Vancouver’s signature Wine and Jazz Festival will not take place this summer. It’ll be back, better and bigger in 2020, according to founder and artistic director Michael Kissinger.
Kissinger, 58, said he suffered a health crisis last winter and spring that resulted in a stroke. He has fully recovered since then, he said, but he and his team ultimately decided to cancel this year’s festival and use the down time to “rethink, retool and reboot” the whole event, he said.
Dates for 2020 have already been set for Aug. 20, 21, 22 and 23, according to the Wine and Jazz Festival website. That four-day stretch is longer than what’s always been a three-day jazz festival. Kissinger said he’d love to see an opening night in the new Vancouver Waterfront Park, before moving the rest of the festival back to Esther Short Park as always.
He’s even considering rebranding the whole effort as the “Northwest Wine and Jazz Festival,” and adding different events and dates in other local cities — perhaps even Portland and Seattle, he said. As many as 65 percent of the event’s audience are visitors from outside the area, he said, so the Vancouver name is not essential.
“Vancouver is our home, but this really is a regional event, a national event, an international event,” he said. “We’ve had 20 years of tremendous festivals and concerts. Let’s use this year as a time for reflection, rebooting, restructuring for the future.”
As many as 15,000 fans have shown up annually for the late-August weekend event, which has been produced by Kissinger’s nonprofit agency, called Bravo! Vancouver, with support from the city and many private sponsors. Kissinger said all those sponsors are still on board, despite his decision to cancel. So is the talent, he said.
The Vancouver Wine and Jazz Festival has featured both local and world-famous jazz, blues and soul stars — from Mavis Staples and Dianne Schuur through John Mayall and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Northwest Jazz Profile magazine praised the event as “one of the most important jazz festivals on the West Coast.”
Walking miracle
Kissinger, a clarinetist and conductor as well as a concert promoter, said he suffered “an unusually terrible virus” last winter, resulting in episodes of vertigo that repeatedly landed him in the hospital. At the end of March, he suffered a stroke.
“I couldn’t move my right arm, I couldn’t move my whole right side, I couldn’t speak certain words,” he said. “I remember lying there thinking, ‘God, I know I can’t make a deal with you. You already know what’s in my heart and mind…. If I can’t walk, that’s still OK, just as long as I can still be a musician. But if I can’t be a musician, just take me right now. If I’m not a musician, I’m not Michael.'”
The next day he woke up and “everything was fine,” he said. Physical and occupational therapists sent him on his way. But one physician who checked his charts told him he should have died or been severely disabled. “You’re kind of a walking miracle,” Kissinger heard.
That’s how he feels now. “I am grateful,” Kissinger said. “I am a miracle.”
Gravelly launch
The Wine and Jazz Festival was an unlikely startup for downtown Vancouver when Kissinger launched it in 1998. That was before Esther Short Park had been renovated and improved with today’s big stage and luxurious lawn.
“I was on the design committee for the new Esther Short Park before anything was happening downtown,” Kissinger told The Columbian in 2017. “I mean, nothing was happening. Nothing.”
He was eager to change that. He’d been mightily impressed when he played in the famous Spoleto music and arts festival — the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) — which is hosted by a little Italian town, he said.
“It’s a beautiful cultural festival for all of Europe. I remember thinking, ‘It would be so cool to create something like this at home.’ The seed was planted,” he said.
Growing that seed took Kissinger a few years of market research and planning, but city officials took almost no time to climb aboard, he said. All were keen to launch something new and exciting downtown. So even when planned park renovations were delayed, the first Vancouver Wine & Jazz Festival went ahead in August 1998 — with headliner Chick Corea, a piano superstar, playing in an undeveloped gravel lot alongside the park to uncomfortable but excited jazz lovers.
In the years since, Kissinger said, the Wine and Jazz Festival “has grown and grown and grown,” featuring well over 200 musical acts in all, local artists “and so much excellent wine.”
Quiet weekend?
Esther Short Park looks likely to be pretty quiet on the weekend of Aug. 23-25 this year, according to Sean Douglas, Vancouver park operations assistant. As quiet as the park ever gets in summertime, that is.
“No one knew it was available until now,” he said, “and I don’t see a giant fenced event moving in at this point. Not this late in the game.”
Douglas said the Wine and Jazz Festival had followed the routine process of reserving the park for this year’s dates and holding meetings with public agencies to arrange nuts and bolts like traffic, food service and sanitation. But the final bill for the whole event was not yet due, he said, when the city got word that cancellation was likely.
It took Kissinger a little while to relent about that, he said. “My board and staff said let’s take a year off and I said, ‘No, no, full steam ahead,'” Kissinger said.
The festival has already filed what’s called an “interest form” for those 2020 dates, Douglas said. “We always give returning events the first opportunity, and this one has become a staple, like the Recycled Arts Fest,” he said.
He noted that Esther Short Park has turned into Vancouver’s busy entertainment center, hosting many ticketed events as well as free noontime and Thursday night concerts — not to mention the growing weekend farmers market. All of which is great, he said, but it sure is tough on the grass.
“The turf gets a lot of workout,” he said. “This gives the park a chance to be a park.”
