The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 Fri-sat-sun Sept 8-9-10

The Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival is just about with us now, and the excitement is building day by day as we get closer to the three day celebration and get-down soon to rock Otis Spann Memorial Field like never before. The Festival is yet another aspect of our growing alterna tive community here, and we hope in this article to give you an idea how that community is working together to serve all the needs of the 15,300 people expected to attend, as well as some the other implications of this un precedented undertaking. But first here's some information of mmediate usefulness for those planning to attend. IN ORDER TO GET INTO THE FESTIVAL GROUNDS, YOU MUST HAVE A TICKET. WHICH YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PURCHASE AT THE SITE. You'll need a ticket in order to be able to park you car, so those of you who haven't picked them up yet should go down and do that while they still last. Series tickets are $15 for all five shows; you can get tickets for an afternoon and evening performance together for $7, or tickets for just the evening shows for $4 each. Ticket outlets are listed on the ad that accompanies this article. People are asked to get their tickets in advance n order to prevent mass confusión and overcrowding at the festival site, since many more people will probably want to attend than there's room for within the fence surrounding the site. We urge you to cooperate in this. People should realize that ticket prices are relatively inexpensive compared to the usual rip-off, and that all the money made by the Festival will be put back into the community. The Rainbow Corporation is a non-profit people's enterprise out to develop the local cultural scene and needs everyone's help and understanding in order to succeed. GET YOUR TICKETS NOW! Bogus tickets have appeared on the street that were stolen from the printer before they had the final blue security screen printed on them. If you think that you have one of these take it to an authorized ticket outlet, Salvation Records, Michigan Union and Carrot's Clothing Store, and compare what you have with the legitímate kind. To make sure you get into the Festival, buy tickets only from authorized, advertised ticket outlets. Lastly, people should know that there'll be no camping allowed on the Festival grounds between shows. CAmping is available at several state parks in the area, and information on those places will be available out at Otis Spann Field. There'll be hundreds of people in Ann Arbor that weekend without places to stay; people who can put up some small space for a few days for crashers should cali Ozone House, 769-6540. What follows now are excerpts from the Festival program (to be found in a special issue of Creem magazine, which will be available at the site) which lays out fairly precisely what the three am-packed days coming up next weekend are all about: The Blues & Jazz Festival was conceived last winter by Rainbow MultiMedia Corporation president Peter Anckews as a revival of the original Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which after two incredible years (1969 and 1970) of artistic (but not financial) success was laid to rest by the University of Michigan before a 1971 Festival could struggle mto life. The void left by the absence of the Festival last summer was so great that people in the Ann Arbor community vore bemoaning its disappearance far into the w.nter, folks in the bars, on the streets, and at various community meetings fantasized its re-emergence endlessly, bui there seemed to be no way to put on another Blues Festival without the support and sponsorship of official University student organizations and their sizable entertainment budgets. The major problem with the 1970 Blues Festival was its tremendous financial failure, involving upwards of 830,000.00, most of which was attributable to minute emergency pólice and "security" costs and to overbooking (too many artists at too high prices to the producers) and under pricing of Festival tickets (four shows for $10.00). Since the University would in no way be interested in a repeat of that failure, and since the University seemed to be the only hope for bringing the Blues Festival back to life. Peter Andrews drew up a proposal for an Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival which he feit would solve the problems encountered by the producers of the earlier events. His idea was that careful booking, detailed planning, and superior organization, coupled with the expansión of the Festival into contemporary jazz music and a slightly less esoteric line-up of blues artists, would not only insure the success of a 1972 Festival but would also expand upon the musical base laid down by the producers and the participants in the earlier Blues Festivals, which had essentially limited their potential appeal to music lovers by featuriny little-known (though musical ly excellent) blues performers from many different disciplines within the blues idiom. A thorough-going proposal was drawn up by Peter's staff , headed by Suzanne Young, and was submitted to a number of student organizations at the University for their approval. For a variety of reasons, most of them financial, none of the student organizations could see their way to sponsoring such an event, even though most of them would' ve loved to do it. Frustrated from what amounted to months of pleading his case in vain. Peter was ready to do something drastic when he discussed the problem with his newly-acquired business partner John Sinclair, who had missed the two Blues Festivals while serving 29 months of a 9VÍ to 10 year prison sentence for possession of two joints of marijuana before being released last December 13th. Buzzing off of John's enthusiasm for the Blues & Jazz Festival plan, and following his earlier intuition that the University wasn't the only answer after all. Peter began seeking independent backing for the proposed event among prosgressive music business operators who could understand the commercial possibilities inherent in the proposition, as well as the musical imperatives involved, and who might be able to bring the Festival