New sponsor steps in to revive flagship New York jazz festival

New York jazz festival gets new sponsor

NEW YORK — A new sponsor has emerged to resurrect New York’s flagship jazz festival and help support some of the country’s largest and oldest jazz events, organizers said Tuesday.

CareFusion Corp, a San Diego-based medical technology firm being spun off from Cardinal Health, will be the festival’s new corporate sponsor for an event next summer.

This year the curtain fell on the JVC Jazz Festival New York after the Japanese electronics company said it would not be sponsoring any jazz events in 2009.

But jazz impresario George Wein, who arranged the 1984 JVC sponsorship, said he plans to produce a festival at Carnegie Hall and other venues the last two weeks of June 2010 thanks to a new deal.

“I think it will be bigger,” Wein said in a telephone interview before a news conference to announce the sponsorship arrangement.

“I think it’s a very healthy sign that people are still sponsoring music events like that,” he said. “It proves that jazz has a life of its own that cannot be killed and won’t be killed.”

Marketing consultant Ronda Thomas Farrell, who was advising CareFusion, said she learned of JVC’s decision from a story written by The Associated Press.

She said market research showed that medical practitioners listed the arts and music as second only to travel in their preferences.

“We saw how jazz was being used to teach listening skills in medical schools like Baylor, and that a significant number of clinicians and administrators are also professional-level jazz musicians,” said Farrell, CEO of consulting firm The Exordium Group.

CareFusion produces various medical equipment such as intravenous pumps and ventilators, devices that carry company-designed safety features to prevent medication errors and infection.

CareFusion also will sponsor this year’s Aug. 7-9 jazz festival in Newport, R.I., which will feature Tony Bennett, Branford Marsalis, Dave Brubeck and Etta James, among others.

Wein said the sponsorship means that Newport “will not lose money this year” and puts the festival on more solid financial footing for next year.

CareFusion said it would also help sponsor jazz festivals this year in Chicago; Monterey, Calif.; Paris, and Manly, Australia.

“I’m a musician myself and I’m really looking forward to participating in these festivals,” said CareFusion CEO David Schlotterbeck, who once played drums.

“The fact that jazz represents a stream of complex information really plays into how medical practitioners have to process information so that they can improvise a solution.”

He said that CareFusion planned to transmit live feeds from festival concerts to hospitals to put on their internal network for patients and clinicians alike.

CareFusion would not give a dollar figure for the sponsorship deal. Wein would say only that the deal roughly offsets the amount lost when JVC pulled out of Newport and New York.

CareFusion has made a one-year commitment to sponsor the jazz festival series with the option to extend the deal, Schlotterbeck said.

Wein founded the county’s first jazz festival in Newport in 1954. He launched a major jazz festival in New York in 1972, a year after a riot by gate-crashers temporarily forced the cancellation of the Newport festival. JVC became the New York festival’s main sponsor in 1984.

In 2007, Wein sold his company, Festival Productions — whose lineup included the JVC-sponsored events in New York and Newport — to the Festival Network, which retained him in an advisory capacity. Wein has since severed his ties with Festival Network.

After Festival Network ran into financial difficulties, Wein put up his own money and obtained a license from Rhode Island authorities to put on the folk and jazz festivals in Newport this summer.

“I’ll produce these two festivals — New York and Newport — as long as I can,” Wein said. ” I had no choice. I either could let everything I worked for all my life die or I could fight to keep it alive as long as I’m alive. Fortunately my general health is pretty good and my head is pretty good.”

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On the Net:

www.newfestivalproductions.com

www.carefusionjazz.com