A Jazz-Appreciation Effort Hits Blue Notes in These Hard Times

Jazz, Louis Armstrong once said, is the only form of music that always produces sly smiles.

But among those who run Jazz Appreciation Month, smiles of any kind are in short supply — because money is, too. Jazz Appreciation Month is an eight-year-old national festival run each April by the Smithsonian Institution. Throughout its existence, it has attracted money from many sources, most of them family foundations and corporations. JAM has grown in size and scope each year, and its 2009 budget of $250,000 is its largest ever.

The 2009 offerings by the jazz program have been especially diverse. JAM was scheduled to present 24 events in the 30 days of April, all in Washington. The events included a salute to Benny Goodman (it’s the 100th anniversary of the great clarinetist’s birth) and a special tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, which has sold more copies than any other jazz album. Meanwhile, satellite events have taken place all over the country.

But like many nonprofit efforts that are long since out of the cradle but still short of self-sustaining adulthood, Jazz Appreciation Month may be about to stall.

Its largest supporter, the Herb Alpert Foundation, in Santa Monica, Calif., is expected to decrease its $100,000-per-year support by a significant amount in 2010. Other major donors have not yet renewed their commitments. And 2009 is hardly a great time to be looking for new sources of money.

“It’s very fair to say we’re scrambling right now,” says Joann Stevens, program director of Jazz Appreciation Month.

The irony, according to Ms. Stevens, is that jazz has never been more popular than it is today. That’s especially true outside the United States, she says.

XM Radio and National Public Radio are both JAM partners. “I’ll bet jazz might migrate to VH1,” Ms. Stevens says. Although jazz clubs are less numerous in the United States than they were 50 years ago, young people are flocking to jazz as they never did during the heydays of folk, blues, and gospel, according to Ms. Stevens.

“If we tell our story and tell it in a compelling enough manner, funders will respond,” she says.

She hopes to triple her annual budget within the next few years by designating a Jazz Day in America, and by finding a sponsor. However, that is likely to be a big challenge. Ms. Stevens is hearing a familiar refrain from established supporters such as the Alpert Foundation. Alpert was happy to provide $100,000 a year across each of the last three years, according to its president. But it doesn’t want to provide six-figure support forever.

“We will be involved and we will support the program in ways that we can,” says Rona Sebastian, the Alpert Foundation’s president. But it’s “unlikely that we’ll be staying in the leadership role.”

The Alpert Foundation will “see how the environment is over the next several months,” Ms. Sebastian says. The foundation “would not abandon support. Our hope is that we would not be zeroing them out.”

If that sounds a bit lukewarm, so does Jazz Appreciation Month’s basic arrangement with the Smithsonian. About two-thirds of the specialty programs the Smithsonian lends its name to are “trust programs.”

“That basically means, if you can raise the money, you can stay,” Ms. Stevens explains. No government money supports Jazz Appreciation Month or any similar Smithsonian program.

For Ms. Stevens, the downturn in the economy is an opportunity, not a cross to bear.

“We certainly need food,” she said. “But food is needed for the soul, too.” Jazz can provide a “national spirit boost” in tough times, she argues.

“It’s a little like the way people went to the movies a lot during the Depression,” she says.

Smithsonian programs in blues, gospel, and chamber music make similar arguments, but all are facing the same fund-raising struggles, Ms. Stevens says.

One measure of how strapped Jazz Appreciation Month is: its Web site.

If you go to the home page, you will easily find a tab that reads, “Support Smithsonian Jazz.” But the tab lists the organization’s postal address only. The program doesn’t have enough money to add a section that enables people to give online.

Ms. Stevens, who is the sister of the famed jazz trumpeter Eddie Gale, says she hopes to correct that inadequacy very soon. She also hopes to use social-networking Web sites to tap into gifts from jazz fans. “Obama showed us all the value of one-on-one online fund raising,” she says.

In the short run, Ms. Stevens has had success with the Smithsonian’s Women’s Committee (it provided $30,200 from an annual craft show for help designing the Web site for Jazz Appreciation Month), the National Park Service (it devoted $25,000 to help run concerts and seminars at national parks), and the National Association of Music Merchants (it covered $15,000 in printing and publicity costs for the 2009 events).

But that is small money. The dollars must get larger — and soon.

“My faith in what this music is about is boundless,” says Ms. Stevens, as a poster of a very dour John Coltrane, the tenor-saxophone great, stared down at her from her office wall.

“But without support, we have no program.”

Bob Levey is a regular columnist for The Chronicle. He spent 36 years as a reporter and columnist for The Washington Post. He has also been a senior-level fund-raising executive and a longtime fund-raising volunteer in higher education, the arts, and health care. He teaches journalism at the University of Memphis.