The International Association for Jazz Education, which represents 10,000 jazz educators in 56 countries, and includes hundreds at jazz programs at American colleges, has filed for bankruptcy.
The 40-year-old group’s troubles stem in part from miscalculations involving attendance at its annual conference, which had been scheduled to take place in Seattle in January 2009. In the past, the event attracted as many as 8,000 delegates. The conference, usually held in New York City, drew jazz educators from the approximately 325 college jazz programs in the United States, along with other delegates. They mingled with jazz-industry figures, while stars like Herbie Hancock performed.
When the event moved to Toronto this year, attendance dropped 40 percent. That decline continued a trend that began with a convention in New York four months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The drop this year, some critics of the group said, resulted from scheduling the meeting at the same time as the popular convention of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
Officials at the jazz-education group have admitted that, even with membership numbers healthy and rising, they struggled with expenses related to the conference and other association activities, such as a capital campaign and rapidly growing services for members. The services included support for jazz festivals, a journal, and teacher-training workshops and fellowships.
Singing the Blues
Alan S. Bergman, a well-known jazz-industry lawyer advising the group, said the collapse resulted from the convention’s poor performance and other financial disappointments, particularly a meager response to a capital campaign that cost far more to mount than it brought in. He said the jazz musicians who founded the association, and who dominated a volunteer board that rarely met, proved unable to handle the challenge of managing increasingly large budgets.
Among the members, concern grew when the group announced in March that Bill McFarlin, executive director since 1984, had left to take a job at another nonprofit arts organization. Chuck Owen, president of the association’s executive board and a professor of jazz studies at the University of South Florida, said Mr. McFarlin’s departure “took a lot of people by surprise,” as he had been “the face of the organization for so long and seen the association through phenomenal growth.”
At that time, Mr. Owen asked all members to contribute $25 to stave off debts, but that request drew only $12,000 from 250 contributors, while the debts mounted, reportedly to more than $1-millon. Mr. Bergman said the amount was hard to tally, but in any case was “not anything that a modest grant from any of a thousand foundations couldn’t cover.”
He said, however, that even though “this is the largest organization in the history of jazz, with a 40-year record of bringing hundreds of thousands of music teachers and students into its convention,” it had been unable to get support from any arts organization or government agency.
He dismissed as unfounded rumors in jazz circles that the collapse resulted from malfeasance. “We have no reason to believe there has been any irregularity or impropriety,” he said, “and nothing other than perhaps some poor business decisions.”
In a letter Mr. Owen sent to members, he said a bankruptcy trustee would divide the group’s assets among creditors and have the power “to examine IAJE’s financial records and mount an independent inquiry into the causes of its financial downfall.”