Speaker 1: KBLA Talk fifteen eighty and I pose the question what happened,
what actually happened with the La Jazz Festival and being
completely transparent. A man in the studio before me this
morning is one of my closest friends. He is the
president and CEO of Bridge Street Incorporated. You know him
to be the former head of the La Federation of Labor,
a former council member for the tenth District. I worked
with him on numerous projects, both on stage as well
as backstage, with the Summer of Success in Baldwin Village
show when he was over that council district. He is
the visionary creator founder of the La Jazz Festival. Martin Ludlow, good.
Speaker 2: Morning, Good morning, Dominique. Thanks for having me here. Appreciate you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for coming in. I mean in these and
I've said many times on this show, I am on
the board of the La Jazz Festival Foundation. I've been
a big cheerleader and supporter of this project since I
first heard about it. I think you've been working on
it for about fifteen years. But these conversations are tough
because I keep on my professional hat and interview you
as is my job. But also, you're my friend, so
and I have a personal stake in this, so I
do my best to be as transparent about that as
possible through the conversation. Let's start with the shaker that
everyone received a little over a week ago that the
La Jazz Festival, which You've been working on for fifteen
years and I've been talking about for at least a
year or two, was canceled at the last minute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so parts of it were being canceled earlier than
you know, the opening night. And I think as folks
will remember, you know, first, let me just say heartbroken,
devastated in many ways. And we've had a lot of wins.
We've had a lot of wins. We've had a lot
of incredible productions, and it's it's always difficult to have
that big loss. And I was doing an interview yesterday
with La Times, and La Times reporters are sort of
asking me about, you know, how do you how do
you recover from this? How does your business recover? And I,
you know, I said to them, well, it's not easy.
But I look at a lot of you know, professional
coaches and folks who got to go out and they're
going to lose a game. No matter what they did
last year, what they did the previous seasons, they got
to come back out. They got to figure it out,
and they got to come back because I got to
I got another game coming up in front of them.
And it's easy, I think sometimes in this different world
to look at them just as oh, that's just sports,
that's just you know, sort of a fun game. But
it really is. Everybody's under a microscope. If you're you know,
monitoring a team that's you know, sort of beloved in
that community, and you end up losing a really big game,
it's really hard for folks to recover. And I'll never
forget some of the young kids that I coached and
mentored seeing them go through that tremendous emotional low if
they missed a pass or missed a touchdown or whatever.
And so I'm going through that myself right now. The
punchline is, we were getting very very close. We're about
thirty days out when we got notified that here's the
final decision by Public Safety, Law Enforcement, Fire County of LA.
And the final decision really was, here's what it's going
to cost. We've been meeting with you for four to
five months in inner governmental round tables. We've all been
trying to figure it out. I don't know. We spent
over a minute and a half on industry professionals, everything
from transit professionals, parking professionals, what we call people flow professionals,
how to ensure that a crowd is moving in and
out safely and quickly and efficiently. The idea of building
something on Dockwaller Beach, which was really the premiere moment
of the whole festival, that has never been done before,
ever in the history of the state of California. And
when we got right down to it, the numbers that
we were looking at that they were giving to us
to pay sort of government was staggering. And when you
added it all up between their costs and the cost
to build, what they were telling us we had to
build on the ground was really out of our reach,
and so we scrambled. I spent a good week reaching
out to millionaires, billionaires, just about everybody that I could
say that, look, this is gonna this is gonna fall
apart if we don't do something right now. And then
at the last moment, when I realized that we were
not going to get that savior, we weren't going to
get that last big influx of money. I pivoted, went
to AEG to see if we could get the Peacock
Theater for our Sunday show. They said yes. Went to
Greek Theater and see if we could get their facility
for the Saturday show. They said yes, And so we
thought at the last minute, let's save the weekend and
you know, sort of figure out a way to create
that vibe and still make it fun. But twenty four
hours before the announcement that we were going to completely postpone,
I got a call from two of our major headliners
saying that they were not coming with us over to
the pivoted location. And with those two exits, we lost
a major round of funders, two people and two organizations
in particular, and there was just no way to recover
at that point. So we had to really make the
hard decision, and that last weekend was really where all
of the resources were coming into to cover all of
the free shows that we were trying to build.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so let's backtrack a little bit for people
that you know, didn't follow every step of this but
are now caught up in the social media frenzy around
it LA Jazz Festival was is your vision to create
a festival that offered free shows, one free show in
the park in every council district, Jazz afterne.
