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How is it that the biggest music festival in Canada is built around supposedly unpopular music?

Jazz, by any reckoning, is not a major force in the marketplace. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, sales for jazz recordings have been in decline for a decade, sliding to 1.1 per cent of the market last year (down from 3.4 per cent in 2001). Jazz Times, the biggest American jazz magazine, suspended publication earlier this month; Coda, Canada's premier jazz journal, suspended publication in January (although a new issue “will be announced shortly,” according to the Coda website). Perhaps the most startling news of all was that the JVC Jazz Festival was cancelled, ending a 37-year history in New York, the biggest jazz town in North America.

Yet at the same time, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal is not only celebrating its 30th anniversary, but expanding its role as Canada's biggest music festival. According to festival co-founder André Ménard, the festival has attracted millions of fans and pumped over a billion dollars into the Montreal economy over the last three decades; this year's festival alone is expected to attract 1.5 million visitors.

That the festival has made its mark on Montreal is undeniable. There is, for instance, the new Maison du Festival Rio Tinto Alcan, on Ste. Catherine just opposite the equally new Place des Festivals, two buildings that almost certainly would not exist were it not for the success of the jazz festival.

“ It is a music event put on by music fans for music fans. This, to me, is my biggest source of pride, that we have not lost perspective and are still excited by it. It's a big music party, first and foremost. ”— André Ménard

There are also less concrete examples. Take, for example, its impact on the city's cultural life. “As early as 1982, barely after the first referendum, the two big solitudes in Montreal really would not mingle at the same mass cultural events,” says Ménard, who co-founded FIJM with Alain Simard in 1979. “And they started doing it, on the French side of downtown! And then all the other ethnic communities got involved as well.”

But the festival's greatest legacy is strictly musical. It isn't just that FIJM has played host to the biggest names in jazz, from Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald to Oscar Peterson and Diana Krall.

“It is a music event put on by music fans for music fans,” says Ménard, who still attends between 300 to 400 concert performances each year. “This, to me, is my biggest source of pride, that we have not lost perspective and are still excited by it. It's a big music party, first and foremost.”

To get a sense of just how big a party, the FIJM anniversary is being celebrated with both a commemorative book and a DVD set. The splashy, coffee-table-ready picture book, titled Le festival sous les étoiles ( The Festival Under the Stars ), feels like a souvenir program for the festival to date. The DVD, dubbed Jazz Expressions: 30 Years of Great Music , is a bit more substantial, including a documentary on the festival, footage of Oscar Peterson's last concert in Montreal, and performances by Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and others.

For many jazz fans, however, what makes FIJM special isn't the big names so much as innovative programming such as the Invitation series. Launched in 1989 with a series of performances by bassist Charlie Haden, the idea is to provide fresh insight on familiar artists by offering them in multiple concerts, each with a different collaborator or backing band.

“To us, a festival brings to a city artists who do not come, or has them do things that they don't do normally,” explains Ménard. “We try to make the artists go out of their way. This is part of the fun of doing things differently.”

It's not just a matter of “doing things differently,” though. Ultimately, what has made FIJM such a success is a combination of insight and feel. Like any good hosts, Ménard and Simard try to anticipate what their guests will want, and do their best to ensure that the environment is as comfortable and welcoming as possible.

Meeting that first requirement is perhaps the trickiest. FIJM doesn't serve one audience, but several. Some of the audience are casual listeners at best; others are the sort of hard-core fans whom Ménard dubs “the jazz police.” How can any program possibly please everyone?

“There are two festivals, on top of one another – the outdoor and the indoor festivals,” says Ménard. The outdoor part is free, family friendly and mainstream. The indoor shows are ticketed, and organized into 17 different series, ranging from the Pleins Feux series, offering large-scale shows by Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck and Jeff Beck, to Jazz au Club, which will present the Bad Plus, Anat Cohen and Jill Barber in a nightclub setting.

“Each of the concert series are mini festivals,” says Ménard. “So it's a bunch of little festivals that add up to this big thing.”

Despite the huge crowds and steadily growing number of “music tourists” attending the festival, FIJM could not exist on ticket sales alone. “Half of the festival budget is taken by sponsors,” says Ménard. In the current economy, that could be a bit worrying, especially given that one of the festival's main sponsors is beleaguered automaker GM. “If they had declared bankruptcy, it would have been a problem for us,” admits Ménard, but things worked out. “We got paid in full,” he says, and though the company did not renew its contract, Ménard has only kind words.

“We've really had great years with them. They really accompanied our progress; they would never try to dictate.”

Not being beholden to advertisers is a key part of the FIJM feel, and the amount of space taken up by ads remains carefully controlled. “On the streets, it's a natural environment for advertisements,” says Ménard. “The concerts are free, and money don't grow on trees, so people understand that.

“But inside, we've never allowed it. In Europe, they have neon-lit signs in the backdrop, with the artist playing in front. We could have got some more money for exposure behind the major stars that play indoors, but we didn't think it was appropriate.”