San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Jazz festival leader: Time for ‘a new voice’
Tim Jackson, who revitalized the Monterey Jazz Festival during his three-decade tenure as artistic director, plans to step down in the fall, making this September’s event his farewell festival.
The Santa Cruz resident was hired in 1991 and co-presented the ’92 season with Jimmy Lyons, who launched the festival with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason in 1958. By 1993, Jackson took over and quickly re-established the reputation of the longest continuously running jazz festival as one of the genre’s pre-eminent events.
“When I arrived, the Monterey Jazz Festival was in an artistic rut,” Jackson recalled. “Jimmy Lyons did some great things, but the board was smart in making a change. It was time to hear a new voice — just like it’s time to hear a new voice now.”
Jackson officially concludes his role at the end of February 2024 and will continue as an artistic adviser as a new artistic director takes up the reins. Colleen Finegan Bailey, the festival’s executive director, said the MJF board and staff spent recent months rethinking the job description to reflect the organization’s expanding purview, like the all-star Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour ensemble that kicked off a national tour last week, and is working with the San Francisco consulting firm m/Oppenheim Associates in launching an international search for Jackson’s successor.
Jackson said he’ll continue to run Kuumbwa Jazz Center, the Santa Cruz organization he co-founded in 1975.
His departure comes in the midst of several transitions at Bay Area jazz institutions. Last March, SFJazz’s founder and
“I can’t think of someone more respected among jazz presenters than Tim (Jackson).”
Jason Olaine, vice president of programming, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline announced his fall 2023 retirement, and in December pianist Susan Muscarella, who founded the California Jazz Conservatory and built it into the nation’s only independent, accredited degree-granting institution focused on jazz, said she’s leaving her leadership role in May to return to teaching.
“In the entire arts industry, it’s a sea change moment,” Jackson told The Chronicle, emphasizing that at 68, it was his choice to move on from MJF. “At a certain point, it’s healthy to experience a new voice that can provide a fresh perspective.”
Held on the 22-acre Monterey County Fairgrounds, the Monterey Jazz Festival has showcased nearly every marquee jazz artist active since the late 1950s, including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock.
Jackson extended that track record into the 21st century.
“Tim was hired to do a threeday festival, and it’s grown so much over the years, in large part because of what he brought to the table,” Bailey said. “The education programs have grown and expanded, and increasingly what we’re doing is year-round programming. Tim grew into this, and it was his vision that built the MJF we know today.”
His tenure has been marked less by programmatic invention than by reviving the festival’s early innovations. While conspicuously improving MJF’s production values, bringing in top-shelf sound and lighting techs, he spent his first few seasons making a close study of the festival’s first decade when Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis played an essential role as “musical consultant,” an unprecedented move that brought a renowned musician inside festival operations.
In looking to make the festival’s programming distinctive, he made the festival commission a centerpiece, showcasing composers with extraordinary promise, like Oakland-reared trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and revered masters like Gerald Wilson, whose Los Angeles orchestra started perform
ing at the festival in the early 1960s. Much like Lewis helped the festival forge deep ties to leading artists in the glory years of the ’60s, Jackson revived and revitalized programs that meant select artists performed several times throughout the weekend, making it more than a one-off gig.
Among his peers in the jazz world, Jackson is widely regarded as the gold standard. “I can’t think of someone more respected among jazz presenters than Tim, not just in the States but globally,” said Jason Olaine, vice president of programming at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, who described Jackson as an invaluable mentor, particularly during his early years booking Yoshi’s in the 1990s.
Olaine ran MJF’s short-lived record label in 2007-08, which released about a dozen albums of performances at the festival, and went on to book the Newport Jazz Festival for five years. “I used to spend my life going to jazz festivals, and there’s nothing like Monterey,” he said. “That’s completely a reflection of the team that Tim has surrounded himself with, which has made it this beacon and model for jazz festivals around the world.”
Akinmusire, who played with the Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour in 2013 and composed the festival commission in 2015, described Jackson as “one of the last people who is truly about the music.”
“He understands the business side, obviously, but you get the sense he’s always putting the music first,” said Akinmusire, who concludes a threenight run at the SFJazz Center on Sunday, Feb. 5. “That’s the history of the festival, but Tim’s kept that alive. He always has his ear to the ground, supporting young musicians who may not have blown up yet. At the same time, he puts together interesting projects on the main stage. It’s rare to be so balanced and so consistent for so long.”
After shepherding MJF through the pandemic shutdown, which forced the event’s cancellation in 2020 and led to a much reduced program in 2021, Jackson brought the festival back to full strength last summer by eschewing the fairground’s three traditional indoor venues and creating new alfresco stages.
If there was one consistent criticism of the festival’s programming during his tenure, it was the underrepresentation of female instrumentalists. With the rise of the #MeToo movement, Jackson did eventually acknowledge he’d lagged on booking female players, which led to a breakthrough in 2018. With more than a dozen ensembles led by women that year — including soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, pianist Tammy Hall, and artists-in-residence trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and saxophonist Tia Fuller — the results were revelatory. The lineups have been markedly more balanced since then, while the festival’s Next Generation Women in Jazz Combo has showcased several exceptional teenage players.
A surfer and flute player first drawn to Santa Cruz by the waves, Jackson was 19 when he got into the swing of presenting jazz under Pete Douglas, who hosted shows at his oceanside Half Moon Bay venue Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society in the mid-1960s. He spent much of 1973 living in his Volkswagen microbus on Douglas’ property in exchange for helping run Bach gigs.
In 1975, back in Santa Cruz, after a yearlong international surfing excursion, Jackson connected with Rich Wills and Sheba Burney at local radio station KUSP, who were talking about presenting jazz concerts in the beach town. They enlisted Jackson in the scheme, and Kuumbwa Jazz Society was born. By the time the organization acquired its own downtown Santa Cruz space in 1977, Wills and Burney had moved on, and Jackson was at the helm.
He didn’t have much of a relationship with the Monterey Jazz Festival, despite his proximity. But the board decided to give the guy just up the coast a shot. Thirty years later, Jackson is leaving on top.
“I’m hoping whoever gets hired will present a different vision than mine,” he said. “It should be somebody who’ll say, ‘That’s all well and good. It’s time for me to paint a new picture.’ ”