We formed a board and thought that we would run a jazz festival. The city encouraged us to use the newly-minted convention center. From this vague wish, a good idea and an even better music festival, now in its 26th year, was born.

Our group was completely grassroots, but we had the enthusiasm necessary to mount a festival. Though we planned the event for mid-August, we were neophytes and did not spend much time organizing. By early June we realized that while the convention center was technically free, every chair and table would cost us money. And potential sources of income—such as sponsorship and beverage income—would not belong to us because the convention center would take those funds.

So we decided to make the bold step of bringing the music outside to a park and offering it for free. At that time, performances in city parks had to be offered for free. We chose Plaza de Cesar Chavez, which was located in the city core and surrounded by hotels. There we would have some beverage income, since the concessions would belong to us. A local beer distributor gave us our initial sponsorship. And then 10,000 people showed up to help us inaugurate the San Jose Jazz Festival.

Since then we have grown to 13 stages; we also use clubs, hotel facilities, and other streets. Last year, 45,000 people showed up. We’ve taken advantage of the good weather and the downtown location to generate a feel that not many festivals have these days. The Plaza de Cesar Chavez is still the focus of activity—and the location of the main stage.

Joe Bonamassa on stage at the San Jose Jazz Festival in 2008. Photo courtesy of Paulo Philippidis/Flickr.

And the festival has expanded in ways we never could imagined, fostering new generations of musicians and audiences, and providing free music not just for our event but also year-round.

The growth is a reflection of the festival’s popularity and of our work building community. Our volunteer base has increased from 30 the first year to over 600 now—with various groups contributing time for everything from beverage sales to hospitality crew. The festival has become intertwined with the local business community. Extending the festival from two days to three helped hotel business during what would otherwise be a very slow week, and all the stages we established in clubs, meeting rooms and restaurants helped businesses with customers and sales. We also created the club crawl: On Friday and Saturday nights we offer free performances at 12 different hotels, restaurants, and clubs.

Musicians, both local and from out of town, have embraced the festival. We typically get eight to 10 requests from overseas acts to play here. To keep the festival fresh and exploratory, we work with a number of unpaid co-curator community members who keep tabs on promising new musicians in blues, jazz, Latin, and salsa.

We’ve also started three programs to develop young musicians and audiences: the High School Allstars, Youth Summer Camp, and Progressions, the last for kids in kindergarten and up. The Allstars, a year-round big band comprised of students who audition, perform twice in different settings. The Youth Summer Camp, which precedes the fest, features a group of students selected from the camp sessions; they play on the main stage Sunday morning.

Blow that horn! San Jose Jazz Festival, 2009. Photo courtesy of Monica P.C./Flickr.

We have found it difficult, with schools out of session, to tie in educational activities around the summer fest. So seven years ago we spun off a winter festival, featuring individually-priced shows at various venues in February. This timing gives us opportunities to organize additional educational activities with local colleges and schools when they are in session.

While San Jose has a sleepy feel, the festival has an urban street vibe that involves a lot of dancing. Closing off city streets allowed us to program the types of music that encouraged dancing, and the asphalt was much better for dancing than the grass in Plaza de Cesar Chavez. The dancing has in turn made the music more diverse. It’s now about 20 percent jazz; the rest is salsa blues, rhythm and blues, big band, youth groups, Latin jazz, funk and soul.

Each year we have added one or two stages, encouraged by the attendance and our desire to expand the types of musical offerings. In 2008, 18 years after we started, we decided that we could not afford to throw this big party without charging money. So we got the rules changed for downtown parks and charged $5. The price has increased to $25 this year—still modest compared to similar events. Each time we raised our prices, we lost about 10 percent of our audience. But the income grew, so we could increase artist fees, and the sophistication of the audience grew with the diversity of the music and the increases in the stature of the artists that we were able to program.

The San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, as it is now called, draws fans and musicians from around the world. It is almost an unstoppable mix of good times and opportunities to find new, younger (or older) but not established artists. The few headliners draw crowds of course, but the mix encourages exploration of geography and talent.

