Plus I’ll let your ears feast on some of the non-client sounds I’ve been digging lately.

It’s ironic that on the one hand, I told you that traditional press outreach may not work like it used to, all while trying to censor myself from talking about my PR clients. When in fact, you, dear reader, are the intended audience for all the politicking and convincing I try to do with critics.1

The media is no longer doing “its job,” because it no longer has a job to do!!! The remaining folks giving you musical commentary, critique or recommendations, if you’re even able to find their work, are doing it for supplemental income, or out of pure passion, a compulsion to share their taste and educate a broader public. Are there even five full-time working music critics, who don’t also post on Substack for money, teach college courses and freelance up the wazoo?

The majority of what comes to my inbox as far as potential projects, I turn down, either because I don’t feel I can do it justice or it doesn’t align with my taste or the prevailing musical zeitgeist of this cultural moment.

I’ve also included a playlist of songs I’ve really been enjoying. Some of them I referenced on The Listening Room by from his ‘Stack, . David is an expert in streaming, having previously worked at Spotify, but his own listening habits reach far and wide and he is dedicated to musical discovery, as evidenced by previous posts in his Listening Room series.

THE CLIENTS

August 14, 2026
Gaia Wilmer Large Ensemble featuring Mônica Salmaso - Parabólico: Reflections on Gilberto Gil, Volume I — (Sunnyside Records)

Sao Paolo-based saxophonist, big band leader and arranger Gaia Wilmer has spent years reimagining the songbooks of major Brazilian composers. Her new one turns to Gilberto Gil, the first of a planned two-volumes, out August 14 on Sunnyside Records. The record features the great Brazilian vocalist Mônica Salmaso on arrangements Gaia wrote specifically for her. If you want a preview, Gaia put together a playlist of the original Gil recordings that inspired it, and there’s also a survey of her own catalogue if you’re new to her work. The above linked mini-documentary is a must-watch.

Save it.

Recommended if you like: Mônica Salmaso, Jacques Morelenbaum, Marisa Monte, John Hollenbeck, Frank Carlberg, Maria Schneider

August 14, 2026
John Hollenbeck & Hot Club Jazz Orchestra — Peace and Justice (Flexatonic Records)

Drummer/composer John Hollenbeck reunites with Portugal’s Hot Club Jazz Orchestra for Peace and Justice, a large-ensemble album shaped by a Kyiv commission halted by Russia’s invasion/ Originally conceived around Hollenbeck’s arrangements of Ukrainian music for curator Olha Bekenshtein, the record still carries that spirit in two anchoring Ukrainian pieces, including “Red Shades,” his arrangement of the 1914 resistance anthem “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna.” It’s out August 14 on Hollenbeck’s nonprofit label Flexatonic Records.

Recommended if you like: Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Bill Frisell, So Percussion, music for wind ensemble

August 21, 2026
Linda May Han Oh & Melissa Aldana — Beneath Lifted Skies (Biophilia Records)

Beneath Lifted Skies is an intimate and expansive dialogue between bassist Linda May Han Oh and saxophonist Melissa Aldana, two singular modern-era jazz artists who here turn to the totality of recorded jazz history, not as an act of nostalgia but as a means of discovery and re-discovery, both for themselves and the audience. Through a program of standards, lesser-appreciated bebop gems, free improvisations and solo meditations, the album honors the musicians who shaped the language of jazz while revealing new possibilities within what Oh and Aldana have inherited. Stripped to the vulnerable clarity of a duo setting, each performance unfolds as a conversation grounded in deep listening, trust, and mutual curiosity, balancing reverence for tradition with a restless spirit of exploration.

Recommended if you like: Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, duos of Charlie Haden & Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Jim Hall & Ron Carter, Dave Holland & John Scofield

August 21, 2026
Skinny Hightower - Feels Like Destiny (self-released)

Feels Like Destiny by Wichita, Kansas born and raised drummer, composer, and producer Skinny Hightower was written and recorded over a 24-week period. Hightower plays nearly every instrument himself, except for flute. The songs display a early fusion-like technical prowess that doesn’t sidestep joy and playfulness. The album draws from the spiritual warmth of Stevie Wonder’s golden period, the rhythmic sophistication of Steely Dan, and Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi-era fire. Across the record, he blends Steve Gadd-like precision on the drums, Anthony Jackson-esque bass language, Stevie Wonder’s iconic clavinet textures and Herbie Hancock’s Rhodes vocabulary with a George Duke Mothers of Invention flair. These elements weave into his own narrative and personality as a creative artist, resulting in a sound that honors his fusion lineage while pushing it into the future.

Recommended if you like: Stevie Wonder, Cory Henry, Lettuce, Jaco Pastorius

Pre-Save

August 28, 2026
Kelly Green — Eat Your Greens (Green Soul / La Reserve)

Pianist and vocalist Kelly Green pays tribute to her mentors Mulgrew Miller and Harold Mabern on her new album Eat Your Greens, a lively mix of classic standards and wry originals. Green’s core quartet — bassist Luca Soul Rosenfeld, drummer Evan Hyde and Thomas on flute — is joined by tenor saxophonist Scott Robinson, with guest turns from Steve Wilson, Wycliffe Gordon and Wallace Roney Jr. Standouts include a duet with Gordon on “When You’re Smiling” and a solo-piano take on Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.” The release date is August 28.

Recommended if you like: Annie Ross, Mel Torme, Benny Golson and Cedar Walton-esque classic hard bop harmony and feel.

PERSONAL TIME

Just below is a heavily edited video conversation between David Ecker and myself about me and some of my recent listening obsessions. The playlist tracks are linked below – to Bandcamp, when possible and YouTube, when not.

Please enjoy some tunes you may or may not have heard.

Listen to the Playlist

Enjoy your listening! And BUY THE MUSIC IF YOU CAN!!!

Danny Melnick wears many hats, but at his core, he’s what used to be called an impresario, a person who organizes, manages, and often finances public entertainment events such as concerts and theater productions.

His responsibilities include booking venues, securing financial backing or taking on the financial risks on his own, hiring talent (musicians, stage hands, caterers, videographers, audio engineers), overseeing or outsourcing marketing, advertising, social media and the like to drive ticket sales.

In this regard, Danny follows a model similar to that of his longtime mentor, George Wein, of Festival Productions, where he spent a good 25 years of his career.

He founded Absolutely Live Entertainment in Fall of 2007, when he left Wein to go out on his own. He manages the band Artemis. He previously managed the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, was a tour manager, a booking agent at The Kurland Agency (f.k.a. Ted Kurland Associates). He has booked and produced the Saratoga Jazz Festival at Saratoga Performing Arts Center for 30 years, and previously programmed the Newport Jazz Festival and the JVC Jazz Festival-New York, among many other editions in other cities. Danny has produced about 120 festivals, by his count.

He also produces concerts and tours for all kinds of occasions in jazz, folk music, Latin music, global music and produces benefits for organizations like Monterey Jazz Festival, JusticeAid, Blue Note Records and many more. He has programmed Carnegie Hall’s Shape of Jazz series since its inauguration in 2003, which is underwritten by the George & Joyce Wein Foundation.

I am publishing this interview this week because on Sunday August 9, Danny is opening his rolodex of basically every major living jazz musician who is available and willing, to pay tribute to the late Jack DeJohnette, the Chicago-born pianist and drummer, slightly underrated bandleader and sideman to some of the most consequential musicians on planet earth (Miles Davis, Charles Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny, and on and on) from 1965 to 2023.1

Jack passed away in October 2025, just following an archival release Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs from his own archives of McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, with himself on drums, recorded live at Slugs’ Saloon with DeJohnette on drums from 1966.

His death leaves a massive hole in the lives of his collaborators and fans, who came to love his elastic beat, his unmistakable sound and an uncanny sensitivity to whomever he was backing.2

The lineup of musicians Danny assembled with Jack’s widow, Lydia, is astounding. It’s all going down this coming Sunday at the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston, NY. Four generations of friends and fans will join together to bid Jack a fond fairwell, while supporting two local charities that are important to the DeJohnettes.

Ticket info is here.

Matt Merewitz (TSP): The last time we did this and lost it to technology problems, we focused more on Saratoga, but this is more general. I was reading your updated bio. Congrats on getting your website back up.

Danny Melnick (DM): I have to edit that even more. It needs more love, but we’re getting there.

TSP: I wanted to go back and ask you: I think you grew up in Long Island, is that right? And you were going into the city frequently to see what kind of shows when you were in middle school and high school?

DM: Yeah, East Meadow, I was really first getting onto the Long Island Railroad with my friends during my high school years. I saw a bunch of shows at the Nassau Coliseum and some things like that a little earlier, but I was totally into classic rock and progressive rock. Going into the city was really to Madison Square Garden for the most part, and seeing Rush and Genesis and Elton John and Billy Joel and those big types of groups that are pretty much all still out there doing what they’re doing all these years later.

When I started driving, I was going around Long Island and going to shows. The first real jazz or jazz-adjacent show, I saw Oregon in this place in Huntington, Long Island, and that was life-changing for me. To see those guys play—Ralph Towner, Trilok Gurtu, who was in the band at that point—I was completely knocked out. I was like, I need more of whatever that is.

TSP: About 1983?

DM: It was a little later. I graduated high school in ’85, so this would have been ’84–’85. When I got my driver’s license, probably in ’84, so it was ’84–’85. That was it.

During those days, Jones Beach Amphitheater was cranking along. Then I went to college in Washington D.C. at American University and started really getting into jazz a lot more by that point, and did what I could in D.C. as a college student to hear music. I interned at Blues Alley my whole senior year.

TSP: And was Ralph [Camilli] running the club then?

DM: Ralph was there. Yes, he was running the club. I worked for this guy Tony Wheelock, who I’m still friends with. Also Bob Israel and Mike Jaworek.

TSP: Can you remember what the musical fare was at that time?

DM: My great memories of that time there were Tony Williams, Joe Williams, Buddy Miles’ Band of Gypsies, [John] Scofield. I feel like that year when I was there, Shirley Horn was there, Dizzy Gillespie certainly was there then.

TSP: I want to ask you: why not pursue the classic rock angle of things, given your history, as opposed to getting into it through jazz? Is it just happenstance and that’s how it worked out, or…?

