[Columbus Jazz and Blues producer, Brice Miller indulging in one of his other passions besides organizing live music events.]

Citing the continuing recession that faces both the entire U.S. economy as well as that of the host city, the chief organizer of the Columbus Jazz and Blues Festival has announced that the event will be postponed until the spring of 2009.

The event, which was to take place at Riverside Park in Columbus, Mississippi, would have had its second annual fall run had it proceeded as planned, initially being scheduled for September 26th and 27th. The first edition of the festival was considered by most involved to be a definite success, and the Columbus Convention and Visitors' Bureau had set aside $7,500 for this year's Jazz and Blues Festival, with half of that already given to the festival's organizers. Since the announcement of the postponement, the Bureau has requested that this first installment of its grant be paid back, and the organizer has stated that he will comply with the Bureau's request and conditions.

With a very small amount of fans expected to show up even in a best-case scenario and a trend of belt-tightening appearing among individual as well as corporate donors throughout this summer, both the executive board of the Foundation that acts as the festival's own private bank and the organizers' advisory committee decided that giving the final green-light to the festival's September dates would create a responsibility for them that would by prohibitively irresponsible from a social standpoint.

The festival's chief organizer, Brice Miller, who is also the namesake of and runs the foundation that officially funds the festival, says that Columbus Jazz and Blues was facing competition with organizers of other festivals and cultural events set for the summer and fall seasons for donors that he said made choosing the right event to support "very, very stressful" on donors.

This was compounded by the fact that the size of Columbus as a market makes hardly any room for shortfalls for organizers that want their events to be viable in the future. About 6,000 events attended the event last year, according to Miller, who also teaches jazz at the University of Alabama, and the City of Columbus has only 30,000 residents. That small population also means that organizers of local and regional events, including Miller, have to solicit more small business owners relative to large corporations than do organizing companies like The Festival Network and AEG, which have large corporate holdings for dealing with economic downturns in their respective local-, regional- and national-level markets, and which stage household-name blockbuster festivals, such as the Newport Jazz Festival and Coachella, that can be relied upon to attract tens of thousands of fans regardless of the quality of the lineup or other features year-by-year.

In his release announcing the canceling of the fall 2008 dates, Miller said that the heads of businesses he talked to were eager to fund the Jazz and Blues Festival, but were facing such dire economic conditions that Miller did not want to alienate himself from Columbus's business community, and its residents at large, by pressuring them to contribute to his festival; the organizers of other events, such as the Columbus Katfish & Karting Festival and the 7th Avenue Heritage Festival, were also asking for financial help.

Miller also stated in the release that part of what he and other top organizing personnel see as a temporary problem is due in part to the attitude he has taken regarding event planning in the Columbus area in general, saying that he intended to work together with "all the players that host other events" and organize Jazz and Blues to "relate to" the other events. The Columbus area's standard group of donors has indicated to Miller that it cannot support all Columbus-area events equally, and that has created a trade-off between keeping with his desire for healthy and sustained collaboration among local organizers and securing the funding for his own event.

Miller did not list any tentative Spring date(s) for the festival, and did not name any of the artists that had been booked for September, though he did say that the list of scheduled performers had included a few Blues Award winners.

For more information about the current situation of the Columbus Jazz and Blues Festival, go to Miller's personal website, thisisbricemiller.com.