Dear Jazz Festival Ticket Holder,
Thank you for your patience. Last week, just hours before our first Main Stage performance, we were compelled by rapidly escalating health and safety concerns to cancel the final eight of our eleven Sarasota Jazz Festival events. Canceling these events is a deep financial hardship for the Jazz Club. The festival represents approximately half of the Jazz Club's annual budget. Grants and sponsorships provide about half of the total support for the festival, while most of the balance comes from ticket sales.
We have contractual obligations with scores of musicians, venues and vendors too extensive to list. We feel a special obligation to our musicians. Our ability to hire and support them is one of the concrete ways that we achieve our mission of preserving and promoting jazz. Most of them are already suffering the loss of many other performances.
We are a volunteer managed and operated organization with one part-time employee and a few contracted service providers. We are a private, non-profit organization with very limited assets and no executive salaries to support.
WE NEED YOUR HELP
We are now prepared to offer a variety of "refund" options to the nearly 1,500 festival ticket holders. Frankly, we are hoping that most of you will choose the first option of donating your tickets back to the Jazz Club. This will allow us to cancel our debt obligations and to then begin the happier process of planning the coming season and next year's Jazz Festival.
