When Terri Pontremoli left her post as executive director of the Cuyahoga Community College Jazz Festival in 2004, she was ready for something new. She’d been working at Tri-C since the early ‘90s in fund-raising, grant-writing and programming, helping develop the JazzFest from a $200,000 project to a $1 million event with year-round outreach.
Trained as a classical violinist at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she also taught, Pontremoli worked on the JazzFest for 10 years, blazing funding trails, developing educational programs for Cleveland schools, learning “how to run the festival from soup to nuts.” She particularly enjoyed her freelance years in the '80s and '90s, working pop and rhythm ‘n’ blues gigs at the Front Row Theatre and as the contractor for Playhouse Square.
In 2004 and 2005, she was executive director of the Cleveland Arts Prize, which was going through a transition and “trying not to be stuffy.” In spring 2005, she had an epiphany while watching pianist Ahmad Jamal perform at Severance Hall: She missed jazz badly. When an executive position opened up in the field, Pontremoli went for it.
Since 2006, she has become as hands-on as she ever was at the Tri-C Jazz Fest, but on a much larger project: The Detroit International Jazz Festival. She is its executive/artistic director. It’s the largest free jazz festival in North America.
The most recent festival this Labor Day weekend drew thousands to downtown Detroit for three days of shows by more than 100 world-class acts on six stages. All of it was free. The featured performers included pianist Danilo Perez, the ultra avant-garde Trio M, the indefatigable, timeless drummer Roy Haynes, and Allen Toussaint [pictured, at 2010 Detroit Jazz Festival], the great New Orleans songwriter, among others.
“I have the opportunity to be artistic, but I also have been allowed to market,” says Pontremoli, who points out that Detroit's jazz heritage and audience is “bigger and hipper” than Cleveland's, and that the former's schools “didn’t gut out all of their music programs as early as Cleveland did,” when it stripped them from public schools in the '70s.
After World War II, Detroit had an “influx of black folks that came up for jobs in the auto industries… and that middle class are the people who made sure the kids had still music lessons and music in the schools," she says. "That’s why Marcus Belgrave had a trumpet." (Belgrave, who has recorded with everyone from Was (not) Was to Ray Charles, teaches at Oberlin.)
"When you talk to any of the guys who came from Detroit, it started in the schools… they also had a really strong jazz club scene," says Pontremoli. "Detroit musicians are pretty aggressive; they’re all good and all competing for work. There’s a lot of good musicians [in Detroit], still. And jazz gets played on the radio there much more than [in Cleveland], and that makes a difference, too.”
