The Detroit International Jazz Festival may be rescued from a financial abyss by a $10 million pledge from local heiress and jazz record label owner Gretchen Valade, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The annual Labor Day weekend jazz festival, one of Detroit's signature cultural events, has struggled to make ends meet the past five years, losing more than $1 million between 2000 and 2003 due to flat corporate support, administrative and marketing failings, and competition from the Chrysler Arts, Beats & Eats street fair in Pontiac. The gift from Valade, 80, would create a foundation dedicated solely to overseeing all aspects of the event, including programming, operations, marketing, and fundraising, and the foundation's $10 million endowment would ensure that the festival began each year with a $500,000 head start in funds — double the amount the festival has recently received from its main sponsors.

That's if the Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, which has produced the event since 1994, agrees to give up control of the event. Although the festival is Music Hall's highest-profile and most successful annual event, producing it has so strained its staff and financial resources that the center's core mission — presenting theater, music, and dance in a historic downtown theater — has suffered. Negotiations continue between Valade, the president of her company, and Music Hall's executive board.

Last spring, Valade, a descendent of the founder of Carhartt clothing company, rescued the foundering 2005 festival with a $250,000 cash donation that eventually grew to $500,000 — 42 percent of the event's $1.2 million budget — and another $100,000 in in-kind contributions from her company, Mack Avenue Records. Still, the event netted only $125,000, which included the final $325,000 of a multi-year grant from the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Festival artistic director Frank Malfitano, who has not played a direct role in the negotiations, said he approved of a self-sustaining foundation to ensure the festival's long-term viability. "This is a difficult economy in which to raise $1.5 million to produce a festival worthy of Detroit and comparable to the festival produced this past Labor Day weekend," he said.