For Jazz Festival Impresario, Deals at a Dizzy Pace

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006

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."

"And," Williams adds, listening as Fishman tugs on the small Gillespie-replica trumpet he wears around his neck, "I did not follow you out on this limb for nothing."

* * *

Fishman was "born, bageled and cream-cheesed in Brooklyn," where his parents started him on piano at age 6. He hated practicing and spent his time playing stickball in the street and dreaming he'd play for the Dodgers one day. So his teacher and parents introduced him to jazz -- and it worked: He decided to major in music at New York University, but his parents disagreed. Music wasn't "a proper career for their son," Fishman says. He dutifully studied business management, realized he would never become one of the world's great musicians, and set his ambitions on becoming a great producer.

In 1972 he met Gillespie, and by 1978 he was persuading the trumpeter to appear in concert with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert, which Lalo Schifrin conducted, didn't happen until 1985, at which point, Maggin writes in his biography "Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie," Fishman's "organizational skills, deep understanding of jazz, and quiet persistence . . . impressed Dizzy . . . and he put Fishman in charge of his business affairs."

They worked together until Gillespie's death in 1993, and the association earned Fishman contacts, credentials and self-promoting layers of hubris and charm. Around Washington, he's known for name-dropping, nonstop talking, a squirrelly intensity and, sometimes, being insistently annoying. This all makes him liked, loved and loathed.

Says John Edward Hasse, the curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History: "Jazz is now widely recognized as the most accomplished, innovative, influential and consequential music that this nation has produced, so it's ironic that Washington -- with its jazz heritage and a very large African American population and lots of other people who like or love the music -- it's ironic that for all these years there wasn't a major festival. I say kudos to Charlie Fishman for starting this, and I hope that it grows and that it can continue indefinitely and outlive us all."

* * *

Last year's festival came about with the Atlas-like heavy lifting of two full-time employees -- Fishman and Williams.

This year the festival has a third full-timer in Eli Sperling, a 22-year-old recent college graduate whose father is one of Fishman's best friends. Sperling's official title is production assistant, and right now he's serving as chauffeur: Fishman's car battery died, which complicates the life of any impresario racing between venues to check the setup.

At the Inter-American Development Bank, whose Cultural Center is hosting an invitation-only Rivera concert (the trumpeter's public concert is tomorrow), coordinator Anne Vena leads the trio through a walk-through and discussion of how every guest must be photo-ID'ed, and how many instruments they'll squeeze onto the stage, and who's in charge of bringing gels for the lights, and which hotel the musicians will be staying in, and where will the refreshments be delivered, and when? Then Vena brings up the Na'rimbo Mariachi Band concert they'll be hosting for students from D.C. schools.

"How old?" Vena asks.

"Third- and fourth-graders," Fishman tells her.

"Oh!" Vena looks surprised. "That's young."

"Young and frisky," Williams says brightly.

"Obviously they won't need photo IDs," Vena says, 9-year-olds being an unlikely security threat.

"You never know," Fishman warns, deadpan. "They could have a little castrated midget."

Two hours later Fishman is back in his office, moving aside boxes and asking Sperling to pull chairs around his desk. In 10 minutes he's got a staff meeting with his part-time partners at JBV Production and his logistics expert. He has not stopped for lunch.

So it goes when one man drives a five-day jazz festival in the city where the only all-jazz radio station went dark in 1997 -- to make room for C-SPAN's all-talk radio.

"We used to have the old DC Jazz Festival," says Willard Jenkins, a journalist, broadcaster and programmer at WPFW-FM, the radio station now most devoted to jazz programming, "and the District Curators had their Fourth of July festival for years, but Charlie Fishman -- I have to applaud his effort because he seems to have made a real commitment to fostering a real community-wide event, and that in itself is different from other efforts."

A few afternoons later, Sperling walks back into the headquarters of the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival with a big, empty black bag.

"How'd you do?" Fishman asks him eagerly. He had sent Sperling out to U Street, to hand out fliers and posters of the Jazz Festival.

"They cleaned out my fliers!" Sperling crows. " Everyone wanted stuff."

Fishman beams. This time, he hopes, the jazz festival will survive.

Fo information about performances, visithttp://www.dejazzfest.org.