As the organization has grown, so has our desire to program free music in the community throughout the year. We now routinely work with clubs and restaurants to help them find talent, consult with others free of charge, and program a few shows when we can. Over the course of the year this amounts to over 100 mostly free performances. Our staff is very small, with just two full-time people, and three other year-round staff members, so our ability to build more connections is limited by the number of staff members we have.

On the other hand, if we had more money, we might not have been able to maintain our community feel for a quarter century.

The post The Happy Accident of San Jose Jazz appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You heard it here first: The next bubble to burst in California, perhaps even before Silicon Valley and real estate, just might be the festival bubble.

The festival economy is growing so fast that it runs the risk of overheating. Even after expanding from one weekend to two in 2012, and increasing capacity this past year from 99,000 to 125,000, the Coachella Arts and Music Festival still managed to sell out in just three hours. Its cousin, Stagecoach, is the world’s biggest country music festival, welcoming up to 75,000 people each year over one weekend in Indio. Coachella and Stagecoach are even spawning spin-offs, like last fall’s Desert Trip (AKA “Oldchella”) and the massive new Arroyo Seco Weekend, headlined by Tom Petty, debuting later this month at the Rose Bowl.

And those are just the big-ticket festivals. This summer, Californians could spend every waking moment attending festivals—hundreds of regional events and thousands of community ones celebrating our arts, our foods, our cultural heritage, or some combination of all three—and still not get to all of them.

Festivals aren’t new here. Our state has shaped and been shaped by major festivals, from the Monterey International Pop Festival during the Summer of Love, to the 1996 Organic Festival in San Bernardino National Forest, which helped launch the rave scene. But today, festivals proliferate for very practical reasons: they match the promotional needs of so many California institutions and communities.

Festivals provide the ready-made audiences that our creative industries require to support artists and performers. Cash-strapped local governments see festivals as relatively cheap economic development tools for creating traffic around sales-tax-producing retail corridors. Major industries have found that festivals work better than conventions in attracting paying crowds. (Coachella has essentially become an entertainment industry bash for cutting deals and gaining status for the bottle service crowd).

Regional museums and cultural institutions use festivals to differentiate themselves, and attract tourists. No region has taken more advantage of a festival strategy than the Coachella Valley, which hosts dozens of major gatherings, from the big music weekends, to the Palm Springs International Film Festival, to the architecture-design-fashion events known collectively as Modernism Week, to the Indio International Tamale Festival.

There’s also a cultural fit between festivals and this era. Short attention spans require a constant mix of offerings. And given how hard it is to build any structure in California, the impermanence of festivals is attractive. Californians are turning away from established, brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of pop-up food and social events. Festivals are happenings designed to be photographed, hashtagged, geotagged, and shared in order to produce the maximum amount of FOMO among one’s friends and followers, who won’t get their own chance to attend.

All of which makes festivals both red-hot—and vulnerable. Visiting such events around the state, I keep hearing organizers ask: How much longer before the bubble pops? Will the crowds still have the cash for $5 bottles of water if the state’s other bubbles, from housing to technology, burst? Will they tire of waiting in long lines? In an era of skyrocketing land values, will open spaces hosting these festivals eventually find it more lucrative to house something permanent?

A shakeout may be underway, at least among bigger musical festivals. With so many successful festivals seeking to book the same performers, fees go up, and so do ticket prices. How much can the market bear? Major festivals in the United Kingdom (widely considered the global leader in musical gatherings) and in places from Oregon (Sasquatch!) to Tennessee (Bonnaroo) have seen attendance decline and experienced difficulty in securing headliners. Perhaps the biggest harbinger of a festival problem was the colossal disaster of this year’s Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, which sold tickets costing $1,500 to $12,000 and delivered a grand total of zero performances to a hugely disgruntled audience.