DM: I actually made a very conscious decision about this. When I was in college and really thinking about a career, I knew that I wanted to work in the music business somehow. I had worked at a record store when I was in high school on Long Island at Record World in Roosevelt Field Mall. Then I went to D.C., and my roommate was a drummer. He had a band, and I was mixing sound a little bit and trying to help them get gigs on campus and around D.C.

Then I did the Wembley Stadium internship my junior year, and then Blues Alley, and by then I was really into jazz. But I said to myself: you can pursue getting a job at a record label or maybe at a radio station or something in the rock and pop world and see how that goes, or maybe you could get another job in New York City when you come back home, in jazz, like I was doing at Blues Alley.

I really loved the music, and I felt that the pop and rock world didn’t need me. I literally thought: what are Bruce Springsteen and Madonna going to do with me? They already have all of these people doing all of these things. I wanted to pursue my passion for jazz and my interest in live presentation, whatever that meant to me.

I didn’t really have a clear understanding then about George Wein or Festival Productions or any of that stuff. I was really thinking about clubs. I started to meet and learn about some of the booking agents and managers, and a lot of them were based in New York City.

When I came home back to Long Island after I graduated college, I started trying to get interviews in New York City. I wound up getting a job at the Blue Note, and I was psyched because I really felt that I could do something cool and meaningful with jazz.

TSP: So you’re at the Blue Note. How long until you find your way to George from there?

DM: I worked at the Blue Note from August of ’89 until April of ’90. While I was working there, Jeff Levenson was the jazz correspondent at Billboard magazine, and he was a consultant at the Blue Note. Jeff was around all the time acting as a consultant, talking about the artists and stuff like that.

One thing led to another, and he told me about George Wein, about the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, about Newport Jazz Festival, and I was like, I want to work for them. That’s what I want. He said, “Maybe you should write him a letter and see what happens.”

So I did. I literally wrote George a letter. I think Jeff may have proofread it for me, and I sent it to him cold in March of ’90. They hired me. It was a three‑month position to be the JVC New York box office manager for all the shows for JVC New York in the 1990 festival. They said, “When this is done, you are done. We’re not guaranteeing you employment after this festival is over, after you do the wrap‑up in early July.” And then I never left, basically.

TSP: When I read a lot of your bio and it says you’ve produced tours, what does it mean to produce a tour?

DM: Between ’91 and ’96, working for George, I was on tour as a tour manager and assistant numerous times throughout Europe on JVC‑sponsored tours with Ray Charles and Buddy Guy and B.B. King and Maceo Parker.

I did Carnegie Hall Jazz Band tours to South America, Mexico, and Japan. I also worked with John Phillips on the Newport Jazz Festivals in Madarao, Japan, which existed in those days on the west coast of the main island of Japan.

JVC had an exclusive contract with Festival Productions Inc., to not only sponsor jazz festivals around the world but also some tours. John was the main liaison for Festival Productions. I worked on JVC festivals in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Newport, Toronto, Amsterdam, London, and they did stuff in other markets, that I was not involved with. We did these tours in ’93, ’94, ’95 particularly in Europe. I also went to Japan with John four times to work on festivals that he was overseeing, and that was totally unbelievable.

TSP: What else is involved in producing a tour?

DM: I’ve done a ton of tour production over the years, and a large majority of it has been for special projects—whether it’s an all‑star band, whether it’s celebrating the history of Blue Note Records or the Monterey Jazz Festival or the Newport Jazz Festival, or the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album.

In every one of those cases, those are one‑off touring projects celebrating a particular situation. We’re putting together all‑star bands. I’m working with a booking agent. The booking agent is selling the project to the presenters around the world, and I am managing the entirety of that project.

I’m getting agreements with all of the musicians that they are going to do this tour during these dates for X amount of dollars. I am overseeing the contracts that the agents are doing with the presenters and making sure that everything is correct with those contracts, making sure that the routing of the tour is practical and logical, and that we can get from point A to point B to point C.

I would be hiring a tour manager, a sound engineer. I’m overseeing travel, whether it’s flights or renting vans.

TSP: The booking agent is not handling advancing. You’re handling that.

DM: They book the dates. They oversee the contracts with the presenters. They get deposits from the presenters, and the tour producer does everything else.

The idea for me as a tour producer is that I have to be very excited about this project. I have to feel that this project can sell. I have to feel that the project can sell for a certain amount of money that will make money for everybody involved, and particularly for me.

I’ve had a lot of offers and opportunities during my career to produce tours, and I look at these things on paper and think: this is a cool project, but if we get all these musicians, this is what they’re probably going to earn every night. We have all these other expenses. The agency is going to take a commission, and I don’t think there’s going to be enough money for me to do all this work.

I’ll go to the agent and say, “Listen, I’ve run this budget. I need you to get on average $20,000 a show for me to be able to take this on.” If they say, “Yeah, absolutely, we can do that,” then I’m in. If they say, “Well, it’s really like a $12,500 show, maybe in some major markets on a Friday or Saturday we could get $15,000,” I’m out.

I would say to the agents sometimes, “If you think that’s what the fee is going to be, would you take a reduced commission?” Sometimes they say yes. Very likely they’ll say no, and if that’s the case, then I am out. Maybe they do it themselves, or somebody else could do it, or they don’t do it at all.

TSP: In the modern era where the fees are a bit lower, and things have gotten different—when you do for Monterey, does the festival hire you with their own funds to pay you, is it not incumbent upon “the market” to pay you?

DM: No. The last bunch of Monterey tours that I did, they spent money on rehearsals and filming the band and creating promotional materials, publicity, marketing, branding, and outreach for the concerts through social media. But all of the risk at the end of the day was on me to get those tours off the ground.

TSP: And these sell like what? Give me a ballpark fee for one of those bands. Are they making $15,000 a night? $20,000 a night?

DM: Some of those tours were a long time ago. The tour with Potter and Ambrose and Dee Dee and McBride and those guys was like 2013, I think. Even in those days, that band was going out at performing arts centers earning $25,000, $30,000, $35,000 a night. The reason why it was such good money was because they really sold tickets, and the presenters needed shows to be able to sell tickets. Those types of shows sell. They’re not hardcore jazz fans necessarily, but there’s enough names that they can sell to the various constituencies and do okay.

The Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour is an appealing marketing hook. We did a lot of Newport tours, and it’s good for jazz, I think, and good for the musicians too. It was a stepping stone for a lot of these artists to go out and do these types of things and get in front of thousands of people a night and then come back eight months later and play a club show or be on the second stage of a festival, and people would know about them.

TSP: Let’s go back to Festival Productions. You do that stint. You go to Ted Kurland for two years. You decide that’s not for you. Then you go back to Festival Productions, right?

DM: Yes.

TSP: After you went back, what was your role then?

DM: I had a much more senior role and reported directly to George Wein. While I was at Kurland, George’s longtime vice president of artistic programming and senior talent buyer, Marie St. Louis—whom he and Joyce were friends with since childhood in Boston—was diagnosed with cancer and was very ill.

After some back and forth, George said, “Marie’s sick, and I don’t know that she’s going to be able to come back to work. I want you to come back here, and I want you to book the artists for JVC New York, Newport, Saratoga.”

I felt horrible about Marie. She was one of my great mentors. I came back in October of ’98 and booked a lot of the artists for the ’99 festivals. I worked in Philly and Pittsburgh and produced those Mellon Jazz Festivals for quite a few years during those days.3

TSP: What are the most important things you learned from George and from people who worked at Festival Productions?

DM: It was an unbelievable, brilliant, lucky time for me to be with him and all those people: Bob Jones, John Phillips, Art Edelstein, Deborah Ross, John Schreiber, and all these other people who had such incredible knowledge and depth of what was going on in the music and the business.

The most important thing that I learned from George was that as much as you love the music, as much as you love the musicians, as much as you want these great artists to be heard and to be presented and to be loved by the audience, if you have no business skills and no understanding of how to manage finances and budgets and how to do these concerts and festivals in the most efficient and wise way, it will all fall apart in two seconds.

This love that you have for these artists is all going to go away because they’re not going to have any opportunities to play on anything that you’re doing, because everything that you’re doing is going to vanish. The mixture of the music and the business, and understanding the responsibility of the business, is such an incredibly critical and driving part of my entire life.

The only reason why you and I are talking today, and I’ve been in business for myself since 2007, is because I understand finances and budgets. I’m not the best budgetary person on the planet. I don’t make the most money. There are things that I do that have lost money or made a little bit of money. It’s a roller coaster.

One of the things that John Phillips said to me early on in my career with him at Festival Productions was: as friendly as you may get with the musicians, and as much as you may honor and love them, you have to remind yourself and constantly know that you are not one of them.

He said: If you’re going to work on the business side of this environment and this community, that is your role. You are the man. What you’re doing—tour production, festival production, band management, publicity, running a club, whatever it is—they are the musicians. They have a culture, a communication, an understanding of each other, a life that they live on and off the stage with their instruments and their music, and you are not one of them.

The reason why you need to know that and remember that is because one way or another you’re likely going to have a business relationship with those musicians. You’re going to hire them to play a gig. They’re going to be in somebody else’s band on the festival. They’re going to call you and want advice. They’re going to want something from you. They’re going to want to know why you don’t book them all the time. There’s that little line of separation and cushion that you have to keep between you and the cats, because that’s the reality of your role.

In Saratoga, I have 22 sets. We could count together now 750 amazing bands that are touring the world in jazz or connected to jazz—Latin, Blues, R&B, whatever—that I could book at Saratoga. A lot of these bands are friends of mine, who played the festival 15–20 years ago and I haven’t been able to bring them back for whatever reason. I have to make these decisions and book the festival for the festival. I can’t just book friends.

TSP: I’ve always noticed that at Saratoga, you’ve struck a balance between pop‑adjacent and jazz for the insiders. Obviously there’s some crossover on the main stage having lesser‑known names, but you’re striking an incredible balancing act, especially in 2026 and the years leading up to now, because jazz is just not broadly popular unless you’re talking about Kamasi, Shabaka, which are recent phenomena. It was either you were a legend, or you came up through the Young Lion pipeline.

