The 2009 Gulf Coast Ethnic and Heritage Jazz Festival wrapped up in downtown Mobile last week, and organizers say the annual event pulled off a strong showing despite a shoestring budget and a last-minute venue change caused by rain. It was the kind of week that tests a festival to its foundation — storm water chasing performers off the square, a new venue secured on short notice, and a budget that left no room for anything to go wrong. Instead, festival director Creola Ruffin said, the music never stopped, and the audiences who came out found a festival that felt as polished as editions staged with far more money.
The festival ran this year on a small grant from the Mobile County Commission, public donations and in-kind support from the City of Mobile. Even with limited funding, organizers were able to book strong performing talent at more affordable rates than in previous years, a bit of good fortune Ruffin credits to the festival’s growing reputation among Gulf Coast musicians. What the event lacked in marketing dollars it made up for in word of mouth, and the crowds that followed the music from venue to venue suggested the festival’s audience has continued to deepen even in a tight economy.
Rain forced the festival’s outdoor programming out of Bienville Square and indoors to Club 351 on Water Street in downtown Mobile. Ruffin said the venue’s high ceilings and lighting still gave the event an open, outdoor feel, and the move — disruptive on paper — ended up suiting the music well. A festival that exists to honor jazz history found itself performing one of jazz’s oldest tricks: making the room work, whatever the room happens to be.
The festival’s slate of events, including a Night of Poetry, a Jazz Student Workshop, the Jazz in Bienville performances and a Jazz Jam session, went on as planned. That completeness mattered to organizers, because each piece of the schedule serves a different part of the festival’s mission — the poetry night ties the music to the spoken-word tradition that grew up alongside it, the student workshop puts young players in front of working professionals, and the jam session closes the week the way jam sessions have closed jazz weeks for a century, with musicians trading choruses into the night.
A festival rooted in volunteers
The Gulf Coast Ethnic and Heritage Jazz Festival was founded on New Year’s Eve of 1998 in New Orleans and became a registered nonprofit in April 1999, with a mission of preserving jazz music for future generations. Ruffin has led the organization since its earliest days, when the group produced its first fundraiser, a boat ride called “Jazz on the River,” with sponsorship help from Harrah’s Casino ahead of its New Orleans grand opening that same year. The organization’s birth on the New Orleans waterfront and its growth on Mobile’s is a story the Gulf Coast tells about itself: the music, like the people, has always moved back and forth across the state line without much regard for the border.
Ruffin credited the City of Mobile’s events office and Elizabeth Sanders, who now works with the Downtown Mobile Alliance, with helping the fledgling festival get off the ground in its first year. Getting a new cultural event established requires more than talent and ambition — it requires someone on the city side willing to answer the phone, help with permits and logistics, and vouch for the organization when sponsors ask whether the festival will actually happen. That early institutional support, Ruffin says, made the difference between a one-time event and an annual tradition.
Local volunteers and arts organizations, including the Mystic Order of Jazz Obsessed, continue to support the event each August. The volunteer corps handles the unglamorous work that keeps a festival alive — hauling equipment, staffing gates, running errands between venues — and the Mystic Order’s involvement ties the festival into Mobile’s broader network of jazz lovers, an organization devoted to keeping the music visible in the city year-round. August is a demanding month for outdoor work on the Gulf Coast, and the people who show up to do it do so out of genuine devotion to the music.
The festival currently operates entirely through a working board and volunteers, with no paid staff. Ruffin said long-term growth depends on that volunteer commitment, but she is candid about its limits: a salaried director along with at least two additional staff members could help the organization pursue grants, donations and sponsorships year-round rather than scrambling in the months before each festival. The current model means the festival’s institutional memory lives in a handful of heads, and every funding deadline, grant application and sponsorship renewal competes for attention with the actual work of staging the event. Professionalizing the back office, she argues, is not a luxury — it is what would let the festival plan three years ahead instead of three months.
New talent, New Orleans roots
Among this year’s standout performers was jazz artist Art Sherrod Jr., who played the festival for the first time in 2009. Sherrod’s appearance fit the festival’s pattern of pairing established Gulf Coast and national names with artists the Mobile audience may be hearing for the first time, and organizers count those introductions among the event’s most important contributions. For a young saxophonist or a touring sideman, a festival slot in Mobile means a new audience, and for Mobile audiences it means the chance to say they heard a rising artist before the rest of the country did.
Ruffin said she holds a particular appreciation for New Orleans-style jazz and the musicians who bring that sound to Mobile audiences. She cited past festival performers such as Trombone Shorty, Kent Jordan, Marlon Jordan and Donald Harrison as examples of the high-energy sets the festival aims to deliver. The list reads like a family tree of modern New Orleans jazz — the Jordan brothers carrying the city’s trumpet lineage, Harrison blending straight-ahead tradition with modern harmonies, and Trombone Shorty fusing brass-band bones with contemporary fire. Booking those artists is a statement of identity: this is a Gulf Coast festival that knows where its music comes from.
That New Orleans connection runs deeper than booking lists. The musical highway between the two Gulf cities has carried musicians, styles and audiences for more than a century, and Mobile’s own place in Gulf Coast cultural history — the home of the original Mardi Gras celebration in the United States — gives the festival a natural constituency for music born in carnival culture. When the rain moved the 2009 festival indoors, the New Orleans-rooted music simply moved with it, the way it has moved through every venue and every city along the coast.
Organizers say the festival remains open to volunteers who can help with printing, communications and grant writing ahead of next year’s event. The specific needs are a window into how the festival actually runs: printed programs, press outreach and funding applications are the three fronts where extra hands would do the most good. Those interested in volunteering or supporting the Gulf Coast Ethnic and Heritage Jazz Festival can reach the organization directly through its office.
For Ruffin, the measure of the 2009 festival is not the budget or the weather but the continuity. A festival born on a New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, nursed through its infancy by Mobile volunteers and now in its second decade, survived another August of Gulf Coast uncertainty and came out playing. Next year, organizers hope, the rain will stay off Bienville Square — but either way, the music will go on.
Downtown Mobile as a jazz stage
The festival’s center of gravity in downtown Mobile is part of its identity. Bienville Square, the historic park framed by live oaks a block from the city’s commercial core, has long served as one of downtown’s signature gathering places, and the Water Street corridor where the rain-driven 2009 edition landed sits steps from the riverfront that first brought jazz musicians and audiences together along the Gulf. Moving between a park and a club in the span of a single festival is the kind of thing only a downtown district can absorb — restaurants, bars and foot traffic all within walking distance — and organizers note that the venue scramble inadvertently showcased more of the city center than a typical year does.
The Jazz Student Workshop deserves particular mention among the week’s events. Every festival that lasts must eventually answer the question of who comes next, and the workshop is the Gulf Coast festival’s answer: young musicians from area schools get instruction, ensemble experience and the chance to hear professionals work up close. Several past festival volunteers and supporters began as students of the music themselves, and organizers see the workshop as the seedbed for the next generation of players who will keep jazz alive along the northern Gulf Coast long after the current board has passed the torch.
As the festival looks toward its next edition, the needs are the same ones Ruffin has articulated all along — more volunteers, a professionalized staff and the year-round funding discipline that stability requires. The mission, preserving jazz for future generations, has not changed since the nonprofit papers were filed in April 1999. What has changed is everything around it: a bigger audience, a deeper talent pipeline and a Mobile downtown that has grown up around the festival’s August home.