Speaker 2: And beyond, all the way out to Marino Valley, Inglewood, Compton.
We were really bringing it to parks all over southern California.
Speaker 1: And also small restaurants and venues and in addition, convene
a roundtable of different festival organized nisers, like a panel
to do tours around the history of the beach and
access to the beach and you know, jazz itself. All
of this was part of something that was supposed to
run from the seventh through the twenty third of August.
And when you say the first time it's ever been done,
I hear people say, well, we have the l Park
Jazz Festival and the Guardina Jazz Festival and the Playboy
Jazz Festival. And so I think people don't are not understanding.
Speaker 3: What you mean. So let's start there.
Speaker 1: What were you trying to do and what would make
it should it happen in the future, would make it
the first because you know.
Speaker 2: I think some people have described it as the first
jazz festival in LA and that's farthest from the truth.
In fact, I remember one reporter that says, how does
it feel to be bringing jazz to LA Jazz has
been here for over one hundred years. We're not bringing
jazz to LA. But you know, it's really inspired by
the incredible international jazz festivals worldwide that really are sort
of like harvest season within those cities where they're major takeovers.
If you're in New Orleans for a New Orleans Jazz
festal for those two iconic weeks, it really is a
moment where everybody in the city lives and breathes around
the moment that all of the international tours are coming
in from around the world, because it is a unique,
significant city wide experience, the activations and so forth. Montrou
which is probably one of the most attractive of them,
very much on the beach, the cove setting. It is
all the restaurants are activated at night. If you haven't
had a chance to be there, it's not cheap to
get there, But if you ever get a chance to
get to that, you'll see the vision of what it
means to have a whole city takeover. Montreal, which actually
in Detroit have gotten over a million people to their
international jazz festivals. That's very different. You know. I was
very grateful for the support of a lot of the
local jazz festivals because the goal of this was to
try to lift the whole ecosystem and to try to
really put LA on the map from having a similar
sized festival that you'll see in other cities like a Newport,
Rhode Island, like a Cape Town, South Africa, and we
have not had something of that scale here in Los Angeles,
and that was the intent.
Speaker 1: And so and the other you know thing that I've
heard is why start so huge? You know, it was
maybe it was too big to stand up that quickly
that even though you've been working on it for fifteen years,
but at that scale.
Speaker 2: No. So the original idea was to put this on
Dargwaller Beach, and that was a very intentional effort to
really elevate the narrative of the African and African American
experience here in the United States, given that jazz was
founded by our ancestors that were brought into this country
across the ocean. First moment that we experienced it was
on the beach. We have been denied access to that beach,
whether it's the ability to purchase properties, whether it's the
you know, in some cases our properties that we own
were taken from us Bruce's Beach, Viceroy Hotel, Ebony Beach Club,
and to do that festival on the beach required a
vote of the California Coastal Commission. Since nineteen seventies, the
Coastal Act has essentially said, you can't privatize the beach.
Most of us think about that through the lens of
you can't privatize it to build a building. Well, that act,
that law takes it all the way to any level
of a privatization, whether it's a long term, permanent structure
or it's a part time event structure. We fell under
that category. To address that, we had to agree that
seventy five percent of our tickets would be free. The
only way to make the economics work on something that
was going to truly cost millions was to find a
path where you could still do paid tickets on the beach.
So that's when we started to build it out even
larger than the original vision, so that we were including
all of these different moments across southern California that would
essentially go into the formula of a major festival and
allowing us to keep seventy five percent of those tickets
for free. If the twenty five percent that you're charging
for or right there on the beach, the math absolutely works.