Then there was a period of time where jazz wasn’t producing any major stars with draw, and you have to strike this difficult balance between artistic coolness and selling tickets. Your headliner this year was Patti LaBelle, right?

DM: Right. And The Revivalists on Sunday. To that point, Marie St. Louis, who was booking Saratoga for George starting in 1978 up until 1999, did that before my time. Back in the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s they had James Brown, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and other fabulous crossover musicians.

When you look back at those lineups, you see a tremendous mixture. They bordered soul and R&B to jazz in the proper way so that the audience would come and learn about jazz artists. I’ve continued that all these years. The audience kind of expects that. A lot of old‑timers still come and want bebop and some sort of left‑of‑center avant‑garde. Every year I try everything I can within those 22 sets to book the most diverse yet hip festival I can.

The truth is, I’d like 50 sets, because there are so many bands I want to book. If I was able to layer more and more bands and more and more music onto a festival like that, I would be able to lean into more styles.

TSP: As a manager now, I’m starting to see the very real reality of—what is your draw? Can you sell this many tickets? If you can’t, then until you can, we can’t book you, unless you have private funding that can shore up all the risk that’s involved with running an event. That’s what the subsidized PAC model is: until you have that draw, you cannot play.

DM: It’s very sad and very true. The weird thing about it for me, watching all of this and being involved in it, is that there are artists, particularly young artists coming up, but even artists now in their 40s and 50s who are in that lost middle period where they’re not a legend, but they’re also not the new young hot thing.

In some markets, in some situations, they do well. Some of these bands can go to areas of Europe and do really well, or they can do well in the Northeast.

It all comes down to whom I want to book and whom I can get. There are plenty of times when I make offers and I can’t get the artists that I want because they’re touring in Europe, or they’re recording that week, or they’re not working, or there are three festivals going on the same week.

In late June, we work together a lot in the Northeast to try to help each other out between Rochester, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and some others. But we’re up against Europe starting earlier and earlier, and bands touring all over the world. They could be in Asia that week. They could be in California that week. They could be at the Vanguard.

I’ve had situations where an agent has called and said, “Jed made an offer for so‑and‑so two years from now at the end of June. It would be on top of Saratoga Jazz Festival weekend. Do you have a sense?” And I’m like, take the Vanguard. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say, but take the Vanguard.

MM: Let me ask you a question about Newport because it’s in my head. I just got the app yesterday and I looked at the schedule. Newport is doing the same thing you’re talking about in Saratoga, maybe taking it to a further extreme stylistically and also for a younger audience. They’re really pushing the envelope of the under‑30 market.

I look at the lineup. I see four to six acts a day that I would consider in my jazz wheelhouse, and then eight to ten that are not jazz at all. I think about the years between, say, ’99 and 2008—those years of Newport—and I think you were booking those years.

DM: I did all those years.

TSP: They were very full. It felt like—my first Newport in 2008, I saw Aretha Franklin close out the festival and it was packed. The whole field was packed. But after that year, there were a several years where George was bringing in Henry Threadgill and Amir ElSaffar and Vijay Iyer and Rudresh and whatever, and he was trying to make it more artistic, but it wasn’t selling out.

What do you see happening there?

DM: A few things happened. I did Newport from ’99 until I left in 2007, and then came back. George asked me to come back when the guys who bought George out—they failed after a couple of years—and George got Newport back.

George owned Festival Productions Inc. up until 2007. It was a for‑profit company. We did the 50th anniversary festival in 2004, and in that festival we really stopped doing the R&B and soul stuff and the smooth jazz stuff that we were doing earlier and went back and did an unbelievable, phenomenal, epic jazz festival—straight‑up jazz.

After that was done, George was like, “Jazz is alive. I want to focus more on jazz. Yes, I know that we have to book some of these crossover bands still, but I want more and more great jazz at Newport, and whatever happens will happen, and I’m willing to do this.” So he did it for a few more years.

Then he sold the company. Those guys floundered for a couple of years and failed, and he retained the Newport Jazz Festival and the Newport Folk Festival trademarks.

When he started Newport up again around 2010, he created the nonprofit Newport Festivals Foundation, put a board together, put a lot of his own money into this thing, and went forward with Newport Jazz and Newport Folk as non-profit events under the auspices of this foundation with a board. That changed everything. It changed the whole financial picture.

He brought me back as an independent contractor to book and produce Newport Jazz, which I did for seven years through 2017. In those days George was still with us, and we were doing a lot of jazz: Amir ElSaffar, John Zorn Masada Marathon, Henry Threadgill, Rudresh Mahanthappa, on and on.

George was totally into it. He wanted those musicians to be heard, to have a big platform. In those days, he knew that it was his personal final hurrah in music, and he wanted the hip, young, cool, interesting, forward‑thinking, creative jazz artists to be heard in Newport because he wanted the rest of the world to say, “If Newport’s booking Mary Halvorson and Dafnis Prieto, we should be doing that also.”

It did help these artists a lot. It did move a lot of these artists forward because he gave them this very prominent platform to be seen and heard in the context of Ron Carter Quartet, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter Quartet, Dave Holland.

After I left, and he eventually passed on a few years later with COVID and all of that, Jay Sweet—and I haven’t been there in these years—has a mandate from the board to sell this thing out like they do the folk festival. The way they’ve been doing it has been to spend a tremendous amount of money on talent and to book all of this non‑jazz stuff: R&B and hip‑hop and soul and funk and all this interesting stuff that is jazz‑adjacent.

It’s working. They have great branding. They’re selling to a younger crowd. They know that they have a capacity limit at Newport. One of the most fascinating things about Newport is that it’s not a very large event. They max out at like 9,000 people a day.

They’re doing three days, three stages. They have all these different groups that they can present over those three days on the three stages—many more names than I can do in Saratoga because I have two stages and two days. They’re spending the money, and they’re doing this cool‑kid stuff, and it’s working.

TSP: I do feel to some extent that it’s at the expense of the number of jazz acts. They’ve got Little Simz, Maya Delilah, Lake Street Dive, The Dip—this is just not jazz. They’re calling it jazz, but it’s not jazz. But the thing is—it’s fun. I had fun seeing Noname the other year and Brittany Howard. Newport did that for a long time with different names, and they’re doing it again.

There’s honestly plenty of jazz—Charles Lloyd, Braxton Cook, Chief Adjuah, Tia Fuller, Chicago Underground Duo, Greg Bryant’s thing—but most of the other stuff is R&B or jazz-rap or whatever. And it sometimes feels like the jazz is playing second fiddle to pop. On one hand, that’s helping sell tickets. On the other hand, it’s just different and the people who run it now are decidedly not jazz people. What I personally have to come to terms with is that, things are going to be different when new people take over.

DM: As time has moved on and George has passed, and the structure is what it is now, that’s the way they’re doing it. This is where they’re at right now. Jay is leading, and he’s selling out these two events well in advance, and he’s appealing to a younger crowd. They made a decision—with the board’s approval and direction—that this is the way it’s going to go.

I personally am not very interested in it, and I don’t love the whole musical combination and structure of what they’re doing, but I do respect it and I understand it. I’m a little envious because my whole thing with Saratoga—as awesome and successful as it is—I always want more: more sets, more stages, more days. I have a full understanding of what I’m dealing with.

TSP: I mean on the last day you’ve got the Bad Plus Farewell Tour, Michael Mayo, Marquis Hill, Nduduzo Makhathini, Sullivan Fortner, Charlie Hunter, Flea playing with serious musicians, Fonville/Fribush, and then you’ve got Lake Street Dive. I love Lake Street Dive. That’s a great booking because people who like jazz would like Lake Street Dive.

They’ve got Thundercat, who is a trained “jazz musician” playing funk. So they’re not completely “selling out,” so to speak. Honestly, I do think that Nate Smith kind of has the juice. He’s hip enough and he’s in with enough legit jazz musicians that he can say, okay, let’s do Vulfpeck (his collaborators), let’s do whatever. I’m sure he only really got six or eight slots getting involved as late in the game as he did, but it feels like a better balance this year. I’m more excited to go this year than I was to go the last two years.

DM: That’s really good, and I hope if you’re going you have an amazing time there. I will say—and I think you know this—that they did a lot of these bookings before Nate Smith was brought in. Nate’s energy and his direction hopefully will be seen very strongly in 2027, and we’ll see how it goes.

I think the fact that Newport is thriving is really good for the entire community and the entire world. We all want every festival to be as successful as it can be because it’s good for the whole thing.

TSP: How did your work with Steve Milliken and JusticeAid begin?

DM: The quick answer is: Josh Feigenbaum, who’s a very good friend of mine who’s been involved in the music for quite a few years.

He called me one day about 12 years ago and said, “I have a fishing buddy who’s a retired judge from Washington D.C. who’s creating this organization called JusticeAid, and they are going to start doing concerts to raise money for criminal justice reform. I told him about you, and he needs help. You should take his call and talk to him. You guys will make a deal, and you’ll produce a bunch of concerts for him. Hopefully it’ll all work out.”

Here we are, 10–11 years later. We’ve raised millions and millions of dollars for all of these incredibly important human rights and criminal justice issues, and it’s been an amazing run for me and JusticeAid. Milliken is a genius, beautiful, lovely guy.

In a few days, I’m driving up to Maine to produce a Rhiannon Giddens concert in Bar Harbor, Maine, where Steve has an old family house. We’re doing it at the Criterion Theatre, which is an 800‑seat theater. It’s sold out, and we’re going to raise more money for the causes that JusticeAid supports. It’s been an incredible run.

We have a show coming up at the end of September with Pedrito Martinez in Washington D.C. at The Hamilton. I love working with them. They’re a great group and great board.

TSP: Tell me about all the folk‑adjacent stuff that you’re doing now. How did that come into your lap? You did a big Dylan tribute at City Winery. Then you did Béla Fleck and Sam Bush—this big bluegrass show at the tail end of the pandemic. Were you surprised to have gotten that call, or was that stuff you were deeply involved in for years?

DM: I’ve had a great relationship with Béla Fleck for many years. He’s played Saratoga, Newport, and so many other things that I’ve worked on. He’s booked by The Kurland Agency, and Jamie Ziefert, who handles the Northeast for Kurland, is a very good friend. We do tons of business together.

