. “Some events stay active as long as they’re small, then they reach the point of no return where expectations reach a certain level and you can’t shrink,” Patterson says. “It’s a sure thing staying at a smaller scale and not having to rely on the KC corporate dollar, which really isn’t there on a regular basis.”
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The danger comes when the public confuses a small-scale event like the one Hawkins and Miller are planning with the massive Blues and Jazz Festival of the past decade. “If people get less than what they expect, they’re going to be extremely disappointed, and they’ll make a mental note to avoid it in the future,” Naber says. “It will be a disaster if it’s not done properly.
For many festival fans, the year has already been a disaster. As Miller says, “When they canceled the Blues and Jazz Festival, it was like canceling the World Series.” But at this point, a Royals World Series berth is more likely than a world-class blues and jazz event’s return to Kansas City.
And well-intentioned or not, Hawkins and Miller’s makeshift event is a shoddy substitute.
“This pseudo-Blues and Jazz Festival is analogous to having a Royals game — make that a 1985 Royals game — get canceled and then scheduling a pick-up sandlot baseball game in its place, thinking no one will notice the difference,” says one local jazz musician who asked not to be named. “The people behind this half-assed sham should know better.”
