The Savannah Music Festival was great again. Where were you?

This is an opinion column from arts and culture editor Zach Dennis.

The 2023 Savannah Music Festival (SMF) concluded earlier this month and, much like last year’s return from the pandemic, has shown the overall experience is strong out of the uncertainty of the COVID-19 years.

There’s definitely headliners that draw attention (Tedeschi Trucks, Béla Fleck, Buddy Guy) but there has also been this diverse range of discoveries that expand your listening repertoire, even past the last days of the festival.

There was a bit of both in one of the festival’s final shows this year. Cécile McLorin Salvant is a multi-Grammy winning musician who has earned acclaim since “Womanchild” caught the music world’s attention in 2013. Playing ahead of her was San Salvador, an exhilarating band that doesn’t have the same stateside recognition as Salvant but certainly commanded the stage as well as anyone else at this year’s SMF.

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Salvant shifted from Joni Mitchell covers to 17th century hymns, serenading the audience with an intimacy that felt like we were in a  listening room rather than a historic moviehouse. The opposite was true of San Salvador — their sound rumbled through the Lucas Theatre like thunder, vibrating beats through your body to the point of it being near impossible to not move your body with the band.

Well, unless you were one of the many empty seats in the house.

Yet again, Savannah didn’t show up for its music festival.

Now, close the Facebook comment for one second here. I know what you’re going to say: these are why you missed, ignored or didn’t know about this year’s Savannah Music Festival.

It’s too expensive

It’s 2023, what isn’t?

But in all seriousness, I hear that concern. The final price on a $109 Buddy Guy ticket probably spun some heads. But after 20 years in operation, what else can be expected?

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If you look at the direction the city is headed — influx of “luxury” apartments, high housing prices and a median income $49,832 that doesn’t set up workers to afford the aforementioned luxury housing — the prices of these tickets would be nothing to our new neighbors coming from either coast with an overly healthy paycheck.

But this is also a festival that wants to relate to locals, not just the new faces. If Trustees’ Garden is going to become a base for shows with Spoleto levels of production, it’s gonna cost money. If you’re going to bring in acts such as Guy, Galactic or Tedeschi Trucks Band, it’s going to cost money.

Which begs the questions: how do we subsidize the talent coming to perform without forcing another massive push for individual donors from around the region? Most things in Savannah, including SMF, are tied to the tourism industry, which showed steady growth over the whole region in Q1 2023.

If tourism is a leading industry, and the music festival brings thousands tourists, why wouldn’t our city invest and assist more to keep the costs affordable but still bring in great talent?

Corporate and government sponsors for SMF include the City of Savannah, Savannah-Chatham Public Schools System, Georgia Council for the Arts, Visit Savannah and Savannah Economic Development Authority (SEDA) providing funds to support their work.

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2023 Savannah Music Festival: Buddy Guy

Currently, SEDA offers entertainment incentives, but that applies to film productions coming to town, another economic driver in the city but not one as dominant as tourism. So, if we’re quick to incentivize Hollywood productions coming to town and creating jobs for local workers, why wouldn’t we also incentivize a city music festival that also brings in talent and jobs to the Hostess City, as well as provides year-long programs and concerts for public school children?

SMF was a recipient of the Arts and Cultural Enrichment Program by the City of Savannah, but poor funding into the cultural arm of the city government once again leaves the organizations creating community across town on their own when it comes to surviving. While hotels and luxury apartments line the pocketbooks; events such as SMF could sophisticate the outside fascination with Savannah, while still providing rich, evocative culture for her residents.

If we want to make the Savannah Music Festival affordable to everyone, developing that equity the organization craves, there needs to be some creativity on the state and local levels to create incentives that make it possible to showcase what Savannah’s arts organizations are doing, and lean less on individual donors.

A more equitable funding line could also provide more freedom for the programming team to get creative with their yearly line-ups since a lot of folks claim…

I don’t know anyone/don’t care about the lineup

Listen, Taylor Swift isn’t coming to Savannah, much less SMF. The Enmarket Arena couldn’t even handle her.

Setting up some curiosity for a line-up of unknown musicians could be helped in two ways: like stated above, a bit more diversity in bottom line for the festival could provide freedom to the creative team; but another option to promote curiosity is a sort of weekend pass structure that would give audiences more freedom to take chances on shows.

More: Tedeschi Trucks Band prepared for an 'epic' return to the Savannah Music Festival

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Listen, Tedeschi Trucks and St. Paul and the Broken Bones have played in town so much they probably own real estate at this point. The thing that the Savannah Music Festival excels in programming more than anything is bringing one-of-a-kind acts to Savannah, such as Sona Jaborteh, Kodo and Terence Blanchard, that wouldn't make it to Georgia without the festival.

