Each month, LuxeSF profiles a member of The Luxury Marketing Council. This month we talk with Matthew Campbell, Director of Marketing & Communications for SFJAZZ, the organization responsible for bringing world-class jazz to the Bay Area and for establishing San Francisco as one of the nation’s leading communities for the appreciation of the art of jazz.

LUXESF: Give us some background and history on the organization.

CAMPBELL: The organization was founded in 1983 by our Executive Director, Randall Kline, under the original name “Jazz in the City.” The organization’s first presentation was a two-night festival with just a few bands, all local groups. It got going with a little bit of funding from The San Francisco Foundation and the Hotel Tax Fund, and a lot of moxie on the part of Randall and a few early believers.

LUXESF: Was he a practicing jazz musician, and what was his interest in jazz in those early days?

CAMPBELL: He was a jazz bass player, had been a jazz student in college as well, and was working at the Boarding House, which was a great old, now-defunct San Francisco music and comedy club. Steve Martin very famously recorded his first album at the Boarding House. Randall used to get into jam sessions with the house band at the Boarding House, and he was a life-long jazz fan -- not quite professional, but a talented amateur bass player.

Initially, he noticed that there were a lot of great artists in the Bay Area who were not getting the exposure that they deserved, and he decided to form a festival primarily to showcase local acts, with a great diversity of talent performing over the two days. The result was a lot of great music in the concert hall, and a financial flop at the box office. What Randall realized was that while there is this tremendous diversity in the Bay Area of both artistic talent and audience taste, not everyone wants to hear everything all in one night. So he devised the model for what became the San Francisco Jazz Festival, with each concert being built around one essential artistic experience, with the artists on a given night presented in a venue that not only complements the music but actually enhances the artistic experience for musicians and audience members alike. Ever since then, we have strived to match each performer with the best venue that San Francisco has to offer, both for the character of their music and for their stature as a national or international artist. We’ve had rip-roaring blues shows at the Great American Music Hall, and jazz legends at the Nob Hill Masonic Center -- where we’ll present the likes of Dave Brubeck and Etta James this spring. We have swing dancing shows on a luxury yacht out on the San Francisco Bay. The idea is really matching the music, the performer, the venue and the audience.

LUXESF: How many subscribed members in the organization today?

CAMPBELL: We have around 3,000 paying annual members, and call them “members” and not subscribers because it’s not a ticketing program. It’s primarily a philanthropic program.

LUXESF: You are a 501(c)(3)?

CAMPBELL: We are.

LUXESF: Operating budget?

CAMPBELL: Just over $5 million.

LUXESF: How many full-time employees?

CAMPBELL: 20 and change. We grow during season, particularly in our production staff. We also have a volunteer corps of several hundred people who serve as ushers and also offer clerical support and so forth.

LUXESF: How does the organization rate nationally?

CAMPBELL: We’re the largest non-profit jazz presenter on the West Coast, and in terms of overall budget and scope of presentation, we’re second, nationally, to Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York .

LUXESF: Take me to the programs. You’ve got essentially two pods throughout the course of the year?

CAMPBELL: Yes, we have two major presenting seasons. One is the Fall San Francisco Jazz Festival, which is by far our most renowned brand. It features approximately 30 - 35 concerts usually, running from the last couple of weeks in October through the early part of November.

LUXESF: And how many guests will you bring through the turnstiles?

CAMPBELL: It varies from year to year, depending on the number of concerts, but it’s usually in the 20-25,000 range.

LUXESF: That’s the fall program. And the other program?

CAMPBELL: SFJAZZ Spring Season, which in 2007 runs March 8th through June 23rd. It usually features between 30 - 40 events, including concerts and educational programming. We’ll be doing more than 40 programs this coming spring. It’s spread out over a longer period of time, and the presentations are mainly on the weekends, whereas during the Fall Festival everything is concentrated into those three to four weeks.

LUXESF: Let’s insert a plug here for the Spring Season. Who special will be performing?

CAMPBELL: I’m very excited about the return of Dave Brubeck, whom I mentioned a moment ago. He’s one of the great legends of jazz piano -- in the 1950s he was, I believe, the first jazz musician ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

LUXESF: “Take Five”!

CAMPBELL: Exactly. And that was an album that a lot of people discovered in their college years. Dave will be performing both with his quartet and with a big band -- so it’ll be a rare treat even for longtime fans and concertgoers. We will also have our own SFJAZZ Collective, featuring eight of today’s most prominent jazz stars. Their Artistic Director is Joshua Redman, who is one of the major saxophonists in jazz today -- someone a lot of our era’s younger jazz fans discovered in their own college years. And we have a theme that’s spanning several of our shows called “The Monk Project,” dedicated to the late, great pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. Among other Monk-related events, we will have our own SFJAZZ All-Star High School Ensemble with the exciting young vibraphonist Stefon Harris as a special guest for an evening of Monk’s music. So from high schoolers to Brubeck, we’ve got at least four generations of artists performing this spring.

LUXESF: And now is the time to be booking for the Spring Season -- to get the best seats?

CAMPBELL: Yes -- for our members, that is. As I mentioned, we don’t have a subscription ticket program, per se, but we do have a membership program, and one of the great member benefits is the ability to buy tickets before the general public for all of our major seasons. So tickets are going on sale to our membership on December 16th, and then not until January 7th for the general public.

LUXESF: What does membership cost?

