December 20, 2017
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Patti Jones, Executive Director
(916) 715-1501
Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society Foundation Statement on the End of the Sacramento Music Festival
Youth programs, including Jazz Camp, are funded by the Foundation, and will continue.
The Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society Foundation is saddened at the announcement that the Sacramento Music Festival has ended its historic 44-year run. The Foundation sponsored all the stages at the Sacramento Music Festival where youth bands were featured. This was an invaluable educational opportunity for both local and national youth bands. The Foundation will continue to seek out and create opportunities for youth jazz bands to learn, grow, perform and share their skills and music with appreciative audiences.
Since 1996, the Foundation, a wholly separate non-profit entity from the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society, has been responsible for funding the youth programs that once were part of the Society. The Foundation wants to assure our supporters and the young musicians who rely upon our scholarships, youth band festival, summer jazz camp, honor band, and instrument donations that the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society Foundation is on sound financial ground and that these youth education programs will continue to thrive.
The Foundation was formed in 1996 in anticipation of a large donation from the Hanson Family Trust to fund the annual Youth Jazz Camp – now known as the Teagarden Jazz Camp.
The Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society rightly felt that the best way to manage this and other endowments and to ensure that it was used for the express purpose of the jazz camp, was to create a separate foundation dedicated to youth education. The Foundation established its own board of directors and 501c(3) identity separate and distinct from the Society.
The mission of the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society Foundation is to preserve and promote
traditional jazz music, by supporting the education of children and adults in the performance of traditional jazz, and in the history and appreciation of America’s true original art form.
Over the last twenty-one years, through donations and an endowment from the Friedlander/Teagarden family, the Foundation has expanded its youth education programs. As the Society worked to regain better financial footing for the music festival, the Foundation expanded its role to not only fund, but produce and manage both the Teagarden Jazz Camp and the Traditional Jazz Youth Band Festival beginning in 2013.
In addition to the camp and the youth band festival, the Foundation’s other programs include
- Music Lessons Awards presented annually to approximately 25 young musicians so they can afford private music lessons with an emphasis on Jazz.
- TNT – The New Traditionalists, a regional Honor Band of High School jazz musicians
- Instrument Match – a program to match donated instruments with youth musicians
- The Trad Jazz Project – a partnership with local schools to sponsor clinics and music instructors to teach traditional jazz in school band programs.
More than 95% of the donations received by the Foundation are earmarked specifically for one or more of the youth education programs. Although the Foundation was an outgrowth of the Society, by law and by its mission the Foundation’s spending is restricted to these programs.
For more information on the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society Foundation and its programs, visit www.sacjazzfoundation.org