Even though it was this pandemic thing, he called me and said, “Listen, Béla put out this bluegrass record,” which I knew about. He said in January of 2022, “There’s this singular weekend in January where he’s able to get all of the musicians that were on the album to do the Ryman in Nashville, and he really wants to play Carnegie Hall in New York. I want you to take this show on and do this.”

It was going to be Tony Trischka and Billy Strings and Chris Thile and Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle and all these people. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” He said, “No. We can make a financial deal that won’t put you out, but you have to take a risk. You have to put the tickets on sale. You’ve got to do the show.”

TSP: So you rented Carnegie Hall yourself?

DM: Yes. I rented Carnegie Hall. It was a Sunday. They were going to do Ryman Thursday/Friday or Friday/Saturday, and then Carnegie on Sunday. Béla guaranteed the ensemble, the whole show, all the names, and I booked it and presented it.

We put it out there in the fall of ’21 and it sold out immediately. Then Omicron hit and it was whacked. They played the Ryman shows. They came to New York. They had to get tested backstage. We all had to wear masks. Everybody in the audience was masking. A bunch of people we allowed to get refunds because they were sick or scared to come to the venue.

But we did it, and it was basically sold out at that point, and it was unbelievable.

TSP: Obviously you continue to do the Shape of Jazz series at Carnegie Hall? You get four a year?

DM: Three to four a year, depending on what Carnegie is doing. This coming season it’s only three—’26–’27—but they already told me that for ’27–’28 it will be four.

TSP: Who are you doing this coming year?

DM: This coming season we have Lakecia Benjamin. We have esperanza spalding in a special project because she’s their Perspectives artist and is doing four or five things at Carnegie Hall throughout the year. Then we’re doing this amazing all‑star show in March of 2027 for Billy Childs’ 70th birthday.

That’s going to be fantastic. I’m so excited and proud to be presenting Billy Childs at Zankel because he is definitely an artist deserving wider recognition, even at 70 years old. It’s a 70th birthday concert featuring Billy Childs on piano, Sean Jones on trumpet, Steve Wilson on saxophones, Matt Penman on bass, and Ari Hoenig on drums. It’s going to be really cool.

TSP: There was one other thing that I wanted to plug.

DM: I have the Jack DeJohnette Memorial.

TSP: Right! When did you get the idea or the go-ahead to do a Jack DeJohnette send-off? Did Lydia [DeJohnette] ask you to arrange it?

DM: Lydia had the idea to do this event for Jack. Jack passed away in late October, and she and I spoke about a month later, after Thanksgiving. I met her at her house outside of Woodstock, and Pat Metheny was there, and we had Terri Lyne Carrington on a Zoom call. She had already asked Pat and Terri Lyne if they would help with the artistic vision of the event, and asked me if I would produce the whole thing — the venue, the logistics, the finances, all of that. We decided right there that we would do this on Jack’s birth date, August 9.

TSP: Why do it in Kingston vs. the city? Why was this region so important to Jack but also the music of his generation?

DM: Lydia really wanted to do it in Kingston, or up here in Woodstock, because Jack lived here since the late 1960s with her — they got married in 1967 — and she did not want to do it in the city.

She specifically wanted to celebrate him in this area that he loved so much. He had played a number of concerts at UPAC in Kingston. So when I got in touch with them about this, not only did they have the date available, but they gave us the building for free — there’s no rent on the building. They also donated the sound, the lights, and the video production. We do have to pay all the labor, so we have ushers, security, cleanup, stagehands, and catering, but all of the venue expenses were donated by UPAC, which is amazing.

TSP: What was involved in selecting this date and how did you assemble this massive number of musicians of so many generations? How long ago did you begin planning before you put it on sale? Did you have free license to ask anyone you wanted or did you need to run things by Lydia? Do you have a co-producer or a backer here or is this all hard tickets?

DM: We started asking musicians in December, once we locked in the date. We had a list of about 90 musicians who are living and who either played with Jack or were influenced by Jack, particularly the drummers, and we got around 50 of them to commit to this. So it’s been pretty amazing how this has all come together. We did not put it on sale until early June — we needed a lot of time to make sure all these musicians were available. We had to do a contract with the venue, I had to get insurance, and marketing assets, and all that stuff, and that just took a long time throughout the winter into spring before we were finally ready to announce and go on sale.

This is all hard tickets. I am financing the event myself at the beginning, so I’m paying all the bills, and I’m being reimbursed for those expenses, and then all of the remaining money goes to the two beneficiaries.

TSP: Are the musicians being paid? Are some donating their services to the charity?

DM: None of us are making any money — Pat, Terri Lyne Carrington, and I are completely doing this as a donation to the causes and for our love of Jack and Lydia.

TSP: What charity is receiving the funding? And why was it important to Jack and Lydia?

DM: Lydia picked the two beneficiaries— The Table at Woodstock and Family of Woodstock. They’re two distinct organizations that are socially oriented here in the Woodstock area. They both do a tremendous amount of work to help people with food needs, medical needs, housing needs, and many other issues. They both have very good websites with a lot of information about what they each do.

For more information about Celebrating Jack DeJohnette: Sound Travels, visit the Bardavon website. This celebration of Jack’s life and work will be held on his birthday, August 9, 2026 at Ulster Performing Arts Center, 601 Broadway, Kingston, NY at 5:00 PM.

For more information on Danny Melnick and Absolutely Live Entertainment, visit his company website.

It’s a miracle I got the article out on Modibo Keita out, which, by the way, I got wonderful feedback on and was able to shine the spotlight on someone doing something big, whom most had never heard of. I missed the Montréal International Jazz Festival, as expected, but I can’t imagine having made it with this workload.1

A bit earlier in June, I was scrambling with my associate Taylor Haughton to launch the inaugural Brooklyn Guitar Festival, which first got moved from LeFrak Center at Lakeside, to Warsaw in Greenpoint, then again, at the last minute, to The Arlo Williamsburg, due to a Knicks watch party, which the city insisted upon.2 Co-bookers Joel Harrison and Alex Skolnick got interviewed and played a bit on WNYC’s All of It with Alison Stewart.

Then the 10th Jazztopad NYC Festival occurred over 5 days and nights, curated by longtime Jazztopad artistic director Piotr Turkiewicz, supported, as always by the Polish Cultural Institute, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the National Forum of Music in Wrocław, Poland. I, in fact, landed from a family trip to California and went directly to Dizzy’s Club for Polish trumpeter Tomasz Dąbrowski with a crack New York band: Marta Sanchez (piano), Luke Stewart (double bass) and Kweku Sumbry (drums).

Some other highlights that week included the annual house concert at Maqam Studio in Sunset Park, with performances by Shahzad Ismaily, SUTARInova, Dąbrowski, Amir Elsaffar, Philip Golub and Michael Bates.

SutariNova was a new electronic and dub-inflected configuration of the acclaimed Polish vocal trio Sutari. Founding members Basia Songin and Kasia Kapela weave Polish and Lithuanian folk material in dense vocal harmonies with traditional instruments. They were joined by electronic producer Filip Zakrzewski, and Shahzad Ismaily, one of New York’s essential collaborators and producers, who played electric bass and a range of other instruments.

DoYeon Kim’s world premiere of new works combined with pieces from her debut, Wellspring, with a new quartet at Lincoln Center Atrium, including Ingrid Laubrock, John Hébert and Satoshi Takeishi was a major highlight for all.

The festival concluded on Father’s Day—which precluded me from attending—with momentous concerts at Rizzoli Bookstore with the River Sisters, the two women singers of SUTARInova, and percussionist Hamid Drake. My colleague Taylor took up the mantle that day. Then a final evening program occurred at my favorite New York City club of the moment, Close Up, with Polish improvisers and baritone saxophonist Matylda Gerber with New York scenesters Henry Fraser, Jon Starks, Elias Stemeseder, Yvonne Rogers and Solomon Gottfried.

Two days later Vision Festival 30, in which guitarist-improviser-bandleader-educator Joe Morris and multi-instrumentalist/community builder Daniel Carter were fêted.

Was nice to have WBGO’s Leo Sidran cover it on the radio. JazzTimes.com just released a feature on our Lifetime of Achievement recipient, Joe Morris by longtime attendee Tad Hendrickson. And the Spanish podcast In & Out Jazz published some beautiful coverage.

I’ll posting more thoughts soon.

An album that snuck up on me amongst festivals

Guitarist and bassist Tal Mashiach’s second album, Who’s Around?, dropped on Anzic Records, and we marked it with a release show at Joe’s Pub on July 3; which happened to have taken place on the hottest day of the year in New York City, and somehow the room was packed anyway.

Down Beat since named it an Editor’s Pick, with critic Michael J. West likening it to Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. Tal has spent a decade as a member of Anat Cohen’s band Quartetinho and Tentet. This record, built out with seventeen top New York session musicians from all over the world, puts his name front and center. If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s worth 39 minutes of your time.

For a month I’ve been hard at work on relaunching the Big Ears: Conversations About Music, with an episode called Festival Culture: Joe Boyd, Robert Gordon, Ashley Capps, one of four planned episodes recorded live at the 2026 festival. It’s conversation between legendary producer Joe Boyd, Big Ears and Bonnaroo founder Ashley Capps, and filmmaker Robert Gordon, prompted by Gordon’s documentary, Newport & the Great Folk Dream, about the night Bob Dylan went electric at Newport in 1965. Boyd was actually there, as Newport’s production manager that summer, at 22 years old. His firsthand account of what he calls the birth of a genre, is something magical

The whole conversation, without ever saying so outright, ends up being a tribute to George Wein, who founded Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals and, in doing so, more or less invented the American music festival as we know it; the template that every festival since, including the ones I work on today, owes something to. So much of my career, and the careers of countless people I know in this business, trace back in some way to stages that Wein built them first. Getting to put out an episode that honors that, even indirectly, means a lot to me. There’s also a lot of discussion of Capps’ work with both Bonnaroo and Big Ears, both of which he founded.

The Inaugural Brooklyn Jazz Festival

The other big one we just announced: the first-ever Brooklyn Jazz Festival, happening August 8 at Prospect Park’s LeFrak Center at Lakeside. I’m helping market.