CAMPBELL: Our entry-level “Individual” membership is $60, and we have named levels that go up into tens of thousands of dollars, each level coming with its own distinct benefits. In terms of what might most appeal to the luxury marketing Council membership is a group called “The Leaders Circle,” which begins at a $1,200 annual contribution and goes up to “The Legends Circle” at $100,000. The Leader Circle is composed of movers and shakers in the Bay Area -- cultural figures and people who enjoy the highest level of seating and customer service. They also have exclusive access to special events, receptions at concerts, and so forth.

LUXESF: What do you find is the prototypical profile for a jazz listener?

CAMPBELL: It’s really all over the map, and it’s an interesting and challenging issue for us. In marketing circles that term “long-tail” has become very prominent over the past year, dealing with niche products that are very small but have rabid fan bases. That’s been our story all along. So we have a very different profile of an SFJAZZ concert attendee depending on who is playing. If we have someone like a Dave Brubeck playing, you’ll see a higher proportion of folks “of a certain age,” and more designer suits and gowns in the room. If we have younger, hipper artists in a club setting, you might see more young professionals in leather jackets and khakis. Most often, you’ll see a mix of ages and backgrounds on any given night, from young people of college or even high school age up through people who also are longtime subscribers to the Symphony or the Opera. But there is no one predominant feature to the profile. It’s a challenge, because we need to reach a lot of different people through different media. But there’s also a certain level of insulation. We’re diverse enough that no one event will make or break us, and there is no one group we need to reach in order to be successful.

LUXESF: What’s your primary marketing thrust?

CAMPBELL: In addition to direct-mailed pieces to our own list and a weekly e-newsletter, we do a great deal of advertising in The San Francisco Chronicle, which is probably our most reliable means of reaching the most people in the Bay Area. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that they’re a longtime Major Sponsor of our fall Festival. But in keeping with what I said earlier about our audience diversity, we also realize that diversity of media is key to reaching our varied customers. So we also have sponsorship arrangements with a variety of television and radio stations, with our fellow LuxeSF members 7x7 Magazine and California Home + Design, and with jazz-world publications like JazzTimes Magazine. We’re also increasing our online marketing/promotion presence, including a comprehensive overhaul of our sfjazz.org website in the past year -- expanding and, I hope, clarifying the architecture, adding new content like streaming media clips, expanded links to more information about our artists, recommendations to other concerts that we’re presenting ... along the lines of, “If you like this artist, you might try that artist.”

LUXESF: To that point, do you find that attendance at most of the shows is from jazz aficionados? To what extent are you attracting first-timers?

CAMPBELL: It really depends on the concert. We definitely have a corps of jazz aficionados -- many of our SFJAZZ members chief among them -- and we see them at show after show over the course of a season. But there are so many niche markets within jazz. We have concerts that lean more toward the jazz avant garde, the more experimental material, and I notice a lot of the same faces at those shows whom I don’t see at the more mainstream shows. Then we have a significant number of Latin jazz concerts every year, and so I see a lot of people who come out just for those shows. Brazilian artists bring out their own loyal following -- as we can tell by the number of audience members singing along in Portuguese! Our goal is to try to get people to try a few programs outside their natural comfort zone. And for first-timers, we try to demystify jazz a little bit, both through marketing materials that are informative without being didactic, and more formally via our seasonal “Discover Jazz” adult education course.

LUXESF: Has there been a great performance or performances that rocked the organization?

CAMPBELL: Yes, there certainly have been, and I’m happy to say we’re still having them. We’ve had several historic “ stride Piano Summit” concerts, showcasing the stride piano style popularized by Fats Waller. (It was called “Stride” because of the walking bassline in the left hand of the pianist.) We’re having another one of those momentous Stride programs this spring with the Thelonious Monk focus, since he was really influenced by Stride piano. A personal favorite was the first time we presented Sonny Rollins in 1996. That was a tremendous moment, not only because it was an amazing show, but because of his enormous reputation in the jazz world. And this past fall -- exactly ten years later -- we presented him once again, and fans are again buzzing about the show as one of their all-time jazz concertgoing highlights. We’ve had shows where several thousand people danced to salsa in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to the music of two now-departed Afro-Cuban masters -- Celia Cruise and Tito Puente.

And keeping with the Latin jazz theme, this past season our final show of the Festival starred a Bay Area-based percussionist who played in the very first Jazz in the City Festival in ’83, John Santos. To close our Festival, John performed his final concert after 21 years with his great group, the Machete Ensemble. At the end of that show, the band led a conga line off of the stage and into the lobby, and a big percussion jam session continued in the lobby of the concert hall. These are magical moments that can’t really be predicted or deliberately recreated, and that’s part of the thrill of jazz. There’s always something really thrilling about the live experience that stands out from hearing the music on a record, and there’s an event in every season that just might be the best concert you’ve ever heard.

LUXESF: Why did you join the Luxury Marketing Council?

CAMPBELL: Well, I think the Luxury Marketing Council’s membership, and also the people that the Council reaches through its members, is a significant part of our own membership. As I said, we have a group called The Leaders Circle which is composed of people who are affluent, very highly educated, very well placed in Bay Area business, society, law, medicine, etc. We feel that it’s really a natural fit for us in terms of better understanding and serving that portion of our audience. I can tell you from my very first attendance at one of your events, the event at Anchor Steam where the researcher talked about the six different types of very wealthy patrons, was an eye-opener for me. The other thing that’s great is the networking potential. There are a lot of fellow members who could either be potential sponsors of ours or be conduits to sponsors, and we’ve already gotten into some really interesting conversations, traded business cards and had some promising follow-up conversations. It’s a great group, and we’re honored and excited to be a part of it!