So that was when it really started to grow tremendously
to the size. And you know, I'd say it, we
came very very very close. By the way. We ended
up spending over a million, almost one point two million
on musicians, and I just want to put that out there. Yeah, yeah,
that part of the number that we spent is making
sure that both businesses and musicians were covered. There still are,
there's still work to be done, but just want to
put that out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to talk more about that when we
come forward. Martin Ludlow is here. What really happened to
the La Jazz Festival is our topic and that question
of you know what happens next? Who's holding the bag?
All that and your future plans are straight ahead on
KBLA talk fifteen to eighty and Martin Ludlow is here.
He was is the creator of the La Jazz Festival.
And of course when you first told me about it,
I did see your vision, this giant you know, Party
on the Beach, but also the socially innovative piece which
marks all of your work, whether it be in the
City Council, whether it be you know at the LA FED,
whether it be with Bridge Street where you produced all
of those concerts inside the prisons for Common and the
Labor Day music festivals that we did at Exposition Park,
and you know the Doc King event, a huge Doctor
King event in Memphis.
Speaker 3: I mean, you tend.
Speaker 1: To have a socially innovative component even to the entertainment stuff.
It's your sweet spot. And so I saw the vision.
I was very excited. I still see the vision and
also heartbroken that it seems to have crashed and burned.
You point out that you spent one point two million,
did you say you have already spent on musicians? Is
that deposits? That's just what you needed to pay them
to secure their attendance on those performance states.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that you know, was really the heart of
the festival. We had I think one hundred and almost
one hundred and sixty artists from eighteen nations that we
had confirmed, and I will acknowledge that there still are
a couple whose contracts were going back and forth didn't
get countersigned. They there's about twenty of them that did
not get their deposit, but the balance of them did.
And so I'm working in morning, noon and night to
you know, with the moment to your point of the
burn and crash, trying to pull the money together to
cover those deposits. And I will and that's an absolute
guarantee if those musicians are listening. But to the other
one hundred and thirty of them, you know, I've been
on the phone pretty much daily. I've got more calls
to make. The calls have been incredible. Almost every artist
that I've spoken to have said, listen, love the vision.
I'm hoping you'll allow to keep us, keep the deposit.
Said absolutely. And then third, can you put us on
the next show because we love working with you. And
that's been the majority of the calls, and so you know,
I'm heartened by that, grateful for it. And I think
that for hard working musicians who are living their life,
you know, it's it's tough. It is tough, and it's
you look at your working show to show to show
you live off of those shows. I think there was
not just I don't think there was just a passion
about getting paid. There's a passion to your point, about
the vision of the festival, and people felt a lot
of pride in the narrative. And it wasn't, you know,
just a solo it. I think I heard one musician
talking about his family remembering the days of the ink
well and having to be forced to go to the
ink well just to access the beach safely. And so
there was all kinds of stories like that that are
very passionate and made people feel differently about obviously the postponement.
Speaker 1: So and I want to be clear about this because
I'm seeing so much stuff on social media and even
some of these articles that are being published in what
I would call mainstream press that you don't get to
put those major artists, you don't get to put John
Lengend's name on a flyer without a deal with him.
It's not you can't just make that up. You'll be sued,
you'll be shut.
Speaker 2: Down, right, correct, correct?
Speaker 1: So I mean this idea that it was all just
a big phony thing that would never was never actually
going to happen, is to me that's based on a
lack of understanding of how the entertainment business works.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and I you know, I've sort of been
avoiding social media because it is brutal. But yeah, you
those artists were very much looking forward to being there.
And you know, anything I can say publicly is that
I apologize to everybody involved that we were not able
to pull it off. But it was painful down to
the last, you know, twenty four hours, and a lot
of those musicians were very much looking forward to being there.
And like I said, I've been on phones just almost
every day talking to different artists and and you know,
the conversations we were having with lapd La Fire, the
County of La those are very real conversations. And just again,
we had almost one hundred people working on the festival
for five months. That's that was a large payroll every
every month. You know those If anything, those people right
now are just really saddened because they were looking forward
to seeing the fruits of their labor finalized. But yeah,
we met as an executive team every Friday that That
conference call was massive. Our talent repture on the call.
