Jazz Aspen Snowmass will be returning to its original home base, the Benedict Music Tent, seen here with a concert by owners the Aspen Music Festival in full swing.
For its 2009 season, Jazz Aspen Snowmass will change its locations and change and lengthen the dates of its June Festival, while its Labor Day Festival will be shortened by a day to compensate for the new resources being directed to the June Festival.
The venue change sees the festival's major artists playing in the 2,050-seat Benedict Music Tent in Aspen's West End, which was borrowed from the classical Aspen Music Festival when Snowmass's June Festival launched in 1991. The festival has taken place at the Rio Grande Park in Aspen every previous summer going back to 2002.
Also, while it has usually spanned a single extended weekend, the festival will expand its run-time from four days to seven, with concerts taking place on June 18-20 and June 25-28. The Music Tent will feature concerts by a list of out-of-town artists from the 18th through the 20th, while the next weekend starting on the 25th will feature participants in the festival's own Academy, a summer camp for high-school and college-level musicians, performing gigs throughout the city.
Both weekends' proceedings will be curated by Grammy-winning bassist Christian McBride.
The Labor Day Festival, which will remain in the Snowmass Village venue (the venue which held the June Festival after it moved from the Music Tent to before it moved to Rio Grande park), will be shortened from five to three days long in response to the June Festival's growth, and it will run September 4-6.
One major reason for the move are the fact that the Music Tent is a permanent structure, thus saving organizers the time and hassle in attending to the Rio Grande tent, which had to be raised and taken down in a multi-day process, that was part of their preparation for past June Festivals. In addition, the Music Festival will not be using the Music Tent until June 25th, and thus the first weekend of Snowmass presents an opportunity for the venue to be utilized for an event which is integral to Aspen's status as a summer festival hotspot.
Music Festival President Alan Fletcher says there has been no resistance within his camp to the first-weekend move of Snowmass, saying "It's a great use of the venue," in an interview with the Aspen Times.
Relations between Jazz Aspen and the Apen Music Festival have not always been as friendly as they are at present, however. In a statement announcing the move and expansion, Jazz Aspen founder and executive producer Jim Horowitz stated that, besides the fact that he thought they were the best remedy for the global economic strains which he sees permeating the live music business, he also felt that the changes "alleviate the convergence of the... [two Aspen] festivals bumping into each other with simultaneous openings," with said convergence having caused a minor war of words between the two organizations at the beginning of the new millennium.
Both Jazz Aspen Snowmass and the Aspen Music Festival have since relaxed their mutual tension by collaborating on events, though, co-presenting concerts by such luminaries as Wynton Marsalis. The use of facilities by Snowmass will no doubt further this warmth of relations between two festivals which has been developing over the past few years.
The list of artists and schedule for the 2009 season of Jazz Aspen is TBA. Fans can go to jazzaspen.org for updates on programming for the '09 run.
