Festival’s 15th celebration includes All That Jazz, a new venture beginning Aug. 2

(The following Trumpeter column originally appeared in The Huntsville Forester on July 25, 2007.)

By Bruce Gowan

As a special feature of its 15th season, the Huntsville Festival of the Arts is launching a jazz festival in addition to its traditional summer program.

This inaugural festival will run for four days from Aug. 2 to 5. The lineup includes some of Canada’s finest jazz performers — the Giants of Jazz, with special guest Guido Basso, Hilario Duran & Havana Remembered, Molly Johnson and the return of festival favorite Oliver Jones.

In addition, jazz can be enjoyed in a number of venues throughout the community.

Expansion or alteration of a successful endeavor is always a challenge, and our decision to increase our performance schedule certainly required careful thought and planning.

Bruce Gowan is an active member of the Hunstsville Festival of the Arts board of directors.

Each year when the board of directors of the Huntsville Festival of the Arts meet to ponder the format for the coming summer season, the suggestion of an all-jazz lineup, similar to many other festivals across Canada, is inevitably tabled for discussion. The consensus opinion always determined that it is important to continue to offer a wide range of artistic options to hopefully satisfy the diverse tastes of the residents of and visitors to Huntsville and district.

This past year the board made the bold leap forward to pursue the option of a separate jazz festival, while keeping our traditional format in place.

With this decision in hand, our first task was to secure a financial partner for this venture. As TD Canada Trust is a major supporter of Canadian jazz festivals, our first initiative was to contact Will Gibson, a local manager for TD Canada Trust and a strong supporter of our festival.

When apprised of our plans Will set up a meeting at TD’s corporate offices for our pitch. We (Kareen Burns, myself and Rob Saunders) headed off to Toronto armed with a tentative outline of our first year’s program and lots of information relating to the history, financial performance, and community involvement of the Huntsville Festival of the Arts.

The meeting went well and we were pleased to hear that the head office of TD Canada Trust has been monitoring our festival for several years. We received enough encouragement to begin the process of planning the jazz festival (securing performers and theatre dates etc.) while we waited for the approval process to work its way through the committee decision tree at the bank.

In the spring we were pleased to get the news that TD had agreed to be a presenter for the 2007 Festival.

We are launching this new initiative with four keynote performances; however our vision for the future has no boundaries. With the continued support of our patrons and sponsors we would, in future years, like to expand this program to include numerous outdoor presentations and activities – perhaps even in our new downtown waterfront park.