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Until now, JazzBoston has been most visible through its Web site, with its comprehensive Boston jazz calendar, message board for local musicians, media links, and listings of information and services for anyone involved in jazz at any level. (For the record: I’m a member of the non-profit’s all-volunteer advisory council.) JazzBoston originated with Herald freelancer Bob Young, who’d been attending the public forums hosted by the local chapter of the Jazz Journalists Association. He recalls, “It was fun, but it became clear after the first meeting that it was going to be a lot of the same grumbling, sort of this woe-is-me attitude, and people not really thinking that they could take fate into their own hands a little bit more.” But Young did see all the elements of the fragmented jazz scene coming together at those meetings, and that sparked an idea that had been germinating. “The scene has always been fragmented, and unless you were paying close attention to it you might not realize that there’s an awful lot of stuff that happens here on a nightly basis. So this was a chance to pull the people together who don’t normally talk to each other, the various presenters who are realizing that, well, it can’t hurt to promote the entire scene as a whole.”

Young got together with a handful of people who’d been attending the JJA meetings — publicist and JJA member Dawn Singh, pianist/composer Donal Fox, musician and teacher Toni Ballard, writer Bob Blumenthal. The Web site became an immediate priority, one that Young was well suited to initiate given his journalism background and his day job working in the communications department of a large financial-services company overseeing its intranet. Soon Fox had pulled in recently transplanted New Yorker Pauline Bilsky and her husband, Don Carlson, jazz lovers who have extensive corporate communications and fund-raising experience. Bilsky has since become JazzBoston’s executive director.

The idea for Jazz Week came from JazzBoston’s predecessor, the Jazz Coalition, which was founded in 1970 by the jazz trumpeter, composer, and Methodist minister Mark Harvey. The Coalition grew out of Harvey’s work at the Old West Church, where he had started the Jazz Celebrations concert series, “providing a place to play, but also providing a welcoming community for musicians to gather.” From that came the Coalition. “The initial idea was to gather information and pull people together, but we quickly found that that only had so much value and impact and that what we really needed to do was start producing stuff.” Out of that came the original Jazz Week. “We had 100 concerts our first year, and we thought that was pretty good. The JazzBoston Jazz Week has 139 at last count.”

The Coalition got started because there weren’t enough venues for jazz, but by the end of the ’70s more places were booking jazz because of its efforts. “We’d ask people, ‘Would you consider booking jazz one night during ‘Jazz Week?’ ” They’d book it, find that they liked it, and keep it. This year, Harvey says, the jazz series at Borders during Jazz Week came about specifically because Borders was approached by JazzBoston.

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