Festival director - a career in Bluenote fever
Serge and Francine Wintsch have been running the JazzOnze+ festival in Lausanne for 20 years. How do they experience their task, which is as strenuous as it is stimulating?
Serge and Francine Wintsch have been running the JazzOnze+ festival in Lausanne for 20 years. How do they experience their task, which is as strenuous as it is stimulating?
There is no training for prospective festival directors. Most of them learn while they are already passionate about their work, like Serge and Francine Wintsch. Their attachment to their festival is a kind of love story. With shining eyes, they talk about the program they have put together for this year's autumn edition, four evenings with around ten concerts.
Their first career steps were very useful for their current task: Francine is a trained typographer and was responsible for advertising for a large company. Serge was head of an architecture firm, and he is also a musician. In order to play, he often had to organize things himself: Finding a place to perform, rounding up fellow players, arranging fees and meals. When they met, they naturally became a duo of "music event producers". All that remained was to find a field of activity, which soon opened up in the management of the Onze+ festival. This had been founded by a group of Lausanne musicians to promote contemporary improvised music.
Tour organization
Program design is the key task of a festival director. When the Wintschs took over "their" festival, the program was radical. "Although we wanted to continue with exciting and up-and-coming artists, we also knew that we needed well-known names." The solution - as with so many other festivals - is a mixture of safe values and experimentation.
The Wintschs are not satisfied with the bands that are already on the road. They think up an ideal program and, if necessary, put together a tour for the desired artist so that the performance at their festival fits in perfectly. Sometimes they also organize a performance out of the ordinary, for which they seek special subsidies. This year, for example, a tribute to George Gruntz.
Accounting and "species conservation"
Organizing a festival also means raising money. With a budget of half a million, JazzOnze+ is a "poor" festival that functions thanks to a team of volunteers. Wintschs have recently started receiving a small payment for their work. But what drives them to go to all this effort time and time again? "It's the joy of presenting the music we love here where we live. And the pleasure of meeting wonderful people."
After all, it is also part of the festival director's career to ensure the survival of his event. At JazzOnze+, free admission to EspaceJazz means that young people can also get an earful - and often get stuck in. On these stages, they can listen to young groups whose music is closer to current trends than jazz.