The idea came from guitarist and producer Joel Harrison, who also curated this year’s Brooklyn Guitar Festival and runs the long-standing Alternative Guitar Summit, working with Erik Ekstein of Ekstein Development Group, which has an exclusive license to operate the LeFrak Center. Astonishingly, given how much jazz history runs through the borough and how many of its greatest musicians have called it home, there hasn’t been a recurring summer jazz fest here; so Joel set out to build one.

Two stages are filled entirely with musicians performing with their working bands, not one-off pickup groups assembled for the occasion. No filler, and nothing jazz-adjacent or booked because it’s easier to sell. These musicians are operating at the highest level of the art form, playing forward-thinking music with the top side-musicians in the scene. In Joel’s words, we “wanted to prove how accessible and exciting jazz’s state of the art can be: diverse in style, uncompromising in quality, and unconcerned with chasing whatever’s currently in fashion.”

That translates to a day that opens at noon with guitarist Vinicius Gomes & Bailinho, moves through Joel Ross’ Good Vibes, Bobby Sanabria’s Ascención, a Brooklyn All-Stars tribute to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (marking his centennial) featuring Vernon Reid & Harrison (guitars), Ingrid Laubrock (sax), Micah Thomas (keys), Qasim Naqvi (analog synthesizers), Jerome Harris, (bass), Eric Harland (drums), Matt Kilmer (percussion).

Then we’ve got the Chris Potter Quartet feat. Craig Taborn, Joe Martin, Kendrick Scott, “First Meeting” Gonzalo Rubalcaba / Chris Potter / Larry Grenadier / Eric Harland, the Linda May Han Oh Quartet, and Marcus Gilmore’s Journey to the New, before closing out the night with Jason Moran & The Bandwagon with two young special guests. Tickets are on sale now at bklynjazzfest.com — if you’re anywhere near New York, this one’s worth the trip.

MAIN STAGE

1pm: Linda May Han Oh Quartet
3pm: Marcus Gilmore’s Journey to the New
5:15pm: Chris Potter Quartet feat. Craig Taborn, Joe Martin, Kendrick Scott
7:30pm: “First Meeting” feat. Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Chris Potter, Larry Grenadier and Eric Harland
9:00pm: Jason Moran & The Bandwagon feat. Special Guests Akili Bradley & Devon Gates

SIDE STAGE

12:00pm Vinicius Gomes & Bailinho
2:00pm: Joel Ross’ Good Vibes
4:00pm: Brooklyn All-Stars Play Miles Davis’ “In a Silent Way” feat. Vernon Reid
6:15pm: Bobby Sanabria’s Ascención

The first time I almost went, I was going to cover the festival for this newsletter. I reached out to my longtime colleauge at Braithwaite & Katz Communications, who handles U.S. jazz press for the festival. Then, almost immediately, the publisher of Musica Jazz, the illustrious Italian jazz magazine, wrote me out of the blue to ask if I’d cover Montréal Jazz Fest for them. Suddenly I had a much better reason to go.

Then June reared its head.

Between week-long family trip to California, the first Brooklyn Guitar Fest, the 10th Jazztopad NYC, Vision Festival 30 (this week at Abrons Arts Center), and about seventeen other things, I wrote Ann back that I couldn’t stomach more time away from my wife and daughter. I was still interested, however, in speaking to someone from the festival for The Side People.

I’m so glad to got to speak to trombonist, jazz booker and Montréal native, Modibo Keita over Zoom.1 If I wasn’t going to be there, at least I could talk to the person who books the thing.

Modibo is the first Black booker of the Montréal Jazz Festival (or Féstival International de Jazz de Montréal, if you’re fancy and you speak French). Modibo is uniquely qualified as a curator, not only because he is a musician, but he has an intrinsic connection to the African community of Montréal, an historically disenfranchised minority. Early on, Modibo received invaluable mentorship from a youth center worker named Vox Sambou. Sambou is an acclaimed MC, poet, and multilingual performer, fluent in Haitian, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. He co-founded the hip-hop collective Nomadic Massive. Keita got to tour very early in his development with the group.

After univeristy at University of Toronto, he returned to Montréal to find the music scene extremely small and cliquey. While he had real chops and a proper degree from a prestigious school, the scene was dog-eat-dog and Keita had to find his own way as a freelancer and later as a show promoter in his moveable-feast concert series and educational initiative called The Shed. While producing The Shed, he hosted the likes of Toronto bassist Rich Brown, American vocalist J. Hoard, former Late Show bassist Endea Owens, vocalist/pianist/flutist Melanie Charles, Toronto-based trumpeter Tara Kannangara and the late saxophonist and vocoder virtuoso Casey Benjamin, whom we touch on in this interview.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Montréal Jazz Festival runs from June 25-July 4, 2026 in multiple venues around Downtown Montréal.

Matt Merewitz (TSP): I read that you’re a trombone player — when did you start playing music, and was it trombone first or piano?

Modibo Keita (MK): I started around 12 or 13, but I’d always been a music fan. My dad had a big collection of cassette tapes and VHS tapes of Michael Jackson music videos, Janet Jackson, Madonna — I got exposed early.

TSP: When did you become serious about trombone?

MK: Pretty early, because when I started playing the horn I did it through school. I used to go to this youth center in my neighborhood, and the director was a professional musician named Vox Sambou.

One day I came in with my trombone after rehearsal — that neighborhood was pretty rough at the time, they were trying to keep kids off the streets, and a lot of the people I was hanging out with were involved in things that weren’t so great. When he saw that, he saw an opportunity to get me hooked onto something else. His band is called Nomadic Massive, a hip hop band based in Montreal, more active in the early 2000s. I started playing with them around 13, 14.

They took me on the road early, and I started playing with a local collective called Community Vibe Collective. In my teenage years I really learned the Montreal music scene and got to play with people way better than me. I’d be in grade eight or nine saying, “Yo, I gotta go — we’re playing in the US, can I miss four days of school?” By college I was already traveling and playing professionally.

TSP: And before you got into jazz, you were exposed to African music, Afrobeat, all that through your dad’s collection?

MK: Yeah. My dad was really big on Fela Kuti, big reggae fan too — Alpha Blondie, Bob Marley, all that.

TSP: Did you go to school for jazz or regular college?

MK: My high school was an arts program. Up here the schedule runs on nine days, so every nine days I had eight music courses. Then I did a double degree in political science and music at the same time. Right after that I went to the University of Toronto Jazz Program, did my four years, got my undergrad, then moved back to Montreal.

TSP: My impression is that Montreal is still more affordable than Toronto or Vancouver — but has that changed?

MK: It has. Toronto is a much more competitive city — more musicians per capita, and to work there sustainably you have to be pretty good, at the top of the crop. But there’s also much more work. When I was down there I definitely got called more.

In Montreal it’s really based in your circle. It’s a difficult city to penetrate as a freelancer — small city, even though it behaves like a bigger one. Way less musicians, but even less opportunities, so it’s very tough to get in.

What offsets that is the cost of living, which is lower — although that reality is changing, because given the opportunities are fewer, there’s only so much the price can go up before it has a big impact on musicians and artists. We’re not yet at the levels of the rest of the country in terms of rents, but it’s definitely different from four or five years ago.

TSP: A lot has been made of you being the first Black programmer of the Montreal Jazz Festival. Are you comfortable with that narrative?

MK: I think I’m comfortable with it. It’s important. When I was growing up as a musician, I never thought I would get a job like this, ever — because I never saw people that look like me in this role. To have somebody there, and to put emphasis on that, is to show younger generations that there’s a pathway to something like this for them.

I remember the musician I mentioned earlier, the one who put me on at the youth center — he used to say jokingly, because I was already a big jazz fan even when I didn’t know anything about playing, I was really fascinated by guys like Roy Hargrove. Roy was in between, right — the Soulquarians thing, but also the jazz quintet thing. For me it was impressive to see somebody playing with Herbie and Michael Brecker, then go play with Common and D’Angelo, then walk on stage in Jordans and a suit. That was somebody I recognized myself in.

But we didn’t have that on the industry side. I didn’t have that role model. That’s why I really value what impact this can have on the community. And I’m closer to certain parts of that community because I come from them — it’s easier for me to mediate between the festival and underserved neighborhoods because I know how they think, I know some of the challenges. My life has changed since I was young, I was lucky to have a career in music — but this is still a community I’m really close to. The youth center I went to, I still do volunteer hours there to this day. I’m around for the youth if they need advice or have questions, just to be somebody they feel comfortable around. Having presence and proximity is something I value a lot — something I didn’t have when I was younger.

TSP: It’s very powerful that you have not only a Black presenter but somebody who comes from the community, grew up there, has history there. Do you think there’s the same kind of energy in the Montreal scene among Afro-Caribbean or African players in jazz-adjacent music — akin to what’s happening in London with Steam Down, Shabaka, Nubya, Kokoroko?

MK: I think there always was a scene for that in Montreal. A lot of the musicians I played with when I was younger are “world music” musicians, like Vox Sambu — he was heading the youth center. He does a mix of hip hop and Haitian traditional music. It’s always been a melting pot, which is really the reflection of this city. In the 90s there was such big immigration, but the music scene and the city weren’t ready for that level of diversity. What’s happening in London with Ezra Collective, Kokoroko, Shabaka, Nubya — that’s happening at the right time too.

TSP: That stuff was always there — Tomorrow’s Warriors, the Jazz Warriors before them, the Caribbean melting pot — but before those guys got the spotlight, there had been a lot of Black artists in the mix. If you looked at a playlist or a magazine from jazz in the UK from the 1940s to the early 2000s, it would seem like almot everyone was white.

MK: And that’s why I’m saying it’s really a question of audiences and the industry being ready to have the conversation. Now we’re in an era where we talk about diversity more than ever, identity more than ever — visible minority, sexual orientation — those conversations are at the forefront, which makes us pay more attention to these profiles, especially the younger generation. There’s an openness now to explore a little more.

TSP: Any African, Caribbean, or BIPOC artists you’re putting forward this year that you’re excited about — one from Montreal, one from elsewhere?

