When Andy Cirzan came to work at Jam Productions as senior talent buyer a couple of years back, one of his first projects was to go out on the road with a then up-and-coming hard-rock band called Guns n’ Roses.
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Cirzan was a long way from his marketing and programming work for the Ravinia Festival, where he had served his graduate-school internship and then stayed on to book the festival’s pop, jazz, and contemporary music series. He was particularly interested in new music, so when he needed an opening act for an already-booked Wynton Marsalis appearance, Cirzan decided to bring in the Art Ensemble of Chicago. “At the time,” says Cirzan, “it really caught a lot of people off guard. We got all kinds of letters that said, ‘Hey, what was that garbage?’ I had to fire off all of the responses that said, more or less: ‘Thanks for your input, but they’re considered one of the greatest performing ensembles in the world, and perhaps you just didn’t understand what they were doing.’
Part of the jazz/contemporary music series was the subseries, “New Perspectives,” created to showcase music that didn’t fit any particular genre–“stuff that fell through the cracks,” Cirzan says. “Our first year, we jumped in with both feet first–I even brought in Steve Reich’s big ensemble, and we did his Music for 18 Musicians outdoors, which was a pretty heavy experience. I was amazed with what we were getting away with presenting, and the next year I started doing bolder things, like bringing in Cecil Taylor for a piano recital, pretty nutty stuff for Ravinia.”
The trial concert featured Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares at the Park West in late 1988; it was such an unexpected success that over 300 people had to be turned away at the door. The series continued into 1989 with the World Saxophone Quartet, Jon Hassell, Wayne Horvitz’s the President, and Astor Piazzolla.
