| MURRAY: | Next we have Ms. Spier who I understand runs a club that presents jazz? |
| SPIER: | I'm Louisa Spier, Publicist for Kimball's and Kimball's East in the San Francisco/Bay Area. Kimball's East is a jazz and supper club where jazz is very much alive. |
| MURRAY: | What problems do you have in presenting jazz performances or do you have any? |
| SPIER: | As a publicist, most of my job is fostering education in the community about jazz music. This involves taking artists to radio stations, getting local papers to write about them, and essentially educating members of the Bay Area community about the significant contributions these artists have made to jazz music and to American music. |
| MURRAY: | How are you doing relative to commercial viability? |
| SPIER: | We're surviving. We're supported by other ventures; the owner has other businesses that enable him to support jazz. |
| MURRAY: | He doesn't have to make money? |
| SPIER: | He doesn't have to, although we try. |
| MURRAY: | Does he make money? |
| SPIER: | It varies week to week. I would say we are heading towards the black right now after two years. |
| MURRAY: | What are the problems in presenting jazz? Are there problems specific to jazz clubs that aren't problems for clubs that present other entertainment? |
| SPIER: | There isn't an understanding in the general public about jazz music. Like others said earlier: The public doesn't understand jazz, they are intimidated by it, and the name recognition isn't there for the artists except for the top five jazz musicians in this country. The lack of name recognition is a problem. They see Jerry Gonzalez on the bill and they don't know who Jerry Gonzalez is. There's a great need for educating the public as to who these master musicians are. |
| MURRAY: | So would you conclude that jazz as an art form doesn't appear to be commercially viable or at least as viable as other forms of entertainment? |
| SPIER: | At this point, i would say yes. We've found that we needed to supplement our jazz program with other pop acts. |
| MURRAY: | Are there any pure jazz clubs in the bay area that are commercially viable? |
| SPIER: | Not that I know of. One other thing I wanted to say in response to the earlier suggestion of presenting jazz in the same form as opera or the symphony [she is referring to Matthews' statement that jazz should be presented on symphony stages and concert halls], I would agree that jazz needs to be presented with the same reverence, but I believe jazz' home is in a nightclub setting. That's where it came out of, that's where the listeners and people who came from the tradition feel the most comfortable. The nightclub is jazz' natural environment. I think we would be alienating the musicians and the fans by putting it in a sterile, Euro-centric kind of atmosphere. |
| CARRILLO: | This question is directed at you, Iouisa, and you, Edsel. You both represent two of the four jazz clubs in the Bay Area ... |
| MATTHEWS: | Actually we represent three. She represents Kimball's and Kimball's East; I represent Koncepts Cultural Gallery. |
| CARRILLO: | I'm curious... Since you are all suffering economically in presenting jazz, what would happen if the four of you came together, sat down, and strategized. Have jazz presenters in this state gathered as an economic interest to develop strategies for the protection of the industry? Has that ever happened? Do you ever talk about it in the Bay Area? |
| MATTHEWS: | We've talked... But actually there's something happening now that I didn't get a chance to talk about earlier which relates to your question. The Lila Wallace Readers Digest Foundation--the largest private funder of the arts in the United States--has just funded a major initiative called the National Jazz Network to support and develop jazz. Basically they've allocated $3.4 Million over the next four years to set up a network of sixteen nonprofit jazz presenters and seven regional organizations in order to begin to talk about preserving and promoting jazz. We just had a meeting of the three western organizations. There are sixteen organizations in this network with only one from California--my organization, Koncepts Cultural Gallery. I think it's sad that the city of Los Angeles was not able to make a credible presentation that would have included them in this network. This is a major problem. Anyway, the three major organizations that were selected in the Western United States and the people from the Western Arts Federation met and tentatively planned to organize a jazz conference to be held somewhere in the Western United States in 1993 or 1994. This is an example of an organizational effort taking place now. |
| CARRILLO: | Do you see yourselves as competitors for the same audience? |
| MATTHEWS: | No. We don't because the music Koncepts presents is very different from the music Kimball's presents. Kimball's East presents more high-profile acts and acts that Koncepts can't present. It's funny but the real competition is not for audience, it's for artists since it's the artist that generally draws the audience. Because of the way we are structured, the artists we attract are very different from the artists Kimball's attracts. Koncepts attracts people who are on the outside of the music industry--the avant-garde music. The music that Kimball's presents tends to be more commercially viable. That's not to say Kimball's presents commercial stuff, in fact they present a lot of music on the cutting edge, but their artists tend to be more well-known, command bigger fees, and draw larger audiences than our artists do. We are not in competition. We spend a lot of time making sure that we know who each other is presenting so that we don't present similar acts. If Kimball's is presenting-a saxophone act, we don't present a saxophone act. If they present a blues artist, we don't present blues because we will be competing for audiences. We coordinate our booking to make sure we don't compete in terms of the type of acts that we present. |