MK: From Montreal — we have one I’ve always liked since he started. His name is Marvin Caleb. He’s from Guadeloupe, does a mix of Guadeloupian music and Afrobeats — really connecting with his roots while embracing a sound that’s universal to Black communities around the world. If you listen to him you’d think he’s more of an Afrobeats guy than French Caribbean, but he’s local, based in Montreal, and he’s being considered for the CBC Radio Canada Revelations this year. Great profile. Internationally, one of my favorites we have is Étran de L’Air, from Niger. I have a soft spot for that because our heritage is connected to Niger and northern Mali — these guys are Tuareg musicians.

The Tuareg tradition is really present in northern Mali too. Mali is actually unique in West Africa because the language is unified. Regardless of ethnicity, people speak Bambara day to day, for trade, for everything. TV is in Bambara, not French. That changes how people behave culturally — the ethnic divisions aren’t as sharp. A Fulani person isn’t going to say “I speak Fulani and do this and that,” a Malinke person isn’t going to say “this is the Malinke way.” It’s all one big mixed pot. That’s why Étran is so important to me — I recognize part of my culture in it.

TSP: So how does your team split the booking? It’s a massive festival — probably 300 artists between the clubs and the main stages.

MK: It’s complicated. I’m the jazz specialist in the day-to-day booking. [My colleague] Maurin [Auxémary] knows a lot about jazz too and is involved, but he has other tasks, so he books less these days. He’s on the structural side — coordinating between departments, overseeing festival-wide projects, sitting on the board. He makes bigger decisions around what we do. That said, he’s very present in the booking process. I don’t know how he does it all.

I’m more of a jazz head, more hip hop, R&B, Afro-leaning. I’m lucky to work with a team that’s similarly wide-ranging — it’s easy to say “have you heard this?” and have people already know it. But there are things I’m not as strong on, so I’ll go to colleagues when I need to. We try to split work based on strengths because the volume demands it. The jazz stage under the tent is mostly me. Another colleague is well-versed in indie and world music, so he handles some of those other stages.

TSP: I’m a big jazz nerd, so I’m happy to see GEORGE on the festival.

MK: Yeah [Hollenbeck]’s back this year. We had him two years ago as well.

TSP: Happy to see him. And the programming — I made my schedule on the iPhone app (which is excellect) when I thought I was going. I put down Kid Koala, Jean Michel Pilc, St. Vincent with orchestral accompaniment, Hiromi — though I couldn’t possibly see Hiromi and St. Vincent at the same time — Dominique Fils-Aimé and Tomoki Sanders, those were conflicting too; Orrin Evans doing two sets at Upstairs Jazz Bar (which is ironically downstairs - lolz), Mononeon, Elena Pinderhughes, Joshua Redman Quartet (who has one of the best working bands right now), Lizz Wright, Butcher Brown with Nicholas Payton, Alfa Mist, Craig Taborn — big ups for Craig Taborn.

MK: When I booked that one, people were like, what is that?

TSP: That show will sell out. People know Craig from years of playing in Montréal with others.

MK: He won the MacArthur too — it’s just the right year to have him. On that stage I try to push people’s ears a little. Last year I had Peter Evans there.

TSP: Have you had Ambrose Akinmusire on that stage, or is he a bigger stage?

MK: I tried two years in a row but there was always a scheduling conflict. Ambrose is a good friend — and when When the Heart Emerges Glistening came out when I was in university, it was like every jazz student has that one record that changes them molecularly, and that was it for me. Then the second one that floored me was the live record at the Vanguard —

TSP: A Rift in Decorum.

MK: Exactly. Oh my god.

TSP: You’ve got Christine Jensen, Ibrahim Maalouf.

MK: He’s a celebrity in French Canada the way he is in France.

TSP: And the series at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe — that seems very intentional.

MK: It’s where I like to take chances, or do shows for people who are past the discovery stage with jazz and want to see things they won’t normally get to see. The Headhunters — long time coming at our festival. Dominique Fils-Aimé doing her second show there. Chief Adjuah — I love Christian so much, whenever I have the occasion to have him I take it, he’s one of the most creative musicians in jazz today. Isaiah [Collier] is coming back to do A Love Supreme. The Bad Plus doing their farewell show. Shows that have a meaning for the festival.

TSP: I like that you have Elena as a leader — she’s such a badass, and we’ve all been waiting for a record. I know something was made for Verve and shelved. Whatever it is, it’s going to have ridiculous flute solos. Props for giving her her own set.

MK: I’ve been trying for three years, even before I got to the jazz festival when I was running my own thing.

TSP: The Shed, yeah. Wanted to talk to you about that.

MK: She was one of my targets. Didn’t work out — I think she was in the middle of recording, they said it wasn’t possible. I ended up getting Casey Benjamin instead.

TSP: Not too bad.

MK: In hindsight, I’m glad I got to do that.

TSP: I first found out about Casey not from Glasper but from Stefon Harris’s band — he was playing vocoder even before the Glasper Experiment started. Then the Experiment blew up, musically, largely because of him. It’s like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger — Casey’s not the front man but he’s essential to the sound.

MK: That’s why the second Miles Davis quintet is one of the most famous bands in jazz history. Miles was the guy, but Herbie, Wayne, Ron, Tony — Wayne had the compositions, Herbie had the harmony, Tony had rhythmic complexity and sophistication, Ron revolutionized how people play bass. All those innovations within one band. I feel the same about the Glasper Experiment. A lot of things happened in that band that arguably existed before, but not all at the same time. That’s why they caught the ear of the masses.

TSP: Would you say in that analogy the first incarnation was the Trio, and then the Experiment was the second great band?

MK: Definitely. The trio was amazing, but then he started experimenting with crossover and fully committed to it — same arc as Miles. Miles was experimenting in the early iterations of the second quintet with George Coleman, and the band was kind of there before Wayne came in fully. I think it was Miles in Berlin where Wayne replaced George Coleman — first time you really heard that band as it was. Same with Glasper. The Experiment came together slowly — Chris Dave came in, things melded. But the identity that band created was so strong it’s still there, even if it’s not the same as Black Radio one was.

TSP: Let me ask you about The Shed. How old were you when you started?

MK: 2017 was my first concert. When I graduated in 2016 and came back to Montreal, it was really tough if you’re not part of the circles — and being a Black musician in Montreal was particularly difficult. It’s not like in the US where there’s Black people all through the music scene. Here you’ve got Black musicians, but not many of them are in the jazz scene.

TSP: Right. But you’ve got those African music scenes, the Brazilian scene.

MK: So I decided I was going to start something. I needed a job when I graduated, so I started working at Porter Airlines as a customer service agent, and saved about $800 to do my first Shed event. It was actually an accident — Rich Brown was coming to town for a corporate gig, and I thought, this is ridiculous that Rich is in town and we’re not doing something. So I reached out, he was on board, we did it. When the show finished, a girl from the crowd came up to me and said, “So when’s the next one?” I hadn’t planned on it, but I was like, well — maybe I’ll plan that. We did another one, had Jharis Yokley, then over the years Melanie Charles, all kinds of people. That’s how the series came together.

TSP: You had Casey on that, right?

MK: Casey was my very last guest. I had Jonathan Horde, Phase One, all types of people.

TSP: Moving venue — no permanent spot?

MK: Exactly. I’d rent venues — a warehouse, a co-working space, whatever — get the alcohol licensing, staff the whole place, do the rentals, basically build a venue for one or two nights and then clear out.

TSP: Where was the first one?

MK: A good friend’s loft. He offered, I said are you sure this is your house, he said don’t worry about it. I loved the DIY aspect. We ran an illegal bar — really underground — about 80 people, great vibe.

TSP: Maybe 20 of these before it ended?

MK: About that, yeah.

TSP: When did Maurin approach you to work for Montréal Jazz Fest?

MK: Before I stopped, Laurent, who used to be in charge, retired, Maurin moved up, and he wanted someone who knew the music and could do the heavy lifting — and not just another white person, if he could help it. We already had a good relationship. That year I’d worked on a special project around What’s Going On, did a lot of after-parties for the festival, and he liked working with me. He said, “I just give you parameters and you run with it.” So he asked if I was interested, and I said yes before he could change his mind.

TSP: Is this truly full-time? Do you still work as a musician?

MK: Fully full-time [laughs] very demanding on my schedule. I still play a little, but only what I really want to do. There’s a band called Kobo Town I was with before the festival — a calypso band led by Drew Gonzales, great writer, wrote for Santana, Calypso Rose — whenever they go on the road I go with them. And when Lauryn Hill came to Montréal and Ottawa, I played four dates with her. But I don’t do a lot. My other thing is vinyl collecting — I run a listening room at a bar in Montreal called Sample, in the old port. We just had our inaugural event yesterday, a listening session around Marvin Gaye and his influences.

TSP: Are you pulling in people from the community center where you grew up for that series?

MK: I try to put them in as many scenarios as I can. I know these kids, I know what they’re interested in. This year we have Alchemist coming, and there’s a young producer from that center — I taught him music theory when I was working there, now he’s teaching production to the kids and has credits all over the hip hop world. I put him as opener for Alchemist. I do workshops between festival artists and the youth center, get them access to shows when they want to come, tell them to hit me up. I just try to get them to participate in the ecosystem and feel like they can create their own path.

TSP: Have you tried to involve Suoni, Casa del Popolo, that whole scene?

MK: I met last week with the old programmer from Suoni. I want to branch out to that scene. We’ve been doing some things in that territory lately — and I want to find a way to collaborate without getting in their way.

TSP: Last question. Who on trombone is exciting to you right now?

MK: I’ve been around her for a minute, and I’m happy we got her this year — Kalia Vandever. She’s amazing. There’s a lot of young trombonists — Joe Giordano in New York, Zekkereya El-magharbel, he’s amazing. There’s a promising young scene out there. And obviously there’s the Elliot Masons and the Vincent Gardners, those guys still doing their thing.

TSP: I think that does it. Thanks for talking!

MK: My pleasure.

Please go to the Montréal Jazz Festival, because I can’t. Lemme know what you see.

In a recent text exchange, I revealed to a friend “a big part of my personal and professional identity was tied up in my ability to get people placements in the New York Times from the time I was 24 to the time I was 40. And then that all fell away in an instant.”

