George Wein (pictured left) has teamed up with tele-communications giant Verizon to produce the Verizon Music Festival in three cities this summer. The new festival will feature jazz along with other types of music and will be held Aug. 8-11 in New York, Sept. 28-Oct. 2 in Los Angeles and Oct. 24-27 in Tampa, Florida. For Verizon, formerly Bell Atlantic, the new festival means that it will no longer sponsor the two-year-old Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival, produced by Knitmedia. (Knitmedia will not produce a summer jazz festival this year.) And it means that Wein, who also produces the long-running JVC Jazz Festival in Manhattan, has a monopoly on New York jazz festivals, at least for now.
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