For Jazz Festival Impresario, Deals at a Dizzy Pace

Charlie Fishman, executive producer of the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, was Dizzie Gillespie's personal manager back in the day. (By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)

Here at "out-of-control center," in a basement office in Adams Morgan, the most optimistic man in Washington is fielding phone calls in both ears.

"Shhh --" Charlie Fishman be gins as he hangs up a phone and says a word that can't be printed here. "We're missing something with Paquito that I can't find." Swearing three more times in a row, he rustles through papers. "Ding, ding, ding. No ."

An unlit Marlboro hangs from Fishman's mouth. A Ugandan skullcap covers his cropped white hair. Holding up his jeans is Dizzy Gillespie's belt buckle, blaring JAZZ in bright brass letters. In this cluttered space on Mozart Place, with a wall-size photo of Diz looking on, Fishman has been pulling together one of the District's most ambitious jazz festivals ever, which kicked off last night and runs through Sunday. Now in its second year, the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival has big names such as Paquito D'Rivera, Roy Haynes, Randy Weston, Dr. John, John Scofield with Mavis Staples, Poncho Sanchez and Roy Hargrove playing at venues from the Kennedy Center to the Mall to blues spots on U Street and in Anacostia.

"That's not it!" Fishman growls, shoving aside more papers and launching another four-letter diatribe.

"Charlie," interrupts his business manager, Stacey Williams. "Who's dealing with Ticketmaster? The ticket prices are wrong."

Not good. Tickets for the NEA Jazz Masters Concert at the Lincoln Theatre, which should be selling for $46 and $36, are selling instead for $26 and $36.

"Did you get Darlene?" Fishman asks, worried. Voice mail, Williams tells him. "Then call Ticketmaster," he barks, his voice smoky and graveled.

His white hair and small, wiry stature suggest he's paid his dues. So does his vocabulary -- he says "cat" a lot, as in "He's kind of a heavyset cat," or "Who's that cat?" -- and his résumé: He was Gillespie's personal manager for the last years of the legendary trumpeter's life. He ran a jazz club in Jerusalem, was a cultural adviser to the Israeli government, won a Grammy for producing "Dizzy Gillespie and United Nations Orchestra," composed a piece for "The Winter in Lisbon," to which the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater dances a ballet. Fishman has produced tours and concerts all around the globe. He has lived in Washington for 30 years, has three children, one grandchild and, after a recent remarriage, a 22-month-old son whose "Water Symphony" toy now awaits unpacking from the box in front of Fishman's desk.

The city of Ellington's birth has gone begging for live jazz and an audience to love it, so the music's champions have hailed the festival and its lineup as "compelling" (the Smithsonian's John Edward Hasse) and "important" and "amazing" (WPFW's Rusty Hassan). Gillespie biographer Donald L. Maggin calls Fishman's concert-conceiving skills as "absolutely brilliant."

But two weeks before the festival's gala curtain-raiser, the realities of Fishman's idealism are pushing perilously close to the deadline. Fishman is barely sleeping -- and starting to swear a whole lot more.

"Abba," he says his 35-year-old daughter scolds him, "you already have your legacy. Why are you doing this? You've done enough in your life."

"I'm doing it," he says he answers, "because I love the music. Jazz is our indigenous art form, and it's important for our nation's capital to showcase that."