I feel bad for those guys because obviously, you know,
a lot of relationships get impacted when a festival doesn't
go through or a tour doesn't go through. And there's
been a lot of tours and a lot of festivals
that canceled just over the last couple of months.
Speaker 1: I mean, the industry, the business is struggling in generals
that the economy. What do you.
Speaker 3: Attribute that to.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's all of the above. I'm not quite
sure why the Brooklyn Jazz Festival postponed or canceled. They
postpone or canceled on the Saturday before we did. There
have been a number of tours that were announced that
had postponed. There are some people tracking what they call
blue Dot fever, where consumers worldwide have been sort of
pushing back on price points. Consumers have been really reluctant
to spend very you know, they just economically for a
household to try to make a decision on how they're
going to spend that precious, you know, paycheck that they have,
it's it's a it's a real thing, and so you
have to be creative. I think what you saw in
World Cup was just incredible turnout, particularly for the free events.
Where they were free events, there were just tens of thousands,
if not millions, of people. So I think people consumers
worldwide are looking for a really good bargain for what
they're paying and if they can get really good entertainment,
really good cultural experiences where it doesn't cost their family anything,
there's a real interesting.
Speaker 1: And you're right, of course, but yeah, so so okay,
there's so many things to address here. When you talk
about we only have three minutes of news, traffic and
sports will continue on the other side. So let me
go here. For folks who say, well, this is this
is like a fire festival, what do you say to
those people?
Speaker 2: Well, there was one person that was quoted in the
paper and I really appreciate I don't know who it was,
and they were like, look, I've been in meetings with
this guy. I've done tours of sites. This was an
absolute commitment to creating a cultural moment that's free and open.
We were talking about opening up public beaches, public parks,
as you said, community restaurants. This was never about you know,
having some high end you know, consumers flying to some
destination location that really hadn't had any of the pre planning.
In fact, at the end, the ultimate decision of why
we didn't move forward is we knew we could not
afford what was being asked of us to ensure that
it would come off in the way that government was mandated.
That's when we stopped. We didn't stop when people are
already on site.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and honestly, you know, that's I want to get
to that after news, traffic and sports, like, what how
do we as as a community, as a government, as
public safety, you know, support entertainment and what's supposed to
be the entertainment capital or one of the entertainment capitals
of the world.
Speaker 3: And you know what the breakdown was there.
Speaker 1: But when we talk about the fire festival concept, there's
also receipts. It's not like you know, I mean, I
am not privy to all of them, but I know
because I've done business with you. There's contracts for everything,
there's blueprints for everything. I mean, it's this is not
a fly by the seat of your pants operation at all.
There is a paper trail.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely no. And and to your point, I mean
we went through you know, Look, I think most folks
can contact their local council member and the council member
will tell them no, Look that the team came by,
they did site visits. We chose the parks in the
fifteen council districts based on the desires of those council members.
Those interagency task force meetings that we held out at
Dockwyler Beach happened every month. There's probably sixty people involved,
representing everybody from the Coast Guard to lax to a city, fire, county, fire,
city police, County Sheriff, Caltrant, CHP, City of El Segundo,
City of Manhattan, Beach County, Department of Beaches and Harbors.
The roster was extensive, and we were meeting with them
every month and our blueprints, to your point, we're getting
more more intense and more significant and more detailed by
the month. Also, just all of the people that were involved,
you know, from talent managers to on the ground producers
to public safety experts. We had the former assistant police
chief of LAPD that was working with us between the departments,
and we had the former planning director of the City
of La working with all the planning departments, I mean,
the folks that do Coachella traffic. This was a unique
challenge to pull this off, and we brought in the
best in the world, and I think we were all
stunned at what we saw. At the last minute and
it was just no way to move forward and it
was it ended up being a postponeman and that's really it.
At the end of the day.
Speaker 1: I want to find out more about postponed till when
and you know, pull more receipts. La Jazz Festival is
our topic. And you're listening to KBLA Talk fifteen eight
welcome back. Indeed, Martin Ludlow is with me. He's the
CEO of Bridge Street in cored and the man behind
the visionary behind the La Jazz Festival, which was abruptly
canceled right before the opening day here in Lambert Park.
