McMillan: We started the festival as the Clarksville Jazz Festival 10 years ago. In its first season it was in my head. Then there were a couple of projects I wanted to do about as early as the '80s, and Blues Family Tree's first season was 1990, but both projects had their genesis at about the same time.
ADA: Were your plans with the Jazz Festival a reaction to the music community?
McMillan: Initially. I had done a lot of work with music and musicians prior to that. It was really frustrating because it was a closed market, a lot more so than it is now. I felt the reasons were issues of race and ownership of the music, and that kind of stuff. In the late '70s and into the early and mid-80s, you were hard-pressed to find black folks playing jazz and blues in the clubs around town, which seemed really strange to me. It seemed problematic. I had seen a lot of musicians, especially the older players who basically gave up on the hustle. I decided that one way to meet the mission of trying to encourage parity would be to start producing larger shows myself, and giving playing spots to people who I felt weren't getting a stage around town. Clarksville happened to be the neighborhood where I was living at the time. The story of the community has an interesting parallel to the history of jazz, in general, and to jazz in Austin. It's like this thing of freedom and struggle, evolving more, and then figuring out a way to survive that tries to maintain some integrity, but also acknowledges that things are very different than the way they started out.
ADA: This year the festival has a new name.
McMillan: I assumed it would ultimately move on to being called the Jazz Festival or the Austin Jazz Festival. I just felt there would be some kind of natural thing which would happen to let me know when it was time for the name to change. Our programming has expanded, not to just being two days at the park but to a general week of programming in places all around town. Although we started out very small on a parking lot, it's now the biggest block of jazz programming that happens in Austin during the year. So as not to confuse people not from Austin to explain where Clarksville is, we decided to change the name to the Austin Jazz Festival this year. We're also moving the location to Waterloo Park which seems more appropriate with the name change, and a real big booster of the city center. I think that makes sense. I think it's logical.
ADA: How difficult has all of this struggling with education been for you?
McMillan: It's been real, and incorporated into my life. After the first couple of years it became something I worked on at some level all year long -- and somehow the project crossed my mind every day whether that was in August or December. I assumed, which turned out not to be a good assumption, that I would be able to produce the festival for two or three years and people would get behind this and support it. So I assumed if I personally sacrificed and struggled for two or three years I would get my message out and we would be embraced. I thought that we would be able to get corporate underwriting, but what I found out was that trying to market cultural programs based in African American culture -- something that is not commercial music -- ends up being a hard sell for a small city like Austin. The non-profit arts organizations and commercial festivals that get a lot of support, well, very few of those are based in African American culture. Very few of those are paying attention to forms like jazz, blues, conjunto -- those kinds of things. A lot of people have asked me why I'm a promoter, and after 10 years I still haven't made it to this place where I think of myself as a promoter. I run an arts organization. I do educational programs. I do the same kind of work in arts and culture as I used to do directly for people when I was a very politically motivated social worker. I am trying to effect positive change in this community, and rather than making strong arguments about housing and welfare rights, which I used to do as a social worker, I think that kind of advocacy is just as important when you're dealing with art and culture.
ADA: Right, because you're dealing with the same kind of issues. Do you think that the festival will lose some of its identity because it's becoming mainstream?