Corporate consolidation is another factor to watch. Many of the bigger music and arts festivals are owned by just a couple of companies, making them vulnerable to economic winds. One of those companies is Goldenvoice, which is responsible for Coachella, Stagecoach, and Pasadena’s new Arroyo Seco Weekend. Goldenvoice producer Paul Tollett mused to The New Yorker recently about threats to Coachella from terrorism to botulism to “fake news.”

“There are big ships that go down over small things. You’re riding high, but one wrong thing and you’re voted off the island. It’s scary,” Tollett said.

Don’t forget the Listerine: Jerry Hernandez wears a garlic-shaped hat as he listens to a live band at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif. on July 24, 2004. Photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press.

When the shakeout comes to California, which festivals will endure? The fastest-growing events are mid-sized or boutique gatherings that allow people to immerse themselves in a very particular world for a time.

Among these are the High Sierra Music Festival, a family-friendly gathering (entertainment includes a morning kickball game) in tiny Quincy in Plumas County, and Desert Hearts, an electronic music gathering at the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation east of Temecula. The West Coast “transformational” festival scene—a movement that produces hippie parties with lots of costuming—is strong in California; its crown jewel festival, Lightning in a Bottle, is in tiny Bradley in Monterey County.

The state’s best festivals may be small, but they also have a strong sense of place. No matter how many Googlers move into San Francisco from faraway places, it’s hard to imagine San Francisco street events like the How Weird Street Faire ever shutting down.

“In a more globalized ethos,” says Eamon Armstrong, California-based creative director of Everfest, which produces the Fest300 list of the world’s best festivals, “there’s a desire to create your own smaller communities and assert your own identity.”

California’s most enduring festivals have been careful to develop a deep web of ties to their local communities, so they are aiding their hometowns every day, not just one weekend a year. For example, the Monterey Jazz Festival, now in its 60th year, has a robust education program that includes a student festival and summer camp.

But when it comes to engagement, it’s hard to top the Gilroy Garlic Festival, famous for its garlic shakes and garlic cook-off. The event’s proceeds help support over 140 local nonprofits, creating an incredibly diverse array of supporters. It provides a venue for local musicians and performers. It relies on more than 4,000 community volunteers. High school students often complete their community service requirements by working at the festival, and young women compete to win a college scholarship in the Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival Queen Pageant.

Sure, you could have seen Lady Gaga at Coachella this year. But she’s also playing L.A., San Francisco, and Sacramento in August alone. The only place you can find that much garlic is in Gilroy. And the taste lingers.

The post What California Festivals Need–More Garlic, Less Gaga appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In July, three people were found dead at the Hard Summer Music Festival near Los Angeles. During the two-day festival, which drew a record 147,000 attendees, an additional six people were hospitalized. Prior to these deaths, the Los Angeles Times counted 26 rave-related fatalities in the American Southwest since 2006. That doesn’t include non-fatal overdoses, a number which could easily reach triple digits if tallied across the country.

The reaction by lawmakers in cities like Los Angeles has been to clamp down on the events themselves, either banning them entirely or demanding strict control over the crowds. Promoters have instituted stricter security policies, while contending that at such large-scale events, drug use is inevitable. But the recent deaths suggest that these “solutions” haven’t solved anything.

Even though this latest tragedy is fresh, the problem is so familiar—and so unchanged—that a Los Angeles Times write-up of the Hard Summer deaths didn’t even bother to find a new doctor to talk to. They just recycled a quote from last year, in which a doctor frets that “there’s something about these events that leads to this rampant drug abuse,” but is unable to put his finger on why.

I’ve been going to raves for six years, and I don’t find the current approach to addressing the problem convincing. What I am convinced of is that it’s possible to have raves without any deaths at all.

Why has it been so hard to “fix” raves? Because we have not accurately identified the problem, which to my mind does not stem from kids disregarding their own lives, but rather from the fact that they never learned how to handle the spectacular, seductive freedom offered by raves.

