Audience survey data indicated growing displeasure with Stanford Jazz Festival (SJF) programming due to:
Create a format for program notes that lets the artists explain their music.
Very strong positive feedback from audience members in person and in survey data, who said they enjoyed the music more once they knew what the artist intended.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the SJF presented many of the world’s legendary jazz artists, such as Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Benny Golson, and dozens more. As the legends have passed on, their protégés have taken their place. Many of these are great artists who themselves learned from the masters at Stanford Jazz Workshop events when they were students.
One wonderful aspect of these younger artists is that they’re making jazz into something new. For many of our festival patrons, however, the divergence from the classic jazz so familiar to our core audience to a more contemporary and in many ways more adventurous or experimental style is a challenge.
The current program note format focused on non-musical aspects of the artists’ lifestyles, such as what their favorite foods were or what kind of shoes were they wearing.
SJF patrons like music they can understand. They are more engaged and more likely to try out the music of an unfamiliar artist when they feel connected to the music and the performers.
An obvious solution was to ask artists to do pre-concert talks about the music they’re about to play. But that would take up valuable performance time, and many artists would refuse to talk prior to performing.
I created a new format for our program notes instead. Each concert’s program included an original article, based on a direct interview with the artists, to give the concertgoers as much context for what they were about to hear as possible.
I leveraged my years of experience as a music journalist and my reputation as the editor in chief of Keyboard magazine to schedule and conduct effective interviews and write engaging, entertaining, and informative program notes that focused on the artists’ intentions for their performance. I designed a layout that was easy to read while sitting in the concert hall before the performance.
The positive reaction was striking. After every concert, dozens of patrons would ask staff who wrote the program notes, and many said the information helped them to appreciate the music and to enjoy it more.
In the 14 years we've been using this approach to content design, audience survey data still indicates that the content design of the program notes is increasing audience satisfaction with the performances.
