The Toronto Jazz Festival is one of a number of events that have lost a principal sponsor after TD Bank ended its long-time sponsorship of some of Canada’s most prominent jazz festivals. Herbie Hancock performs during the Toronto Jazz Festival at Nathan Phillips Square.Della Rollins
Toronto-Dominion Bank has quietly ended its long-time sponsorship of some of Canada’s most prominent jazz festivals, forcing them to cut costs at a time when cultural industries are struggling to attract corporate money.
Last year marked the final editions of both the Toronto Jazz Festival and Calgary’s JazzYYC Summer Festival to feature TD as their principal sponsor with naming rights, while both the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and the Ottawa Jazz Festival lost their lead sponsorships over the past several years.
TD says it remains committed to funding Canadian music and arts – seeding money to various awards and organizations, holding naming rights to venues in Toronto and Montreal and sponsoring a handful of jazz-oriented events across the country, including Halifax and Montreal festivals.
But the decision to exit some of Canada’s biggest jazz events has left their organizers are hard-pressed to find replacement sponsors.
TD’s sponsorship represented about a tenth of JazzYYC’s annual budget, the festival’s executive and artistic director, Kodi Hutchinson, said in an interview. (Canada Revenue Agency filings show its total revenue at $472,721 for the fiscal year ended August, 2023; of that, $220,230 came from government funding and $85,555 was attributed to ”sponsorships and other support.”) His small team worked all year to put on about 189 events in its 2023-24 season, including 47 free concerts and workshops.
Free shows are a hallmark of JazzYYC’s offerings, building up the community of jazz fans year-round and expanding the festival. But the end of TD’s sponsorship means cutting more than 40 events throughout the year and a major reduction of the main summer event. Last year the summer festival hosted 42 events, 17 of them free; this year that number is expected to fall to 19, only four of which the organizers plan to offer for free.
“Some festivals will have to reduce greatly, which causes further difficulties in getting a sponsor,” Hutchinson said. “It’s circular.”
Toronto Jazz Festival artistic director Josh Grossman said his team is rethinking how it presents concerts this year to reckon with the loss of TD funding; that includes evaluating whether it can afford the infrastructure costs of building some of its outdoor stages.
TD gave Grossman’s team notice before the 2024 festival that it would end its sponsorship, he said, prompting organizers last year to drop the popular, street-closing Avenue Road stage, which recently played host to artists such as Ashanti and BADBADNOTGOOD.
“The reality of taking a bare patch of grass and creating a concert venue is very expensive,” Grossman said. He declined to disclose the size of TD’s sponsorship, but said that corporate sponsors generally accounted for 30 to 40 per cent of the festival’s budget; in its most recent CRA filings, it reported total revenue of $2.3-million.
TD would not say why it had stopped its title sponsorship of some of Canada’s biggest jazz festivals after many years. “We have made changes to some of our sponsorships over time,” said Natasha Ferrari, the bank’s senior manager of corporate and public affairs, in an e-mail. “We continue to elevate and celebrate emerging artists and diverse voices through our direct support of 385 arts and culture organizations across Canada in 2024, including sponsorship of more than 55 music and cultural festivals.”
Corporate sponsors have turned their attention away from major arts sponsorships in the past decade, with their dollars flowing more frequently to sports and cause-oriented organizations.
Even after Bank of Nova Scotia gave the organizers of Toronto’s Contact Photography Festival 18 months’ notice that the 2024 edition would be its last as title sponsor, it took the festival until last month to find new “major” – not title – sponsors in Bank of Montreal and Power Corporation of Canada.
TD’s brand has been tightly intertwined with jazz across Canada for more than two decades – ever since public pushback and federal regulations prompted the cigarette brand du Maurier to stop its long-time title sponsorships around the turn of the millennium.
The bank’s years of sponsoring “really helped us grow,” Hutchinson said. “Obviously, we’re disappointed that they’re not able to continue the relationship, but we thank them for what they did.”
Both he and Grossman said they haven’t been able to find replacement title sponsors since TD gave them notice. Hutchinson said his team is now searching for sponsors with a more regional scope who might have been overlooked in the past, as well as individual patrons.
In December, the co-chairs of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival’s organizing body, Coastal Jazz, issued a public plea to fans acknowledging the consequences of TD’s 2022 exit.
Less sponsorship combined with rising costs and decreased overall arts funding “has compounded to be a very precarious landscape for arts organizations like Coastal Jazz,” they wrote, saying they’d had to cut costs by reducing the festival’s length, letting go of staff and reducing free programming. In turn, they sought direct donations: “Moving forward, the future of Coastal Jazz and the festival lies in the hands of our community.”
