For the better part of two decades, Mellon Bank has sponsored Philadelphia's premier summer music festival -- a sprawling multi-venue showcase for jazz artists of both regional and national renown. During this tenure, thousands of musicians have played to many more thousands of listeners, in settings as diverse as Penn's Landing, the Academy of Music, Ortlieb's Jazzhaus and Rittenhouse Square. A host of distinguished expatriates have been honored; a handful of local legends have received their due. And Philly's resident jazz community -- a loose confederation of allegiances, acquaintances and sects -- has seen the benefit of dedicated corporate support.

This year’s Mellon Jazz Festival, in some regards, resembles those of years past: Mainstream artists comprise the bulk of the program, and concerts will be held both indoors and out. But there have been significant changes in the festival’s framework and focus -- a byproduct, it’s safe to say, of the recent reshaping of Mellon itself. A glance at the schedule reveals much promise, many highlights, even some innovation. But against the backdrop of one of the festival’s most ambitious ventures, many in the jazz community have voiced complaints. And as with a record, or a coin, the issue consists of two opposing but complementary sides.

The festival’s roots stretch back exactly 20 years, into the coffers of another sponsor. It was in the summer of 1982 that the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. underwrote a weeklong Kool Jazz Festival in Philadelphia, part of a massive promotional effort spanning 20 cities nationwide. George Wein -- the impresario whose Newport Jazz Festival had literally set the standard for this sort of musical presentation -- oversaw the coast-to-coast enterprise, more or less like a general surveying an empire. [Disclosure: The writer is co-authoring Wein’s forthcoming autobiography.] His New York-based company, Festival Productions Inc., delivered first-rate events in each outpost; Philly’s inaugural festival included a concert at the Academy of Music featuring The Great Quartet (Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones) and a quintet led by then-unknown trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

Mellon’s involvement as a sponsor followed Brown & Williamson’s desertion in 1984. That year, the 115-year-old financial institution initially supported just one festival, in its home city of Pittsburgh. Wein gave John Schreiber, then president of Festival Productions, primary responsibility for production. From the start, it was clear that Mellon pursued less commercial aims via the festival than the purpose that had been defined by Kool.

“The goal of the festival in Pittsburgh,” Schreiber explains today, “was to create a really wonderful community event where different aspects of the jazz heritage of the city would be celebrated, in a really thorough way. There was great concern on the part of the Mellon folks, and us, the producers, to legitimize, pay homage to, and celebrate the jazz legacy of the city. And so we were able to take concerts into the neighborhoods. Every year we would dedicate the festival to one or another Pittsburgh native. The bank made sure that we did free events that everybody could attend. And I got a real sense of how much pride people from Pittsburgh took in the jazz heritage of their city.”

That pride was soon mirrored in Philadelphia -- where Mellon expanded its musical outreach the following year, having completed acquisition of the Main Line’s venerable Girard Bank. “The beauty of the Mellon festival was that they did want to reach the community,” Wein recalls. “And that made all of the difference in the world. It allowed us to get even more involved with the local jazz clubs. By doing that, we built a basic foundation for the festival in the city. I think it was a great thing, I really do. Basically, when we’d go to Philly, we’d go to all the different clubs and build up a grassroots thing in the city.”

Those efforts resulted in a strikingly inclusive festival over the years, produced in cooperation with a range of local nonprofit organizations and community groups -- like the Philadelphia Clef Club, the Trane Stop Resource Institute, the John W. Coltrane Cultural Society and the Painted Bride. “We had a great relationship [with Mellon],” recounts Rhoda Blount, who co-produced events at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. “We were always at the planning table, and they gave us supplemental funding. We were never fully sponsored, but God knows the money that they gave us enabled us to put good concerts on. Musicians that we could not normally obtain, we could bring in, and have great PR. It really helped nonprofit organizations like ours to survive.”

Similar effects have been felt, to varying degrees, throughout the jazz community -- by musicians and club owners alike. For the clubs, Mellon offered occasional subsidies and, more often, hefty promotional support. For musicians, the festival provided not only a source of work but also a means of exposure. A recent case in point: Last year’s festival, which promoted, but did not underwrite, shows at Ortlieb’s. “A lot more people came out,” contends pianist George Burton, whose regular Groove Lounge set was listed on festival brochures. “A lot of people came who never heard of me, or even knew I was alive. Some of them still come to my gigs.”

Mellon festivals in the past few years have reflected a leaner, more focused quality, due to the efforts of Festival Productions’ Dan Melnick, who took over in both Philly and Pittsburgh in 1999. “When I inherited the festivals,” Melnick says, “they were 10-day-long festivals with lots of little things all over the place. After the first year, I said to Mellon: ‘I’ve got to tell you the truth. This model does not seem very effective, and it doesn’t seem like a good use of the money.’ I convinced them to shrink the festivals down from 10 days to six, but to do bigger events. And I think it was really a good thing for a couple of years there, because we were able to book some bigger names and get bigger crowds at a few less events. It was much more exciting and focused, there was a lot more energy, and I thought there was a cohesiveness to the festivals that was really clear.” Melnick’s decisions in this regard, applauded by many observers, have also drawn the requisite grumbling from the usual corners. What was never called into question, in any serious way, was the festival’s commitment to Philadelphia’s jazz community. At least, not until this year.