off. Andrews made a number of pitches and drew some genuine interest, but the Festival started to get off the ground for real one Sunday in June when Sinclair was in Lansing for a free concert in the park and met a young brother backstage who presented the solution to the problem of financing the event. Riek Dykstra had inherited a piece of money and wanted to do something vvorthwhile with it, so he approached Sinclair out of the blue and offered financing for a project or projects which needed backing, preferably musical projects which could also raise money for other major projects to be undertaken by Rainbow Multi-Media, the non-profit Corporation Sinclair and Andrews had organized. Flashing immediatèly on the Blues & Jazz Festival scam, Sinclair set up a meeting between Riek and Peter and himself for a couple days later, and agreement was quickly reached as soon as Riek read through the proposal and dug on the proposed list of artists for the Festival. This list, which was essentially the same as the Festival line-up, had been constructed around the principie that high-energy music, whether rock & roll or blues and jazz, is what people go crazy to hear, and it was specifically designed to lead people directly from one familiar discipline (blues in some cases, jazz in others) to an unfamiliar although closely related musical form which might raise their musical consciousness a little bit higher. Hard-core blues and rhythm & blues artists were coupled with hardcore avant-jazz musicians, with more popularly-known blues-based artists (Dr. John, Jr. Walker and the All-Stars) mixed in to Ilústrate the wider registrations of the two black musical forms. Each concert was structured so as to provide a context for the individual artists and their musics which would give them each a fuller definition than that provided by all-blues and all-jazz programs, while special care was taken to insure that the leaps and discontinutties from one form to another wouldn't be so great as to bewüder people or turn them off some other way. A number of outstanding performers from the two Ann Arbor Blues Festivals were contracted, among them Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers, Bobby Bland, Mighty Joe Young, Little Sonny, Freddie King, Luther Allison, Lightnin' Slim, and Otis Rush; other blues and rhythm & blues artists were selected for their unique musical qualities, including wailing Koko Taylor from Chicago and one of the grand old women of the blues, Sippi Wallace, who has been retired from secular performing for many years in favor of her' Ufe as a gospel singer in the sanctified churches of Detroit; a number of jazz artists were chosen to represent some of the multidirectional socio-musical movements in contemporary black expression (among them: Sun Ra and his Arkestra, the Detroit-based CJQ, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a group made up of trumpeter-composer Leo Smith and multiinstrumentalist Marión Brown, Archie Shepp and his tet. Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus, who later withdrew and was replaced with Pharoah Sanders). Seigel-Schwall was chosen to represent the rainbow blues movement, and two Ann Arbor boogie-blues bands were added to demónstrate one of the most exciting contemporary permutations of the blues. The musical mix spoke to the artistic questions Envolved, but there's always more to music than just the notes, and with festivals particularly, there recurs the question of the economics of the music, or who makes the money and what do they do with it when they get it. The non-prof it nature of the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation eliminates the major economie contradiction - one or two or three individuals making profits for themselves by exploiting a number of musicians and groups for their own selfish gain - but given the nature of the Blues & Jazz Festival and the peculiar features of such an event, even that wasn't enough. No one organization or group could rightly rake off all the proceeds of the Festival for itself, since one of the conditions of our community is that such an event is created by many elements in the community working together, and another condition is that most all of these elements are needy of money for their own community serviceself-determination projects too, and the economie development of the community s not best served by grossly uneven growth patterns which plump one alternative institution (such as Rainbow Multi-Media) to the exclusión and neglect of its sister and brother developments. Quickly eliminating the possibility of retaining all the possible net proceeds for its own projects, which include the establishment of a non-profit recording studio and a non-profit printing plant in Ann Arbor as well as the developmtnt of a non-profit booking agency and a self-reliant local non-profit record company, Rainbow Multi-Media selected a number of community-based, communityoriented self-determination projects as recipients of percentages of the net proceeds from the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972. These include Project Community, a student-community organization at the University of Michigan which is particularly concerned with the economie, political and cultural development of the local black community, and which is the co-sponsor of the Festival (5%); Trotter Hous,-a black student-run cooperative which is responsive to the needs of the non-student black population of Ann Arbor (5%); the Community Parks Program, one of the oldest alternative institutions in the Ann Arbor rainbow community and probably the strongest after five solid years of practice in producing free rock and roll concerts in the city's parks every Sühday afternoon during the summer months (10%); and the People's Ballroom, a brand-new rainbow community institution which is the first successful development of its kind in the nation and which will open its doors for the first time the week bef ore the Festival starts (10%). In addition, the Festival has channeled even more money into the embryonic alternative economie system which has recently begun to develop in the Ann Arbor community by contracting with other community service groups to provide for the many