For years and years, long before Substack, I’ve been writing down my thoughts on music. I’m not really a journaler. I don’t write down my thoughts just for myself, although now that I’ve looked through these old Facebook posts and some even older blog posts, I’m starting to think, maybe I should’ve.

As I take stock of my career to date, at this strange juncture, it’s both interesting and jarring to reflect on the things that I’ve shared with others in a semi-public forum over 20+ years.

I recently had a come-to-Jesus moment with a friend, who alerted me to the fact that a lot of the time I call or text him, I’m upset at one thing or another in the jazz world. I’ve become the kind of “get off my lawn” curmudgeon I so greatly abhor.

I am realizing that I started this Substack not just to build or shine a light on community by telling the stories of “the side people,” but to create the beginnings of a memoir; or at least to make some sense of my life and work in the broader context of the musical scenes I operate in. I realize that I’ve strayed quite far from my initial intent, which was to tell the stories of those in the industry whose stories don’t get told. But maybe, I just really wanted to tell my own all along.

My hope was to share my accumulated knowledge and reflect on my community, which I’ve chosen to be part of; or really which chose me at the age of 13 and never let go.

I think I’ve told this story here before, but for those who don’t know or are new here due to the last two posts, I almost became a journalist. In fact, if you search back far enough, you can find my bylines in AllAboutJazz.com as well as the Pittsburgh City Paper and the Carnegie Mellon Tartan.

In a fateful encounter with the critic , following a Jazz Journalists Association panel at the long-defunct IAJE Conference, I was advised to check in on a private meeting of publicists, including independent, ones (the folks at DL Media (Don Lucoff, Stephanie Brown, Brad Riesau, Jason Paul Harman Byrne, Jana La Sorte, Terri Hinte), and those working for organizations or labels (Charlie Bourgeois, Caroline McClair, Jennifer Niederhofer, Zooey Tidal Jones). Had I not attended that meeting, I might not have had the career I’ve had in PR. And I’ve had a very good career.1

But at times, as a result of my chosen career path, I’ve felt like I’ve not been allowed to express my true opinions.2 What sets me apart from most of my PR colleagues (aside from someone like ) is that I’ve always tried to tell the truth or my truth, when it maybe wasn’t completely “appropriate” to do so.

To a certain extent, this proclivity has likely made me a pariah in some cricles. It has certainly cost me business. And I’ve definitely hurt some people’s feelings. I do feel bad about that, while at the same time, I could never see myself living a life where I hid my feelings or presented myself inauthentically. It’s just not part of my constitution, for better or worse. I only know how to be me.

Recently, some folks have alerted me that people can feel deeply unsettled by my commentaries on the state of the industry. People often prefer uncomfortable realities to remain unspoken. Some are likely threatened by my frankness, some may find them superfluous. Others have told me they feel liberated by it or find it refreshing.

What I do know, is that the series of posts that preceded this one were partly motivated by my own unhappiness in my role as a PR professional over the last decade. They were motivated a deeply broken system, in which most people have abandoned traditional media in favor of scrolling and not paying for their news or criticism, to the detriment of the critical establishment. Getting one’s news from headlines or graphics as opposed to reading real reportage is a sad sign of the times.

A lot of my unhappiness stems from uncertainty for my future and how things have turned out for so many of the musicians I dedicated my life to supporting and nurturing. Often times, I worry about how my profession might have become irrelevant.3

I feel like my skillset may not prove marketable enough to have well-paid work into my 60s, though one never knows. However, in the last two years, I’ve been presented with opportunities to create a podcast for Big Ears Festival that has vastly changed my life. Plus there’s some new contract work I’ve picked up since January in the offing, that I’m not ready to widely announce, that will take me in a much more curatorial and non-promotional direction in the coming years.

In my mid twenties and early thirties, I was extremely successful and one might say influential in promoting the careers of my artists. I enjoyed multiple years with number one albums on critics‘ year-end lists, acclaim from the jazz press, the New York Times, All Songs Considered, Weekend Edition or Fresh Air with Terry Gross; even the occasional Rolling Stone review. Later, I expanded my sphere of influence into Europe, Japan and Australia, by regularly attending jazzahead; wanting to offer non-U.S. press opportunities to my mostly U.S.-based clients.

The relationships that I’ve built from 2006 to the present still provide me with ample opportunity to make a living and to have some degree of influence over radio play, some major publications and now, festival bookings. But at a certain point, I cannot accept people’s money for PR if I don’t feel like I can bring them value, commensurate with what I feel I need to charge to adequately do my job. This does not apply to everyone who approaches me, but I do have to turn down far more work than I used to; often times for people whose music I truly love. Sometimes I even have to think critically about whether an artists ethnicity and gender identity will “play” in the current media scene. I hate this, but these are factors I can’t avoid if a significant amount of money (for an artist) is on the line.

As they inevitably do, the tides of the industry and the music that is most in favor have changed. Different kinds of music are more popular or garner more critical acclaim. And I no longer feel like I am part of, or buy into the zeitgeist, if I ever really did. I feel like time has passed me by and I’m still fighting for the things I believed in so deeply in my twenties, many of which are not commercially successful or even critically “relevant.” And yet, three of the artists I manage are under 35-years-old and the world of possibility for them seems vast.

In a recent text exchange, I revealed to a friend “a big part of my personal and professional identity was tied up in my ability to get people consistent placements in the New York Times from the time I was 24 to the time I was 40. And then that all fell away in an instant.”

That loss of infrastructure and possibility dealt a massive blow not just to my ego, but to the media ecosystem surrounding jazz and creative music. There is no mass media outlet for young musicians in New York to be covered in their nascent years until either they scrounge up enough money for a publicist or reach a certain threshold of Instagram or YouTube followers or Spotify monthly listeners. And for art music, that is rarely possible.

My friend said to me, “For you, for me, for anyone in this industry, adapting to the changing climate is like 70% of the job. All the platforms crumble.”

“I am adapting,” I said. “But I can still complain privately to you.”

The reality is that so many artists, managers and labels don’t know that the outlets they came to rely on for coverage have disappeared. So many still come to me as a publicist thinking it’s possible for them to achieve outcomes that simply no longer exist.

“The entire world of culture journalism has evaporated,” my friend said to me. The Times is just a bellwether. But people still want and need to tell stories, so they keep telling them somehow.

It’s something of a miracle that the old way of things lasted as long as it did, but it was never going to be a permanent scenario.

I do see value in the work that I do in terms of making people aware of music that they wouldn’t have known of otherwise. I see the work of my jazz colleagues as vital, and sometimes perhaps more effective or inspired than I feel now. And as I said in my previous posts, there are other elements that we are burying our heads in the sand and ignoring. Some of them include digital marketing. Others include email newsletters, DIY touring (getting scrappy sleeping on couches, not expecting anything because of their training), creating your own series and building community not only locally but forming touring networks with other artists.

I stand by my two previous pieces and promise I will bring things full-circle to offer multiple truly meaningful solutions one can can do as an artist or marketer to further your artistic career and your happiness; and consequently myself, as a strategist and manager to promote this art form.

The way this post started was by collecting a series of Facebook posts, rants, reviews and other observations that I’ve written down over the years and largely forgotten about.

I’m leaving some of that below, not to show how smart I am or how much insight I have, but to illustrate how the media has disintegrated over time thanks to our own societal habits (which was precipitated and possibly pre-planned by big tech).

I believe that there’s not currently much we can do about the state of mainstream legacy media. We can show up, do our best and hope this amazing musical art does not go undocumented. Many of my observations of the past remain true and relevant. I think many of these topics deserve future consideration in this space.

As part of this process, I’m forced to reconcile my own perceived irrelevance (as a publicist and in the context of a media ecosystem dominated by algorithms) with the good work that I have brought to my clients, and to my community and the amazing life and career I’ve lived so far. And in some respects, how my life may be better than it has ever been, despite all the changes.

Don’t worry. I’m not giving up. I’ve got a wonderful wife, a beautiful and whip-smart daughter and a beautiful Australian Chocolate labradoodle.4 I’ve got a network of friends and colleagues, literally stretched around the globe, who are united by this music.

I still intend to tell the stories of “The Side People” but you’ll have to continue to endure my need for periodic self-indulgences that I need to put on paper to wrestle with. Perhaps a private diary would be better, but I like feedback and, to some extent, validation.

With that said, here is a collection of things I’ve written over the years that either I’m proud of having said or still hold true.

Thanks for your time and your support.

• October 16, 2016 lamenting media consolidation and a reflection on what we have lost.

It’s a real shame we are living in a media landscape where the powers that be have done away with album reviews and often any kind of regular music coverage in most national or regional dailies. There are amazing new records out on the market right now by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and too many to list on so many other smaller labels like Sunnyside, Posi-tone, Savant, Smoke Sessions, Motema, Mack Avenue, Pi, Greenleaf Music, Ropeadope, Whirlwind, Pirouet, Delmark, Intakt, International Anthem, Shifting Paradigm, Cuneiform, Clean Feed, Criss Cross, Fresh Sound New Talent, Run Grammofon, Smalltown Supersound, Laborie, Edition, Naim, Jazz Village and totally independent self releases. No one knows about these because no writer can even get an assignment to cover them in an outlet of national import. There are obvious exceptions like Pitchfork and the Wall Street Journal, who thankfully are still covering albums but the New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, SF Chronicle, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times and so many others, have limited coverage of records to mostly video playlists or annotated singles columns; maybe an occasional short gig preview and quite sparingly.

The prognosis at alt weeklies is just as bad. In a season where there’s a new Liberation Music Orchestra album (a major event, which I have no affiliation with), it’s a shock to me that I’ve seen no major publication or national radio program cover this amazing record, except Down Beat giving it 5 stars in their new December issue.

There are so many other amazing records out there right now like Dhafer Youssef’s Diwan of Beauty and Odd or Wolfgang Muthspiel’s Rising Grace and so many more that are meeting the same fate not because many people (labels, publicists, artists, freelance journalists) aren’t trying to get them covered, but because the general cultural editors are dictating a new race-to-the-bottom agenda favoring wht appeals to the lowest common denominator.