On July 17, 2001, the Mellon Financial Corp. announced the intended sale of its mid-Atlantic retail banking operations to Providence, R.I.’s Citizens Financial Group Inc. As corporate acquisitions go, this one was to be relatively painless; Citizens had agreed to keep all Mellon branches open, retaining nearly all of its 4,100-strong workforce. For most customers of the Pennsylvania banking institution, the transaction meant little more than a different logo and a new set of personal checks.

Upon reading news of the sale, Melnick called Pittsburgh and was quickly reassured. “There was never a question of whether Mellon was going to continue the festivals,” he now affirms. “Everything was totally cool throughout the process.” The primary difficulty, he notes, was a long delay throughout the fall -- resulting from both the normal activities of a corporate transition and the abnormal activities of September’s terrorist attacks. During this period, it was understandably difficult to make concrete plans for the festival. In addition, he says, the loss of Mellon’s Philly-based corporate affairs office to Citizens presented a bit of a challenge. “I had this group of people in Philly who knew the market, who had grown up and lived in Philly and had relationships with venues and museums and even the media. And now they’re not there, so we’re making a lot of decisions about how we’re going to do certain things in Philadelphia from Pittsburgh and New York.”

Mellon completed its Citizens changeover on Dec. 1, 2001 -- declaring $2.1 billion in proceeds, for a projected after-tax gain of roughly $900 million in the fourth quarter. In a press release, Mellon CEO Martin McGuinn observed that his company “emerges from this transaction as a global provider of asset management and processing and corporate services.” Essentially, its sale marked the last measure in a corporate strategy that was well under way; Mellon had divested itself of all mortgage, credit card and network services transaction-processing businesses in 1999. That year it had also changed its name from Mellon Bank Corp. to Mellon Financial Corp., to reflect the shift in its strategic focus.

“The transaction last year was a linchpin, a major culmination, if you will, of that reconfiguration,” explains Paul Beideman, chairman of Mellon’s mid-Atlantic region. “Now Mellon basically provides corporate services and asset-management services. So it’s a different company than it was five years ago. But Mellon has a long-standing heritage in the communities that it serves in its mid-Atlantic traditional footprint, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia especially, and we feel very strongly as part of our continuing strategy that we maintain a visible presence and continue to contribute to the vibrancy of the communities in which we live. We’ve done the jazz festival for 17 years. We felt that it’s an important thing to do, that it’s visible, that it achieves our objectives, and it’s good for the community -- it’s a chance to give something back.”

If Mellon is a different company today than it was even last year, the same could be said for the Mellon Jazz Festivals. In Pittsburgh, which held its festival last weekend, the main attraction was Tony Bennett, performing with the Pittsburgh Symphony at Heinz Hall. In Philadelphia, the centerpiece is an enormous concert at the Mann Center featuring, among others, Natalie Cole and Chuck Mangione; a “Philly Jazz Tent” on the premises will showcase such local heavies as Bobby Zankel and Barbara Walker. In both Pittsburgh and Philly, these are bigger, higher-profile concerts than Mellon has presented in the past; they’re essentially tailor-made for the sponsor’s new client constituency. At Heinz Hall, Mellon reserved special seating for 200 guests; at the Mann, there will likely be a similar section, along with a catered VIP tent.

Corporate sponsors regularly use their events to entertain clients, so there’s nothing inherently unseemly about Mellon’s decision -- especially since both major concerts, in Pittsburgh and Philly, have been open to the ticket-buying public. But given limited festival-allocated resources, each of these events has come at the expense of other programs -- most of them club- and community-based. “The Mann concert is a big risk financially,” observes Melnick. “And it’s a huge undertaking. We would never have been able to do something like this in Philadelphia -- pull off a Newport-style festival, even for just one day -- without getting rid of all the little things.”

In Pittsburgh, thanks to a partnership with the Three Rivers Arts Festival, Mellon presented two free concerts at Point State Park. But there were no collaborative events at Dowe’s on 9th or the James Street Restaurant, the city’s two primary jazz haunts. (The owners of both establishments booked national acts anyway, in an act of positive protest.) In Philly, the festival’s non-Mann programming consists of a free evening at the Clef Club, one paid concert apiece at the Keswick Theatre and the Painted Bride and three nights at the posh dinner club Zanzibar Blue. Customary outdoor free concerts -- held variously at Penn’s Landing, Vernon Park and Rittenhouse Square -- have been dropped, along with Mellon’s support of organizations like the African American Museum and the Sedgwick Cultural Center, and casual clubs like Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus and Chris’ Jazz Café.