Future Music Festival, Sydney, Australia, 2013.

The way I see it, the danger presented at raves stems from the fact that more than a few attendees are the products of our culture of over-protective parents. These ravers grew up highly supervised without the chance to be left to their own devices. Add to that the subtly influencing hand of teenage hormones and it’s almost surprising that there aren’t more tragedies.

Our society has become increasingly afraid of letting children run wild, and young kids today don’t have the same opportunities as previous generations to venture out into the world on their own, to learn how to handle the small freedoms of youth, to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. Instead, children are funneled from an early age into a myriad of adult-monitored activities such as team sports, school dances, and summer camps.

As teenagers, these hothouse kids begin to break out of their confinement. Raves are the perfect venue for youthful experimentation. Even the word “rave” sounds new and different from the “concerts” or “shows” of which adults hold fond memories.

Rave culture has always celebrated the illicit. The very definition of the word “rave,” meaning “to talk wildly or incoherently, as if one were delirious or insane” conjures intoxication. The first raves were born as a mutation of 1970s and ‘80s discotheques, the distinction being that raves were held in basements, lofts, and abandoned warehouses, rather than established venues. These parties often lasted for upwards of 10 straight hours, and people could bring in their own substances hassle free.

At raves, kids are given a shot at unmonitored social interaction, and the chance to finally partake in all sorts of risk-taking away from hovering parents. Unfortunately, these are not the baby-step risks of younger years. And without past lessons to guide them, it’s easy for bad choices to escalate without anyone realizing.

The question of rave safety is not a narrow one. In the past few years, the American electronic dance music (or EDM) scene has exploded, with longer, multi-day festival events routinely pulling in crowds of over 100,000 people. EDM has penetrated the heart of the musical world; it has its own category at the Grammys, and heavily influences the sound of contemporary pop music.

When I got into raving in 2010, I had always felt like a social outcast, but raves connected me with a group of likeminded people who I would never have met otherwise. It wasn’t long before I started going out more, getting into trouble with my parents, and having more fun than ever before.

Since then, the rave scene has become firmly cemented in the realm of popular culture. But that didn’t mean the end of drugs or danger. Even as security checks have gotten stricter, drugs have been present at every rave I’ve ever been to. And security checks haven’t prevented deaths.

The good news is that thoughtful alternative approaches have emerged. Some raves are starting to protect their attendees, often by bringing together people who understand how raves work and getting them to work together in the crowds.

The Bunk Police, a group now a few years old, built a strategy on the insight that most overdoes happen after kids at raves take mystery drugs they bought from strangers. Many of these drugs are actually harmful chemicals masquerading as popular club drugs.

The Bunk Police show up at events armed with tests kits that can tell whether a bag of powder is real MDMA, or one of the countless synthetic chemicals that have flooded the rave scene since the popularization of online drug dealing websites, such as the fabled “bath salts” scare of years past. Since their existence acknowledges the presence of drug use, festivals have tried to ban groups like The Bunk Police. Despite this, members hop fences, bribe security guards and risk jail time so that they can keep other people safe.

At Steez Promo’s Moonrise Festival in Baltimore, Maryland, volunteers make sure attendees stay safe while they’re partying. They check on people who look sick or zoned out, and hand out gum, water, and fruit. The best thing about the volunteers is that they’re also ravers, and can be considerably less intimidating than the security staff. In the event of an emergency, a volunteer can help you feel better, whereas a security guard might just detain you. When things get too rough for volunteers, Moonrise is also equipped with two medical tents near high traffic areas, staffed by a team of emergency medical technicians.

While unsupervised spaces like raves inevitably invite dangerous activity, they also provide a place for youths to grow, experiment, and flourish, free to make mistakes away from the judging eyes of adult society. Regardless of what the law says, the youth will continue to party on. The best thing we can do is to ensure the spaces they party in are as safe and nurturing as possible.

The post Why Is It So Hard to Stop Rave Overdoses? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.