McMillan: I don't see it as becoming commercial. The identity that separates it from the Clarksville neighborhood will be a change, in that our mission to educate folks about the history and value of the culture that was in Clarksville will change. My cultural education shift right now is doing what I can to educate folks that it's okay that jazz doesn't have the audience of Top 40 radio. It's very different, presenting this kind of music and expressive culture, very much like presenting the Lyric Opera or symphonic music, art music as it were. Austin is not New Orleans or some East Coast city. This community has got to step up to the plate and acknowledge the importance of this music and in the same ways that the symphony finds support. The new push is to find kindred souls -- and educate folks in Austin that there are kindred souls here that are world-class players. The jazz community will be enriched if we are able to continue to bring important voices from the outside to interact with this community to help to promote cultural exchange. There's gonna have to be subsidy at some level. One of my new clichés is European classical music doesn't sell a lot of records either, you know, but that music finds support in this community and in most other cities that consider themselves cosmopolitan cities, find support to make sure that programming happens and it's not tied to records sales and it's not tied to the 14-25 year old demographic that normally buys alternative rock and hip-hop. It's an important thing for the cultural life of the city. So while I am beating the drum, what I'm hoping to do is to help galvanize the jazz community so that the Creative Opportunity Orchestra finds support, so the fall jazz festival that happens in Zilker finds support. If the Performing Arts Center is bringing Wynton Marsalis through town, I want to see that the jazz community gets excited, and gets up for that and goes to see those shows. That is what is necessary for this project to sustain itself. So we have lots of advancement and growth and all of those things. But it's still a struggle.
ADA: The bottom line is you need financial support from the community to keep it going, and that means everything and nothing.
McMillan: And I don't know how much longer, you know, how long ol' Harold can keep on. I got mouths to feed. Things have changed.
ADA: When did you start the double-staged programming? And where did you get the idea to bring more diversity to the project?
McMillan: We started that about four years ago. I go around to other festivals and see what is happening, and one of the things that was very influential was the New Orleans Festival. They have eight to 10 stages and tents with all this kind of activity going on that is different. But within this whole multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary arts angle, I wanted to have a main stage that had this kind of straight ahead jazz and blues and then another stage that focused on the various kinds of world music that might be connected to jazz, or influenced by jazz. So that was the idea in the first couple of years.
ADA: There's not a world music festival here is there?
McMillan: Smaller ones, but nothing not like an annual celebration. So it's a jazz festival but our programming encompasses jazz, blues R&B, gospel and world music.
ADA: How has it come to pass that so many members of the Marsalis family have come through the festival and where have did you meet them?
McMillan: The year that I decided I wanted Ellis Marsalis to play was about five years ago. I had telephone conversations with people around him, but I never got to speak with him in person. I sent him faxes, and made him an offer by fax, then I went to the New Orleans Jazz Festival, looked him up, got a backstage pass, and waited for him to come off stage to talk to him. I gave him one of the program books, and said I want you to look at this -- this is what I'm doing. I want you to come to Austin. I said it wasn't a big festival, and that I wasn't a big promoter. Later when I called him up he was cool and said he'd do it. He was there at the very beginning of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and was very familiar with this process that I'm going through so he's turned out to be someone good to know. I've also met a couple of his sons and this year I'm bringing his youngest, Jason. Ellis is a great guy, smart, really into passing on culture, really into educating. Makes a point of being accessible. The Austin scene needs somebody like him. We don't have somebody like him, which is too bad.
ADA: Who are the most talented players here in your opinion?
McMillan: There's a circle of young guys, some of them came through UT undergraduate school, and then went to graduate school at Southwest Texas. Some of them went through Southwest Texas and studied down there with Keith Winking, and James Polk. The cats though, the cats that I have the most interest in because of their potential for doing things that will get attention and notice outside of Austin are people like Fred Sanders, Elias Haslanger, Brannen Temple, J.J. [Johnson], Edwin [Livingston], and Freddie Mendoza. A bunch of these guys are under 35, many of them under 30. But they're energetic and really doing good stuff. But that is not to say Tomás Ramirez, for instance, is not a talented player and composer, and musician and all of those things. He's been active in the scene here for like 20 years, but I'm more encouraged by these younger guys doing things. One of the things that has been a worry for me at least about the scene in Austin has been who the next generation is going to be, what they're going to look like, and how they're going to play. Where they are going to come from...and I kind of decided that it wasn't going to happen, so I am a bit more optimistic lately because these guys have been surfacing and doing really good things, like making records. Another thing that makes me feel better is that there are young players, many of them black, who are active in the scene. And in the recent past, there weren't a lot of black players in the Austin jazz and blues scene. This makes me think that maybe there is hope for a next generation of the Austin jazz scene.
