Miles Davis, in concert
Eclipse Jazz organized many concerts that brought jazz legends to Ann Arbor. The Eclipse archive offers striking insight to the factors that went in to making a photo of a great artist at work. The story begins over three years earlier when Eclipse Jazz's Michael Landy wrote to Davis pitching a performance in town. Landy is at pains to explain the aims and achievements of Eclipse Jazz, underlining the "tremendous" response to "our project" to "guide the neophyte from more commercial forms of Jazz to mainstream and avant-garde jazz..."
Yet the job is nowhere near completed. We have come to the consensus that the next step in the process must be a jazz festival.
The 1978 concert series proved to be something of a high water mark for Eclipse, but it was also a financial failure, creating a $4,000 loss (nearly $19,000 in 2024). After further losses, by summer 1979 Eclipse "found itself with a serious deficit," according to a short history of Eclipse prepared in 1985.
Eclipse launched with a conviction that low ticket prices were an essential gateway to growing the jazz audience. In its early days, Eclipse secured, with University backing, grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts. By spring 1978, with ideas for the first Eclipse Jazz festival were brewing, Eclipse leadership stressed its educational mission. It had rapidly developed three distinct programming strands, with educational workshops and more esoteric non-commercial artistic events to be subsidized by ticket sales revenue. The 1978-1979 financial debacle brought a certain idealism to an end.
Although Eclipse's educational and small venue concerts continued into the 1980s, they portrayed themselves as more canny about bringing big acts to campus
...we have raised ticket prices to realistic levels. Another valuable lesson learned regards the changing market conditions within the Ann Arbor area.
These changes included broadening the range of artists in their small-venue series. Then, quite unexpectedly, Miles Davis became available.
The history writes:
Due to a last-minute contractual breakthrough, Eclipse was privileged to present the legendary Miles Davis, the only university concert promoters to do so. Unfortunately, the contractual negotiations were closed too close to the concert date to allow for adequate promotion.
The Davis concert was at one level a triumph. Eclipse achieved a booking no peer promoters or campus afficiando organization ever did. It was also perhaps a bitter lesson. The Hill Auditorium concert drew 2481 attendees, a house that may have looked conspicuous in the 4177 seat auditorium. The concert was financially unsuccessful.
Eclipse made a decade of high-level professional promotion with a body of student volunteers, a few of whom stuck around and became paid staff,. Their passion for jazz and conviction that educating about jazz would have a locally significant impact on audiences ready to come out for jazz events remained at the center of their mission. The errors that they made were errors born of their passion. Even among the many stars of jazz Eclipse brought to Ann Arbor, Miles Davis at Hill remained for them a zenith.
Inflation value quoted above from estimate at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Caluculator, accessed November 20, 2024. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=4%2C000&year1=197810&year2=202410