Melnick phoned these and a few other venues in the spring. “He was very apologetic,” recalls Alan McMahon, who programs jazz at Chris’. “We talked for a long time. I was really pissed; I was turning colors. I said, ‘Dan, Ortlieb’s and Chris’ -- we are the jazz community in Philadelphia. We do 320 shows a year at Chris’; Ortlieb’s does the same. We’re the meat and potatoes, the bread and butter, the backbone of the jazz community.’”

Ortlieb’s owner Pete Sounders sounds a similar note: “We’re in there slugging it out all the time, and really for very little gain.”

While neither Ortlieb’s or Chris’ expected full underwriting this year, both had planned on some festival support. “For a little club like this,” says McMahon, “it helped a lot. Our attendance would double during the festival, and those people would come back. So that one week had repercussions for the other 51 weeks of the year, as far as I was concerned.”

Souders, who carefully notes that Mellon’s withdrawal “is not going to kill us,” points out that the festival falls during a crucial time of year, when much of the club’s regular patronage all but disappears. He adds: “The fact that they have things every night at Zanzibar and nothing at our place or Chris’ -- that’s a little bit of a slap in the face.”

Musicians, for the most part, express a sort of wary resignation when asked about the change. “I don’t feel good about the festival itself at all,” opines Burton, the young pianist who played under a Mellon banner last year. “It’s starting to become a commercial event. It seems to me like they’re excluding Chris’ and Ortlieb’s just because they’re not ‘world-class restaurants.’ Those venues need that support. And if they don’t get the support, then we don’t get the support, and that forces people like me to leave the city.”

Slightly different issues are at stake for community organizations like the African American Museum. Blount, who has co-produced concerts there since the festival’s inaugural run, won’t be staging anything this year. (Ironically, she currently works at the Mann, in a nonmusical capacity.) Mellon’s lack of involvement with the community organizations, Blount says, will be felt for some time. “Being affiliated with the festival helped us to procure funds from state government agencies as well as foundations and corporations. When you could put the Mellon Jazz Festival on your list of activities from the previous year, people readily gave you money, because it had that kind of a name.” She adds: “There isn’t that opportunity anymore. I think that’s where a lot of the little nonprofit organizations will suffer this year, not being associated with the festival.”

But to accuse Mellon of abandoning its mission would be a gross oversimplification. “Mellon has been there,” Melnick attests. “They’ve done a tremendous job over the years of keeping the music alive in both cities, and trying to offer the best possible festivals they can. But the festival is not the Philadelphia Jazz Festival. It’s the Mellon Jazz Festival. So Mellon, if they want to continue to do this, which they do, then they have a right to structure it however they want, so it fits their needs. They have new needs now.”

Wein -- whose company produces not only the Mellon festival but also major events for JVC, Verizon, Playboy and Essence -- points out that “the aim of a festival is to reach as many people as possible.” The Mann concert, with a projected attendance of 4,000 to 5,000, clearly serves this aim. And, as Beideman says: “By focusing on that one night, we’re able to provide some significant talent.” This includes not only Natalie Cole (the festival’s biggest name in years), but also deserving Philly-based groups (led by the aforementioned Walker and Zankel, along with bassist Gerald Veasley). Ancillary events at the Philadelphia Clef Club and Painted Bride (both nonprofit organizations), and the Keswick Theatre and Zanzibar Blue, do support the local scene.

Beideman says this option was never entertained. “Some people seemed surprised that we did it this year. There should be no surprise; it’s something that we’ve been committed to for 17 years, and we’re committed to it this year. And we’re committed to it going forward.” In addition to the festival, Beideman’s office sponsors the Radnor Hunt Races (which dedicates all proceeds to the Brandywine Conservancy) and supports such local interests as Greater Philadelphia First, the Franklin Institute, the Jewish Federation and Congreso de Latinos Unidos. In 2001, Mellon devoted $30.7 million in charitable funds to the Greater Philadelphia region.

Still, it’s evident that this year’s jazz festival has disappointed many in the community it serves. “They can do better,” allows Zankel, who’ll appear at the Mann with a quintet. McMahon, who hopes to present his postponed festival bookings in the fall, assumes the air of a vanquished prizefighter seeking a rematch: “I hope there’s good turnout for the Mellon this year -- and I hope that the people who are sponsoring it will reconsider the format in the future.”

Schreiber, who last produced a Mellon festival 10 years ago, offers a nostalgic portrait of the event -- an instructive model that could yet be constructed anew. “The main thing I remember about the festivals,” he reminisces, “was coming in from out of town, to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and feeling part of an energy that the jazz community generated in both cities. And wanting really badly to make the community -- the jazz community and then, of course, the larger community, by virtue of what we produced -- feel as if we were doing this for the right reasons. Because we wanted to help. We wanted to dignify. We wanted to complement what was happening all year round.”