Carnival of Soul

GOSHEN — Like so many other organizations around the nation, Litchfield Performing Arts’ plans were waylaid by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 25th annual Litchfield Jazz Festival, held for years the first weekend of August and more recently in July, was in jeopardy.

But it all worked out, albeit very differently than past years, and the experience has made founder Vita Muir look to the future with excitement.

“I think we’ll do things we haven’t done before,” she said. “We’ll have a nice party … maybe we’ll do more virtual concerts. Anything’s possible.”

The festival’s venue for this year, The Fredrick Gunn School in Washington, wasn’t sure it wanted to play host again this year because of the virus. In the past, the traditional and popular event, a weekend of food, parties and live music, has been held at the Kent School and the Goshen Fairgrounds, rain or shine, attracting hundreds of music fans from around Connecticut and the tri-state area. The festival has featured performances by Dave Brubeck, Eartha Kitt, Lizz Wright and Diana Krall. It also has given up-and-coming musicians their first chance to perform. Krall was one of them. “When she performed for us, it was her first time in the United States,” Muir said.

The jazz event is preceded by the Litchfield Jazz Camp, a month of classes, workshops and individual instruction, culminating with the students performing at the festival. The camp has grown in popularity since it started 24 years ago, mainly because of the professional teaching musicians who run the classes.

The camp’s future, at least for this year, was also in question.

But Muir was undaunted.

“For us, it was about survival,” she said, speaking from the LPA’s headquarters in a repurposed mill building shared with artist Danielle Mailer and her husband, Peter McEachern. “We are a nonprofit, and our staff is very small. We wanted to keep our people employed, and we wanted to find a way to do the camp and the festival.”

Muir’s LPA applied for and received small amounts of funding from organizations including the Small Business Administration and the New England Arts Association, but there was little money to hire the performers and teachers for the festival and camp.

“I sat for a little while and (sulked) about it,” Muir said. “We knew the jazz fest just wasn’t going to happen, at least not in the same way. We started thinking of different scenarios.”

Albert Rivera, Muir’s partner in planning and executing the camp each year, and Teagan Ryan, Muir’s director of development, joined Muir in brainstorming. The jazz camp became a two-week virtual experience, and was very successful, Muir said. “Instead of four weeks, we offered two one-week sessions, plus an extra week for a smaller group of students,” she said. “We asked for full registration in January, and instead of the usual four or five students, we got 40. It was great.

“To make the camp feel more real for the kids, we had live concerts as well as the classes,” Muir said. “The third week, kids that were really motivated were asked if they wanted to do another session, and they were happy to do that.”

Meanwhile, she, Ryan and Rivera tried different ideas, always focused on an outdoor event with live music. “The Gunnery was just nervous, so we realized that just wasn’t going to work,” Muir said. “I thought about renting a venue, maybe a bed-and-breakfast type place, with music on the lawn, but that didn’t work. So we finally focused on presenting the jazz festival virtually. It would be the only thing we’d do, but the musicians could play together.”

Musicians around the country have suffered under COVID-19. Concerts big and small, classes, club dates and other performances fell like dominoes, as states including Connecticut began to shut down in March. And while Connecticut slowly is reopening, performance venues and outdoor events are unlikely to resume until 2021. The Warner Theatre in Torrington, with other major theaters in Connecticut such as the Palace in Waterbury, the Bushnell in Hartford and the Shubert in New Haven, are lobbying for a federal act, Save Our Stages, which would provide $10 billion to such organizations nationwide until the pandemic passes.

Virtual concerts and shows being presented live online, and YouTube has become a place to find that live music, Muir said. So, at the urging of Gunnery staff member Jessie Perkins, she reached out to Telefunken Elektroakustik in South Windsor The sound production company is a longtime sponsor, donating dollars, equipment and expertise. The owners offered their new Telefunken Soundstage, complete with lights, staging, streaming, sound and staff, all inside a repurposed factory building with plenty of space, as a venue for live shows online.

“All they asked for was money to pay the technicians to run the show,” Muir said, adding that the online concert drew 20,000 unique viewers to enjoy the six-hour festival, streaming on YouTube.

“It was simply fantastic,” she said. “In between sets, we had artists’ talks on a side stage. Telefunken set up director’s chairs, and I had big (containers) of flowers. … It was wonderful.”

The experience left Muir reflecting on the past, and wondering what the future of the festival will be. She’s also thinking about her legacy and what she wants to pass on to Rivera and Ryan, who she believes will keep the festival and camp going, well into the future.

“The virtual festival was a great start,” she said. “We may still do outdoor concert, but we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. The virus runs the show.

“Instead of all this labor-intensive event planning and work, maybe we’ll have a gala night with a party,” Muir said. “The next day, we could have the kids from the Litchfield Jazz Camp play, and they we’ll do online concerts. Some of the festival could be ticketed, so people could enjoy part of it. This year, we had a little reminder text on the bottom of the screen during the concerts, and people made donations. We were able to pay the Telefunken technicials with those donations.”

“It makes sense to do it online, because that’s where people are getting a lot of their entertainment,” she said.

Every summer, Muir goes through the August issue of DownBeat magazine, which lists its top picks for best band, best saxophone player, best vocalist, and many other categories. Using a yellow highlighter, she marks the names of those musicians who have performed at her festival over the years, or were past jazz campers. It’s one of the things of which she’s most proud, knowing that in some way, large or small, the jazz festival played a part in their musical career.

“We’ve been looking at a succession and sustainable plan for the jazz festival and the camp,” she said. “I’ll do this ’til I’m not useful. The next generation will take it over.”

To learn more about the jazz festival and the jazz camp, visit https://litchfieldperformingarts.org/ or call 860-361-6285.