DC Jazz’s Sumter Makes the Morning Sunny


Sunny Sumter, the executive director of the DC Jazz Festival, kicked off the Georgetowner’s second season of its Cultural Leadership Breakfast programs at the George Town Club on Oct. 8.

She came. She talked.

She sang.

A singing speaker is a first for this cultural speaker’s event, but it’s not a rare event for Sumter.  She started out as a singer, although  been with the festival, now in its 10th year,  almost from its beginning with founder Charles Fishman, who was Dizzy Gillespie’s manager for many years. Fishman noticed that Washington, D.C., which had a rich tapestry of jazz history to its name and an abundance of talented jazz musicians and singers, didn’t have a jazz festival worthy of the name and did something about it.  He founded the festival in 2005, and Sumter came on board three years later in 2008.

“Somebody said it might be a good idea if I sang something,” she said with a slight coy note to her voice on Oct. 8. As if somebody would have said no.  “All right then.”

She sang “Better Than Anything,” an upbeat—in tempo and feeling—1963 song by David Buckwheat and lyricist Bill Loughborough, and suddenly Sumter put on her jazz singer mantle, and with casual vibrancy waltzed through a song that, after many witty comparisons, comes up with the not unfamiliar notion that it’s love that’s better than anything.  The song has been sung and recorded by many legends, Lena Horne and Natalie Cole—with Diane Krall—among them, but for a small part of a sunny Thursday morning with sunlight streaming through the window, Sunny Sumter owned it.  She was better than anything.

Her singing revealed that this Washington lady once had aspirations to be a jazz singer and became one—and a very good one at that, moving from Visitation Prep to Duke Ellington School of the Arts to begin a career as a singer.  It’s worth talking about a little. In 1997, Washington Post jazz writer Mike Joyce, writing about her debut album “Getting to Know You” said that Sumter had “impressive interpretative gifts” and that her rendition of the Hoagy Carmichael song “Skylark” was “tender and lovely, very much the dreamy reverie it was intended to be.”

Sumter set out to be a singer much to the dismay of her father, but the pleasure of her mother, who always came to hear her sing. Yet it was obvious that Sumter wanted more and wasn’t content to live the life of a jazz singer alone, with all of its uncertainties that don’t always reward pure talent the way they should. She got a degree from Howard University in the business of music, focusing on jazz, and she worked at the Aspen Institute, the National for Teaching Entrepreneurship, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Associates, the Rhythm and Blues Foundation and the Trellis Fund. She’s been executive director of the DC Jazz Festival since 2010.  She lives in Kensington, which she “absolutely loves,” and she’s raising two young children, a daughter Layla, 14, and a son, Kobi, 9.

“Sarah Vaughn was my idol,” she said. “Hearing her sing made me want to be that person.  I’ve never really stopped singing, and maybe one day, you never know.”

The singing thing gives her persona an authentic jazzy gloss, as well as an outgoing, attractive and appealing persona.  It seeps into the way Sumter talks about jazz, by way of  intimate experience. During what seemed like the relatively short time she spoke, she talked about the importance of jazz as a Washington cultural contribution, about the many venues and players, the musicians, how big the world of jazz really was all over the world.  “This is our music, this city’s music,”  she said.  “And we as a festival are trying to make it a part of the regular, day-to-day life of the city.  Education is a key component to everything we try to do.  We have the Charles Fishman Young Artists Series, we have the afternoon school program at Jazz at Sitar and we have our own education program with the public school system.”

“We’re still growing—the first festival had something like 12 concerts, now we have 125,” Sumter continued. “Our Jazz in the Hoods program is now in 16 neighborhoods, and we’re doing cooperative things with all sort of venues.

“The thing is, we want people to come to D.C. for this festival, for the jazz, all the year around.  Jazz is always changing. It’s built for change, in all of its numbers and songs.  The heart of jazz is improvisation, but it’s open to almost any kind of music.  We had Common, the rapper last year. We are doing the same thing everybody is thinking about—finding out what the new audiences wants.  They like Esperanza Spalding, who was a big hit last year. They love Trombone Shorty.”

It’s clear that Sumter wants the festival to be an identifier of the city, jazz as a city’s heart and soul. Fishman once noted that every city of note had a jazz festival—why not here?  “Look at the history here—the Lincoln Theater, Howard, Duke Ellington and others,” she said. “We had our own stars, like Shirley Horn, who were respected everywhere, but in some ways it didn’t resonate the way it should.”

Sumter presents well, reflective of the time when jazz stars were sent out into the world as jazz ambassadors—Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ellington out and about in Europe and Africa and Moscow.

“It’s our own invented, purely American music,” she said. “I think we all recognize now how international jazz has become. I know we know this at the festival, and we will reflect that, for sure.  Jazz has become an incredibly diverse experience.”

Listening to her talk, you hear her connect the dots into making Washington a jazz town every bit as jazzy as New Orleans, which still lives on its musical reputation.  “We can do that,” she said. The festival is assembling—the schools, the neighborhoods, places like the stellar Bohemian Caverns,  the Hamilton, Blues Alley, Twins, the new performance site for the last two years at the bustling waterfront site.

She’s got all the talking points for a shining city on a hill that also swings.  But underneath the talking points and drawing plans, there remains Sunny Sumter, scatting, taking wing at a note’s notice.  Better than anything.

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