I have noticed that a lot of these festivals have headliners and artists who are not strictly jazz artists-but what is the point of that? I mean, those are jazz festivals.

SuperSoulFighter said:

The organizers want to make money.

It's the same with 'The Wave' radio stations. It's supposed to be smooth jazz, but they play a lot of pop music that's not really much different than a regular light/soft rock station.

Yeah obviously they want drawcard names to keep the festivals running financially.

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On the other hand, I'd bet you that most if not all of the bands backing the famous artists have jazz trained musicians within their group and will most definitely put jazz solos and touches into the music, so it won't be completely bereft of jazz at all.

Usually in something like this the big pop stars are the ones that sell a lot of tickets. They pay the bills, and the festivals can spend money bringing in more obscure artists.

You hope that the people running it don't use that to say "well let's just bring ALL pop stars and forget the jazz people, we'll make a lot more money." The Sunset Junction Fair in LA got shut down when that had been going on for a while. The Junction used to be great, a nice fair for the neighborhood with carnival rides and three music stages. It used to be only local bands, then changed to one or two national acts plus a lot of local bands, but they reduced it to nearly all touring bands and raised the admission price to $25. Not surprisingly the people in that neighborhood declined to let them block off their streets all weekend just to make a lot of money, not give the community a free festival or even a good stage for local bands to play on. They got greedy and it got them shut down.

But something like this, if they need Lenny Kravitz's crowd buyin tickets so they can afford to fly out McCoy Tyner's band, or Ornette Coleman's, I think that's reasonable.