services which are necessary at such an event This includes security (Onthe-site "policing" as well as parking-lot direction and protection), which is provided by the Psychedelic Rangers of the Ann Arbor Tribal Council instead of by the local pólice forcé, which is itself constricted to a minimal presence-in the parking area and no presence at all inside the gates; medical help (including drug-abuse prevention and treatment), which is provided by the People's Free Clinic staff and workers from Drug Help; the serving of food and beverages, which will be handled by the People's Food Committee of the Tribal Council as it is at the free concerts during the summer; sound, lighting, and staging, which is contracted to Vulcan Sound Systems Inc. of Ann Arbor who provide the sound system for the free concerts at cost to the Community Parks Program all summer; the crucial on-stage production work, which will be handled by the stage crew from the People's Ballroom, headed by Craig Blazier, which has managed the stage at the free concerts all summer long; and site development, which has been directed and implemented by a group of community people who have worked throughout the summer to get the field in shape for this event. Even the garbage collection service is being provided by a community clean-up squad instead of the usual official garbage collection agencies. In each case significant sums of money are going back into the Ann Arbor community, not out of the community and into the pockets of individual profit-oriented entrepeneurs. Drug Help, the Free People's Clinic workers, the Rangers, all of these groups are being paid for their services, and every-cent of the money they will make from their work is sorely needed by the institutions they represent in order to carry out their community service work. The People's Food Committee will realize for itself a substantial share (30%) of the proceeds from the sale of good food and drinks to the anticipated 15,000 blues and jazz lovers for each of the five shows, money which will go back into the Food Committee as capital for next year's park program and for other self-determinationself-reliance people's food programs during the winter. Other community-oriented services provided by the Festival and its producers include literature-distribution booths and stands for a variety of community organizations, including the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the Michigan Committee for Prisoners' Rights, the Indochina Peace Campaign, the Human Rights Party, the Ann Arbor Sun newspaper, Ozone House, and a number of other groups, at no charge to the people involved; a record outlet staffed by Salvation Records and stocked with hundreds of records by Festival performers and other great blues and jazz artists, painfully assembled from all over the world for the Festival weekend by the Salvation people, and the availability of a great many shortterm jobs for people from the community, many of whom haven't been able to find work of any kind all summer. And, for those people in the Ann Arbor-Detroit-lower Michigan área who are not able to attend the Festival for one reason or another, whether it's lack of money or some other incapacity, Rainbow Multi-Media has arranged for the Festival to be broadcast, live, in its entirety, over radio stations WNRZ-fm (102.9) in Ann Arbor, and WABX-fm (99.5) in Detroit. The broadcast rights were freely assigned to the radio stations, at no profit to the Festival, in order that more people would be able to experience the powerful music of the blues and jazz artists who will be appearing. Other people will be present video-taping the event for possible educational TV screening later in the year, and Atlantic Records has been designated as the exclusive recording agent for the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972, with at least one album of music from the Festival for release later this year or early in 1973. Of course the economie innovations brought about by the Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 have their political implications as well, which we won't attempt to delinéate here; but it is interesting to note that Rainbow Multi-Media has received the fullest cooperation from the city government of Ann Arbor, including full approval of the use of the site (University property which is leased by the city) by the City Council, continuing assistance and advice from Assistant City Administrator Jim Hudak, and a rational, reasonable stance on the part of the Ann Arbor Pólice Department, which has confined itself, as it has for the last three and a half years of the Community Park? Program, to a minor role in the parking área and traffic control at the site and no presence at all inside the gates. Culturally, economically, and politically, then, the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 is a unique event; and even more than that, it is unique in a singularly progressive term. We consider the Festival to be a first major step in our community toward self-reliance, self-determination, and the development of an alternative, communalist, non-profit economie system which would be controlled by the people within our community and not by people who have no more to do with our culture and our music than, say, Richard Nixon. We trust that the Festival, as the earlier Ann Arbor Blues Festivals, will be a smashing artistic success - it's hard to conceive that it could be any other way, given the musical genius which will be present at Otis Spann Memorial Field next weekend. But what's just as important to us, if the event is financially successful we will have enough seed cap tal for Rainbow Multi-Media to develop some of the projects we've been planning and dreaming about for many years; a number of community institutions and organizations will benefit substantially; a large number of brothers and sisters from our community will have a few more dollars towards the rent and groceries; the artists will receive a decent compensation for their work; and everyone will come out of the Festival feeling good enough to work through the winter to bui ld up the people's institutions we've all begun now to créate together. And that's what we would cali a real good time.