Days after wrapping the 25th anniversary of the Jazz in the Pines festival at the Idyllwild Arts Academy campus last weekend officials have announced the beloved event will go quiet in 2019.
Organizers are stepping back in order to reboot the festival, making changes that will benefit the arts school.
“We are not taking a hiatus to not come back,” Pamela Jordan, president of the Idyllwild Arts Foundation and head of the school at Idyllwild Arts Academy said in a phone interview. “We are dedicated to coming back in 2020 and will come back better than ever.”
The festival features a variety of performers playing various genres of jazz on four stages. At the main stage, fans sit on grass under billowing parachutes draped from the trees above. This year’s even included performances from the Pete Escovedo Orchestra as well as Idyllwild native Casey Abrams and his fellow former “American Idol” contestant Haley Reinhart.
While the Cranston Fire in late July forced evacuations of Idyllwild and surrounding mountain communities in the weeks leading up to the event, it didn’t impact the attendance of the festival this year, according to organizers. Over the last three years, Jazz in the Pines has attracted about 2,000 people over the three-day event annually.
Since the Idyllwild Arts Foundation, which also runs the school, took over Jazz in the Pines from the Associates of Idyllwild Arts Foundation — a separate non-profit organization with a similar name — in 2015, not many changes have been made to the event.
Jordan said one impetus for change is the time of year the festival takes place because the school’s popular summer program ends before Jazz in the Pines so there are no students or teachers and no academy activities happening on campus.
“I am not saying the time of year is wrong, but we need to think about the festival’s relationship to the school,” she said. “We have nearly 100 jazz students on our campus during the summer program and none of them have the benefit of this festival or the professional musicians who come to play.”
Jordan said events such as masterclasses or special activities in the summer program with some of the artists that come to the festival are among ideas on the table.
Since planning the festival is a massive undertaking that takes a year to pull together, time is needed to figure out what changes need to be made before implementing them.
“We need to give ourselves a break from doing that so we can involve people and have conversations about how to connect the school more to the event,” Jordan said. The objective is to align Jazz in the Pines with us as an educational institution and for the festival to have a greater impact on our students.”
