By Glenn Mosley/Northwest News Network
The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival is back for another year at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Now ten years after the death of its namesake, the festival, like many such celebrations, is challenged by a changing jazz industry.
For many years, Lionel Hampton would simply pick up the phone and get many of his friends and colleagues in jazz to make the wintry trip to north central Idaho to play jazz and talk to students for days at a time.
These days the graying of the jazz community, the artists and aficionadas alike, has changed things, and so, too, has the fact that February isn’t quite the slow month for work that it once was for jazz performers.
Steve Remington, the executive director of the Hampton festival, says artistic director John Clayton and everyone involved with the festival work hard to make and maintain contacts in the industry.
Continue reading “Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival returns to north central Idaho”