You know, a lot of us are heartbroken. You you
reference at the beginning of the conversation that shortly before
opening day, fire and L A. P. D. Come with
come with numbers. This is what we need and we're
talking dollar numbers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's it was not just that, it was
something that included what's called gross sales receipt tax estimate,
where you're being taxed on ticket sales, food and beverage,
expected sales, merchandise, expected sales and sponsorships, which you know,
to me was a shocker to see all of that
at that moment being asked to be prepaid.
Speaker 1: So you're being asked to prepay taxes on things you
may or may not sell, and.
Speaker 2: Then the event your estimate is off, we will refund
you the difference, or if there is a refund, or
it can go the other way. If we think you underestimated,
then it's going to go higher. So that was a
new one for me, and that was a new one
for our finance team. I think early on there was
a reference that you may have to pay grocery seat
sales tax, but it wasn't like there was a real
clear conversation about it. In fact, I think even in
the document that we got there, there's just still ambiguities
as to which agency was that on behalf of Was
that on behalf of the state, the city, the county,
So definitely some confusion on that for us. But the
sticker shock was was, you know, when we did the math,
when you between the LAPD deployment, which was going to
be almost eighty eight officers per day to get started
in the event that they needed to deploy more, that
would have all been on our tab. We had estimated
that we knew LAPED was going to have to deploy something,
but it was far lower than what we had expected.
And I don't again, I don't sit here blaming the
individual officers that were at the table working with us
day in and day out. I think they were earnestly
trying to figure it out. But I do kind of
question the environment that we were in. When you just
looked at a month earlier, there had been the quote
unquote takeover of Newport Beach and there were horse drawn
or horseback you know, uh police and you know, chasing
folks off of the beach. I think there was a
lot of sort of internal hysterian concern around that.
Speaker 1: The fire, although that wasn't exactly a jazz crowd, not.
Speaker 2: At all, right, right for us, it was just like
these you know, these are going to be uh just anyway.
I won't stereotype our crowd, but I know who was
buying the.
Speaker 3: Ticket and then fire.
Speaker 2: And then you know, for on that it was just
the escalation of really a couple of things. In LA
there is eight, uh sort of eight levels of what
you call medical plan based on the type of incident.
Eight is the highest. We were assessed a level seven
medical plan and a level seven seven medical plan not
only called for ambulances, doctors, nurses, paramedics, EMTs, but we
were also being required to build unprecedented levels of plastic
snap on groundcover that you could literally drive a truck on.
And it was like building a basketball court out on
the sand for a beach festival. And when you look
at our blueprints, they were just growing in terms of
the numbers. Our first estimate from a vendor that was
committed and had the level of equipment that we were
going to need and supplies, it was almost nine hundred
thousand dollars for that groundcover. We started negotiating and see
if we could pull it back. By the time we
got to the final number on that, when you add
the groundcover, you add all of the personnel and all
the equipment required for the Level seven, all the LAPD deployment,
all of the grocery seat sales tax estimates, we were
looking at one point six million dollars. That was never
even remove totally thought of in our budget. Did we
expect to pay for paramedics, Absolutely, we had them in
our budget. Did we expect that would be LAPD, Absolutely,
we had that in our budget. We did not expect
to see anything on.
Speaker 3: The level that we got back one point dollars one
point when you.
Speaker 2: Added between the public costs and the private costs required
to build the elements that there.
Speaker 1: How can we have any kind of entertainment event or
festival or anything a new thing that's not owned by
massive corporate interests, certainly anything black owned or independently produced
when you have unknown costs coming in at the final hour.
Speaker 3: Oh, by the way, we need.
Speaker 1: Another one point two to one point six million, How
how is that feasible if I'm not a giant live
nation level company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again I'll i'll, I mean.
Speaker 3: It can can it? Can it?
Speaker 1: Can?
Speaker 2: It?
Speaker 1: Could? It be blamed on you? Should you have no
own that it was going to be one point too?