Last year, Les Filles de Illighadad and Lakou Mizik provided an incredible international musical experience that transported you to new sensations of music. The curated jazz line-ups rival, or surpass, festivals in New Orleans and Chicago Even associate artistic director Philip Dukes presents a program that could sate the demands of frequent classical concertgoers while enticing those not familiar or with misinformed views of the genre.

On one hand, we, the audience, have to do a better job at taking risks with attending the festival. On the other hand, the festival is funded from a large base of individual donors and that means those folks want to get what they paid for.

The trick for any arts organization in Savannah — who share similar structures to SMF — is to find that diversity of revenue. The arts have always had patrons, but it can’t all be patron-driven. There’s also a need to allow the creative minds leading the organizations to display what they were hired for and provide us with an experience they think will resonate.

That requires more governmental and economic development incentives to parry the burden from individuals, but Savannah can also stand for more creativity by showing up with their dollars.

What festival? What are you even talking about?

To their credit, the SMF staff does as good a job as any with getting the world out. Posters and marquees paint Broughton, social media campaigns that do as much as those possibly can accomplish and they’re present at many other music-related events throughout the year.

But things have got to get even more visible for people to want to come, and that requires more than just marketing, it requires visibility of the work.

More: With first year done, Philip Dukes is gaining your trust at the 2023 Savannah Music Festival

The Morris Center and Trustees’ Garden are difficult venues to catch interest from folks. They’re big and isolated, and even when you mention either by name around town to local and new, they don’t really know what you’re talking about. It’s a bit more visible, but Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum might also deal with the same fate, which is truly unfortunate because this year, it was easily the best venue of the festival and should get more play with concerts and cultural events in the coming years.

The Lucas is the Lucas, and the Trustees’ Theater is the Trustees’ Theater; both dictated by SCAD on how much or how little they want us to see things that aren’t SCAD.

So then, how does SMF get out there more? Not to reference myself, but, again, Daffin Park.

Besides that, maybe utilizing more visible spaces across town could draw both visitors and residents alike. It’s on a much smaller scale, but the Savannah Philharmonic has found success with shows among squares downtown and places outside downtown proper that drive new audiences to their work. They even just completed a show in Richmond Hill.

The use of the soon-to-be completed Savannah Repertory Theatre space was good to see, and could probably play home to some smaller concerts in the future. As Starland continues to grow in popularity, it has a host of spaces such as Starland Yard, Two Tides Brewing and, to go real small, the porch series at Starland Strange.

Victory North has played host to pre-festival SMF shows in the past, but maybe also curating to the growing young, middle-class population emerging south of downtown could expand the festival’s footprint while engaging with an audience they want to grab hold of.

Listen, I don’t know what to tell you

Hey, I hear you! But at the same time, and for whatever reason with all the grandstanding of being a cultural hub, Savannah just doesn’t always show up for its arts.

It’s not just SMF. The same can be found at many cultural functions driven by local groups. It seems as if audiences like to know that these events are there, but support is a whole other commitment. Anecdotally, I’ve been told multiple times that Savannah is a bad live music town. Sure, when a big act comes to the Mercer Theatre or Enmarket Arena, people will go; but for the day-to-day shows and the acts off the beaten path, we just don’t support them like they need us.

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That’ll have to change.The city is shifting, more people are coming and we have a plethora of arts organizations that provide worthy entertainment that folks would be interested in seeing.

The Savannah Music Festival won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but that has to be the case. With the tagline, “A World of Music. One City,” that’ll mean that you may not love everything you catch there but a couple will strike your fancy. We have to find a way to support creativity, not just providing the experience we want. Our arts have to function as much as an ecosystem — growing and dying, changing and staying constant — so things can feel interesting and new; we can have different experiences in town rather than just having the same thing happen over and over again.

But at the same time, that can’t all just fall on the audience.

If the city and county truly believe Savannah and Chatham are these incredible places to live with vibrant arts and culture, prove it by incentivizing them as much as you do auto manufacturers, ports and tourism. Provide our arts leaders with more freedom to cultivate creativity, take risks and sometimes fail. But be able to fail without the fear that the entire infrastructure will come crashing down if that happens.

Because when those new folks move to town and get tired of placing EV batteries in cars for five days a week out in Bryan County, they’re going to take those hefty paychecks and jobs we’ve been touting and look for an outlet to relax.

They’ll probably look for some nice music to listen to also.

Zach Dennis is the editor of the arts and culture section, and weekly Do Savannah alt-weekly publication at the Savannah Morning News. He can be reached at zdennis@savannahnow.com or 912-239-7706.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah Music Festival needs better city, county help to improve