JVC Jazz Festival
The JVC Jazz Festival is a series of annual jazz festivals from 1986 to 2008, which originated as the New York City branch of the Newport Jazz Festival by George Wein under the sponsorship of the Japanese electronics company JVC .
In New York, the festival took place for two weeks in June. Previously, the Newport offshoot in New York was called the Kool Jazz Festival from 1981 (after the tobacco company that was sponsoring) and from 1986 it was called the JVC Jazz Festival.
In addition to the annual New York Festival, which was a fixture in New York's jazz life, there were sporadic other festivals worldwide (a total of 160 with a total of almost four million viewers). Including Miami , Chicago , Atlanta , Houston , Dallas , Denver , Los Angeles , San Francisco , Toronto , London , Bad Segeberg , London, Amsterdam , The Hague , Paris , Nice , Rome , Turin , Warsaw , Berlin . It was played in venues such as the Royal Albert Hall , Carnegie Hall or the Apollo Theater .
The 47,000 musicians who performed at the JVC festivals included Dizzy Gillespie , Miles Davis , Ray Charles , Wayne Shorter , BB King , Chuck Berry , Nancy Wilson , McCoy Tyner , Wynton Marsalis , Dianne Reeves , Oscar Peterson , Herbie Hancock , Ornette Coleman , David Sanborn , Sonny Rollins , Diana Krall , Earth, Wind & Fire , Cassandra Wilson , Chick Corea , Sting .
One of the first concerts under the name JVC took place in 1984 in the western setting of the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg, with Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan .
JVC had started out as a Japanese licensee of RCA Victor (Victor Company of Japan), and a senior audio manager Junichi Shibata was a jazz fan whose father had one of the jazz coffeehouses (Jazz Kissa) in postwar Japan that played jazz records (he was also a saxophonist). The connection with George Wein and his jazz festival came in very handy for the company's marketing.
The last New York JVC Festival took place in 2008 and the others were also discontinued due to financial bottlenecks at JVC during the economic crisis in 2009. George Wein had already sold his company Festival Productions in 2007 to an entrepreneur (Chris Shields) (Festival Networks) whose expansion plans failed in the hotly contested New York City, the US market and beyond. George Wein temporarily found a new sponsor for the Newport Festival and its New York offshoot in CareFusion (a hospital equipment company) for 2009/2010, until the latter stopped supporting it.
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Individual evidence
- ↑ Ben Sisario New York looses its Jazz Festival , The New York Times, May 19, 2009 . After that, Shields - 38 years old in 2009 - was relatively inexperienced, had briefly worked under Wein and Michael Dorf (Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival 2000) and his roots more in folk.
- ↑ Howard Mandel on CareFusion as a sponsor of jazz festivals