Like what should you have done differently? And what should
we have done differently? Because to me it sounds like.
Speaker 3: The government.
Speaker 1: And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like
people were trying to shut it down. You got to
pay taxes in advance on merch that you may or
may not sell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's been more than a number of people that
feel like you. We were stunned. Our whole team was stunned.
But you know again, just want to say anybody sort
of tuned in on this. We absolutely had security and
we had actually put one hundred security officers in our budget.
We had LAPD. We expected there would be some LAPD
deployment that we would have to cover. We had paramedics.
But the escalation to.
Speaker 1: The level seven, we're going to have a bunch of
dead jazz fans.
Speaker 3: I mean, what is happening like?
Speaker 2: It was an emergency response before there was ever any emergency, right,
and that's what it hit is like. But anyway, your
specific question is, you know, could it you know, how
could it get done? And I think there's going to
be a post mortem after this. I know a number
of council members have reached out and they have indicated, Look,
if a developer was going to build a building, we
can tell them right now at the very beginning, how
what size, how many bedrooms? And there are codes, there's
a formula, and they're going to get you down to, hey,
three hundred dollars per square foot, four hundred dollars that
advance before you can get going here. It was a
complete opposite and that is really I think it's a
keen insight and I appreciate you even raising it.
Speaker 1: I mean to me, it's like, we are supposed to
be the entertainment capital of the world. How can we
have nice things if we don't all cooperate to build
nice things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I you know, so parts that I'm going to always,
you know, look back on and just be like, this
is year one. What did we learned from it? I
think it is going to take a will of government
to say this is important and we want to help,
and we want to figure out a way to do it.
It's not just about you know, telling us, hey, you
need this, you need that, you need this, no partner
with us. And you know, this really was more the
county driving it. The county Beaches and Harbors were in charge.
This is the process that they had just set up.
And ironically, this is a fact if you want to
do an event on the beach, if you want to
just rent a spot to do a family event or whatever,
they don't even allow you to start the process until
you're ninety days prior to the event. Think about that
we announced this six months prior to the event, and
they had to figure out how to change the portal
just so that we could even you know, begin to
start to upload some of the forums, and then finally
there really wasn't like a process. I think people were
trying to figure it out. And again, so when I
think about the individual people that were at that table
with us, I think most of them were seriously trying
to figure it out. But there wasn't like a manual.
There wasn't a blueprint. Hey pull out manual on how
to build a mega event on our coastline. And that
I think is an honest and I think all of
them at the table would agree. We were throwing stuff
out these guys every meeting. That is just like an
open ad hoc process. Just whatever it was on somebody's
mind that just fired it off and we would have
to respond to that, and all of a sudden you'd
see the price tag go up, and then there'd be
the next point you have to respond to that price
tager go up. And it was just like an open
feeding frenzy. And at some point, you know, whether you're
a restaurant owner, you're a grocery store owner, you got
a small shop or gas station or whatever, there's a
process for how you get permitted, and it's very clear
in this city county state have those, and I think
the final point is this was multi jurisdictional, as I
said at the beginning, So how do we learn from this?
How do we figure out how do you pull off
a multi jurisdictional experience that can be affordable to a
non mega corporation, the state, the county, the cities that
are involved. There's got to be a way to do it.
And that doesn't seem like rocket science.
Speaker 1: You said year one, so that means you're planning to
do it again.
Speaker 3: They're planning to try it again.
Speaker 2: Right now, I'm trying to figure out how do we
first cover still the debt that's on this one. We
still have a lot of debt and I'm working on
it literally every hour, and we have a lot of
reputational damage to fix. You know this is this has
been devastating to to everybody involved. It's not just me.
There are other people who have relationships impacted. And so
you know, right now, I think the interest by more
people that I'm hearing from on a daily basis is
don't let it go, don't let the vision go. And
that's that's where most of our mindset is. Now, how
do how do we how do we wrap this one.
Speaker 1: Up professional and when So when you say investment, you're
talking about all the people, hours of the people that
were hired, the musicians, deposits, equipment, like what other kinds.
