Europe's Jazz Festivals: The Best Of Summer

The Umbrian capital of Perugia is never more glorious than on a long summer evening when its medieval streets are filled with the sound of jazz. After a day devoted to touring, swimming or an extremely long lunch, there's nothing like settling into Perugia's Arena Santa Giuliana to hear the endlessly inventive saxophonist Sonny Rollins deconstruct the melody of, say, Thelonious Monk's Crepuscule with Nellie — in just the kind of magical twilight that might have inspired it.

Monk's angular ballad could tumble out of Rollins' horn on July 17, when the star headlines the Umbria Jazz Festival. If it does, it'll be just one of the perfect, spontaneous moments dazzling jazz fans as Europe's summer festival season kicks off. Though jazz today lacks megastars like Miles Davis — who could draw big audiences and then disdainfully play with his back to them — there are more festivals in Europe than ever: an estimated 1,500 a year, according to Munich business consultant and jazz fan Peter Leimgruber. Some are small and resolutely pure, others gigantic, with programs full of rock and lite-jazz artists who make aficionados wonder why the promoters still call them jazz festivals. While Europe's love for improvised music remains strong, the festival business is getting tougher as competition stiffens, artists' fees rise, and government subsidies fade. Is this all too much of a good thing?

Jan Ole Otnes, the director of Europe's oldest jazz fest — the Molde Jazz Festival, in Norway — thinks it is. Just 10 years ago there were only four summer jazz festivals in the country; now there are more than a dozen, and Otnes says "a lot of them have lost their special character." Not his, of course: from July 14 to 19, singer Dianne Reeves, bassist Dave Holland, saxophonist Michael Brecker and a slew of artists from Norway's fertile jazz scene will descend on the small town on the North Atlantic, one of Europe's most serene spots for jazz.

Special character? The tiny French village of Marciac, just north of the Spanish border, has it in spades. And the Marciac Jazz Festival's director, Jean-Louis Guilhaumon, has made jazz into a true local industry in a region that's been losing jobs and population for decades. When the French Ministry of Education threatened last month to move Guilhaumon, a school principal who has fostered an ambitious jazz-education program in the village for decades, his supporters recruited the likes of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to take up his cause. The ministry wisely decided last week he could stay put.

Guilhaumon and Marciac will celebrate his reprieve in style. This year's festival (Aug. 1-15) has some of the biggest names in jazz, starting with pianist Oscar Peterson, one of the last of the great generation of classic jazz artists, as well as Marsalis, Pat Metheny and Diana Krall, the Canadian singer-pianist who is jazz's hottest property right now. With a lineup like that, it's no wonder the Marciac festival generates 75% of its €2.5 million budget from ticket sales. Not everyone can pull that off: in Bayonne in the French Basque Country, this year's jazz festival was canceled after local authorities cut their subsidies and other sponsorship dried up.