Speaker 3: I know, you commissioned artwork.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we commissioned art We didn't We didn't buy really
much equipment. That mostly was coming through vendors that were
going to provide the equipment that you know, we were
working out agreements with. But yeah, it's just it's staff ours,
it's professional consultants. It's finalizing the remaining artist deposits and
then preparing for some sponsors who want their money back.
There are a couple of sponsors that have said, hey,
you didn't finish, so we need our money back, and
so we are refunding all ticket buyers, so anybody that
purchase tickets, all that money goes back. So there's a
lot to still unpack, clean up, and then I think
you get to the point of, Okay, now what have
we learned? Can you pull it off again?
Speaker 1: Can it Can it actually be done if you're not
a mega corporation and you know, yeah, I think that
would be a sad commentary on the state of the
entertainment capital if we cannot support an independent producer in
you know, in taking a new creating a new institution
and taking across the finish line.
Speaker 2: Well, I will say this was not easy for anybody.
Sure wasn't easy for us. It wasn't easy for government.
I do think, you know, there's some things that I'll
sort of save because I don't want to put them
out there just out of respect. But you know, if
there's a will, there's a way, and I know our
team had the will and we're looking for just folks
in power to really support that. The community supported it,
and you know that's always going to be the most
painful element of this thinking back to year one. It's
just the level of disappointment, level of frustration. But you know,
you have if an individual has an idea, has a vision,
has a dream, you go for it. It's not always
going to end pretty. And you got to be ready
for that side. And I'm obviously taking it, you know,
every day, but got to keep going.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like you are still considering putting this
thing on this.
Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely and you know, even as I said at
the beginning to interview, the conversations with the musicians first
and foremost have been the most heartwarming. Folks who live
here in LA love this idea, want to be involved,
and are really encouraging us to figure out how to
do it again next year. It's going to take key investors.
I think it's going to be very hard to get
corporate LA to come in and support, just given all
of the backlash that's happened from the postponement. Never saw
that coming, by the way, you know, it is a postpone,
and I think there was one TV news story that
went up immediately. It was very reckless. We were not
even planning to start building the site until literally tomorrow
for the big weekend, and they ran this story almost
a week and a half ago that there's nothing being built.
We'll take a look at our construction plans and what
we agreed with the county, the city, and the state.
We weren't even gonna start building until tomorrow. We by
the coastal permit. We had approval to be on site
Wednesday the nineteenth. We were negotiating to get access today
from Monday, and we still hadn't gotten it all done,
but we were getting real close.
Speaker 1: Just like like you know, I saw a story from
a magazine that said, well, we contacted people from jazz
festivals and they weren't booked for a panel, Like did
you call all of the artists and see if they
were booked for shows? And I only point that out
not just to be defending, but also when I'm encouraging
our KBLA delegation. When you see these stories, especially internet posts,
to you know, run it by the sniff test and
think about in your mind, you know, if this person
knows what they're talking about or what you know, if
what they're saying makes sense. Because there's a lot of
really wild stuff right now about the La Jazz Festival
on the Internet, and I think that we could do
ourselves a disservice if we just buy into it without
at least vetting.
Speaker 3: Martin Ludlow is here.
Speaker 1: The La Jazz Festival was is his project, and we
are telling the story of what really happened. Will continue
the conversation when we come forward on KBLA Talk fifteen eighty.
Ludlow is my guest. He's a creator of the La
Jazz Festival, and I'm hearing that maybe it'll happen in
the future. You know, what would you say, this is
a loaded question, but you know, well I don't even
know how to ask it. What would you what would
you do differently? I mean, some of these things are
beyond your control. Some you know, maybe there is a
protective factor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the first one is really really starting early,
earlier in terms of the formal launch. We you know,
most people don't know this, but we got very close
to launching the Ljazz Festival three times over the last
three years, and each time we got close it was
because we had a title sponsor that was almost at
that point of saying yes. And you know, for folks
out there that have launch festivals that have done big productions,
I think what I'm about to say will resonate. You
really can't dive in to the formal planning until you
have been funded. You know, you really do have to
have the seed money to start. And everybody starts off
with the same question in the sponsorship world, Yeah, who's performing?
They want to know who's performing, so and I think
most of the folks on who are listening, who are
in the entertainment or music world know that to be
pretty much a fact. If you're going to do a concert,
you're going to do a tour. You're gonna do a festival,
they always want you to start off with the talent.
We have the venue in terms of agreement by the state.
We've had that since twenty twenty one, but even in
that permit, it still requires that you have to start
working with all the local agencies. So there's all those
elements we couldn't get. We didn't get our title sponsor
confirmed until January and that was a moment of truth
where it was like should we go, should we pause?
Well we ever get this moment again, and you know,
I remember it was a gut check, you know, to
your point after fifteen years of trying to get this
going and then really getting hit with the pandemic which
set us back, and then coming out of the pandemic,
trying to get large brands like Coca Cola, Butdweiser and
some of the other big ones that traditionally get behind
big music festivals. Could you give them the confidence that
you were, you know, at that moment you could launch.
And we were blessed to have Airbnb come on. They
were a perfect match for us. Their whole mission is
trying to create those unique destination opportunities for people that
traditionally can't afford those. There are a lot of people
in the community that actually make money by putting their
home up on Airbnb. So for us, it was just
a perfect partnership. And when they said we're in, we
immediately launched because that was the seed money we needed
to start pulling in the artists, paying the deposits, and
actually starting to get all of the professionals that we
needed to begin meeting with the government. And we everybody
moved fast. And I think that's probably the biggest the
you know, the biggest reflection in terms of should we
have just held off and try to pull it another year.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, thank you for coming in and talking.
Speaker 1: I know, you know, initially there was you know, you've
got a balance between what the lawyers say and what
and what the comms people say, and I think the
public wanted to hear from you so far.
Speaker 2: I'm anxious to talk, I you know, I for anybody
that wants to interview, I'm just you know, I'm anxious
to talk because this this this vision. Maybe somebody else
will pull it off. Maybe it won't be me. I
don't know what the future has for me. I know,
we gotta we gotta finish up what we started. We
still got a lot of fees that we've got to cover.
That's gonna be me personally, and I am gonna do
everything I can to make that happen and then we
can talk about moving forward.
Speaker 1: So and anyone who bought a ticket getting refunded, they
should just go to the La Jazz Festival website.
Speaker 2: No through the process that they purchase it, that that
system will automatically start kicking it out. And yeah, but
they you know, people can go to the website or
go back to the platform where they purchase it and
start the refund. But even if you don't get the time,
if you don't have the time, it's gonna happen. And uh,
we're you know, our team is making sure that those
are the first things to get handled.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we just have a minute left here
and I still have a lot of things I would
ask you, but I'm going to hand you the mic
and ask you what you want to leave folks with.
It's certainly a huge burden for you your company. I
hope that you know you the company and the vision survive.
What would you leave us with this morning?
Speaker 2: You know you don't often see the ramifications of a
vision that doesn't work. This didn't work this year, and
the ramifications have been substantial. You know, I've really been
blown away by the level of media coverage, and I
know that when we were just a few weeks out
trying to figure out where we're going to get these
you know, final final approvals to dive in, we looked
at a report that showed our global media impressions and
it wasn't just social media, it was all media. We
were at five hundred million impressions and projected to hit
eight hundred million projections impressions by the weekend. And no
matter what happens in the future, that is something that
everybody that was involved, all the artists, all the professionals,
the event producers, everybody involved, the funders, the sponsors, take
a lot of pride in that because that is just
a statement that was you just can't you just don't
see that every day.
Speaker 1: Martin Ludlow, thank you. It's also a statement that there's
a desire for this thing to happen. We got to
leave it there. It is time to pass the mic.
I appreciate you coming in and sharing your story with
me this morning. You can find me at the Premium
Radio dp RI I m A and then radio and
of course you can go to the La Jazz Festival website.
Speaker 3: It's still functioning.
Speaker 1: Like my dad, the late Great and Mary Baraka used
to say, a person is either free or they are
not free. There can be no apprenticeship for freedom until tomorrow,
my kbl A delegation One Love