It’s happening right in front of us. Until very recently, the Times was covering jazz extensively but the abrupt exit of Ben Ratliff and a new set of priorities and an approach to covering “pop music” (yes jazz must compete for same space with pop), the outcome is NO MORE live jazz reviews except major festivals, themed pieces on an artist or trend and NO MORE SUNDAY PLAYLIST in the paper or full fledged CD reviews (a longstanding institution that should come back if we the readers place enough pressure on editorial leadership).

Classical music would be up in arms if they saw their coverage take this kind of blow and they have been in the past, because generally they are more organized and rally around big institutions with clout. What if Wynton [Marsalis] raised a stink? He has the power and the pulpit to do so. Or he could easily do what National Sawdust did and have an in-house editorial staff that wrote about the music and the scene from a curatorial but also critical bent.

That would be progress. I know - be careful what you wish for. Yes there’s the election but it’s bigger than that. What are we going to do about it? Let’s take some real action. I have a letter drafted to the Times that we could just as easily send as Letters to the Editor of every major daily and weekly newspaper in the US.

And don’t give me the relevancy argument. How many restaurants around our entire country advertise “free jazz brunch” and how many markets have performing arts centers and clubs not being covered at all by these major dailies.

And if they won’t listen, we need to encourage more and better websites and blogs and podcasts to cover this music from an array of voices - from critics to audience to artists! Bigger discussion. Will leave it at that…

• April 23, 2017 on venues not promoting gigs adequately when they totally could. This will certainly be a topic of a future post on .

It is truly shocking how some venues that have real budgets to promote gigs, especially when tickets are slow to sell, do not. [There will be a chapter in my forthcoming book on this 😉].

Of course, the process of creating awareness is a balance between being “persistent” and “annoying” to sell tickets. However, some places get it and some rely almost entirely on the artist to do the majority of the legwork. Sometimes they rely on the names in the band to magically sell tickets.

It is completely unfair when the venue has money and resources and the artist is being paid a terrible door split or low guarantee. Many artists, even established ones are left with the burden of often hundreds of dollars in promoted Facebook ads, online ads, even promoted email blasts from third party lists that can be “bought” to draw attention and hopefully advance sales.

Decimation of the arts media has not helped this conundrum for sure. We need more targeted purchasable mailing lists at economies of scale, but we also need organizations in each city that are trusted sources to get weekly gig info out to fans (a la Revive Music in New York, CapitalBop in DC, etc.).

And we need venues to aggressively market to past ticket purchasers of similar artists; get creative when thinking about how to do this. They have the data. They just need to use it intelligently. We may even need to go back to direct mail in some cases. This is a big problem.

• May 6, 2017 on the need to pay for media, if we want to see it keep going.

I realize that many of the people who read me are musicians (most of whom can’t afford many luxuries). But if you make a decent living and you don’t pay for journalistic content, please re-consider your position by paying or subscribing to at least one newspaper or magazine (digitally or in print) so that quality journalism doesn’t completely go away.

I read a very scary article in Talking Points Memo this week that pointed to the fact that Google and Facebook control the lion’s share of advertising on websites across the entire internet. We may begin to see online news outlets go the way of newspapers as fewer and fewer are able to sell ads directly to advertisers which in turn affords them operating revenue to pay their writers, editors, IT departments, janitors, etc.

Look at subscriptions as a form of membership or being a stockholder in something’s future. I pay for my NY Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker and Washington Post subscriptions as well as digital editions of JazzTimes, Down Beat, Stereophile, Jazzwise, Jazziz, Modern Drummer, Bass Player, Relix, Nextbop (through a monthly Patreon donation of $5/month) and a few others. Granted, for me, some of these are tax write offs in my profession. NB: These expenses can be classified as “research materials.” Many who are self employed, can write off subscriptions on your taxes too.

I just gave some money to The Guardian because they have never put up a paywall. I enjoy all of this content and writing on a daily basis. Why should I expect it for free? I realize that the prevailing notion is that journalists by-and-large make more money than musicians but that is decreasingly true. Most work as freelancers (like musicians) and work for similar wages to musicians per gig/article; often less. It’s similar to using Spotify or YouTube to consume your musical content. I get that people have rent, mortgage, student loans, car payments and we all need to feed ourselves, but we should not forget about journalists and news outlets who do the work to uncover the stories — shocking, enlightening, inspiring, even maddening — that change our perspectives on the world in one way or another.

Many of them we share here on Facebook. We need to do our part to ensure that journalists and media outlets continue to have sustenance by paying for their efforts. Every subscriber helps stave off extinction!

• September 16, 2017 on Sara Serpa at the Drawing Center. This work was released on the 2020 Biophilia album Recognition.

Saw an arresting show last night presented by The Stone at The Drawing Center (35 Wooster St) by Sara Serpa with Mark Turner and Zeena Parkins. It was called “Recognition” and focused on the reprehensible legacy of the Portuguese colonial empire with beautifully poignant texts by Amílcar Cabral, leader of the Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼 & Cape Verde 🇨🇻 liberation movements in the 1960s & 1970s. Cabral was assassinated by his comrades with the help of the Portugese secret police (PIDE) in January 1973.

Clearly this project took Sara many months of planning, both musically and from an audio-visual standpoint (the documentary-style accompanying film was edited and realized by Portuguese filmmaker Bruno Soares) to bring this to fruition. The video footage came from Sara’s grandfather who was born in and lived in the former Portuguese colony of Angola. His footage included images of the of the Estada Novo regime, the de facto slave chattel population of Angolans mining salt and other natural resources as well as resistance footage. The Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown in the Portuguese revolution of 1974-1975, a year after Cabral’s death.

It was extremely moving and well put together. I hope more audiences get to see it.

• September 28, 2017 - A short follow-up on the Serpa “review.”

I posted that cursory “review” of the Sara Serpa gig not because I work with her (which I don’t) but rather because so many AMAZING events go on every night and there are no more NY Times reviews or really any live show reviews unless someone shares their experience here on Facebook. All we have is LucidCulture and JazzTrail and Facebook recommendations, off the top of my head right now reviewing gigs with any kind of thoroughness or regularity.

So to all the people who regularly go to gigs, I would encourage you all if you see a great show, say something! Doesn’t require pictures. Just writing something down and sharing it can go a long way towards general awareness.

All this goes for previews as well to get people out to these shows. I will admit that Sara’s email list coupled with the event invite on Facebook + being in the city inspired my attendance but also this great intriguing lineup.

• January 6, 2018 on two young and promising jazz writers talking it down with the perennial dolt, Jon Caramanica.

The millenials aka essential new voices of jazz criticism and Giovanni Russonello went deep on the NY Times Popcast this week with host, and self-professed jazz know-nothing qua pop music critic Jon Caramanica on the big ideas and trendsetters from 2017 in the “jazz” world. Subjects included:

Makaya McCraven, Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening, Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die, new U.K. jazz (Shabaka Hutchings, Moses Boyd, Yazz Ahmed’s “La Saboteuse”, Nubya Garcia), a Caramanica-led detour into acid jazz, Gilles Peterson as tastemaker, the ways to experience jazz live today as opposed to yesteryear, Thelonious Monk & forgotten jazz centenaries (and why maybe that’s not such a bad thing), Vijay Iyer’s very good year, jazz musicians engaging politics and words in performance (Matana Roberts, Mike Reed’s Flesh & Bone, Jane Ira Bloom, Nicole Mitchell); Jazzmeia Horn as a masterful vocal craftswoman on record and live, Lizz Wright’s “Grace”, Cecile McLorin Salvant’s “Dreams & Daggers” and as a masterful interpreter of forgotten songs from the American Songbook, Gregory Porter as a vocal jazz commercial success, jazz singers not being taken as seriously as their instrumental counterparts, the Ethan Iverson-Robert Glasper juggernaut; systemic sexism and sexual harassment in institutions of higher learning, on the bandstand, and in terms of virtually every industry gatekeeper being male; Esperanza Spalding under many lenses (as a singer, vis a vis sexism, vis a vis her co-led trio with Geri Allen & Terri Lyne Carrington and the difference between the energy in all female bands in jazz) and Geri Allen herself and how her relative lack of recognition compared to her male peers during her lifetime reflects the ingrained sexism in the jazz industry.

GO LISTEN. These are two really smart and really thoughtful young people!!!

• January 28, 2018 on Immanuel Wilkins (playing as a sideman with Harish Raghavan at the Jazz Gallery):

I forgot to write it down here but I had a really moving experience hearing and seeing Juilliard student with Harish Raghavan Quintet at The Jazz Gallery this weekend. This young man has some serious talent.

A beautiful, searing tone, at times he sounded electrified when he was completely acoustic (he was smartly paired with Charles Altura, evoking a Kenny Garrett-John Scofield-esque tandem from “Works for Me”).

I realize I am way late in seeing him live. I know he’s been around. I was aware of his Jazz Gallery Mentorship series at SEEDS:BROOKLYN and elsewhere with Aaron Parks a couple years ago and his recent playing with Jason Moran’s MONK: IN MY MIND, but he really wowed me with boundless energy and palpable enthusiasm for Harish’s music, which was very strong (I missed their December gig at The Owl).

I later learned that Wilkins was playing with the drummer from his own band, Jeremy Dutton, whom I had not seen before either, but heard a lot about in recent times. This young man will surely join Justin Brown, Kendrick Scott, Marcus Gilmore, Craig Weinrib, Obed Calvaire, Colin Stranahan, Mark Guiliana, Nate Wood and many others as one of the essential drummers playing so-called “jazz music.”

The 20-year-old much-buzzed-about Juillard student & pianist Micah Thomas also has a very promising future, as was clearly the case here (with echoes of Parks, David Virelles, Fabian Almazan, Sam Harris) but I need to see him again to really explore what we can do. He was impressive. I was glad to finally hear what the buzz was about.

It made me realize that I am a little bit out of touch with what is current. I say this without hesitation. I started coming to NYC as a serious listener in 2005, while I was still in college. The Jazz Gallery was originally my primary home for listening. I remember taking those steps up to the second floor of the Hudson Street location. I was so taken with the energy of my generation of players - Ambrose Akinmusire, Aaron Parks, Logan Richardson, Ben Wendel, Harish Raghavan, Dan Tepfer, Joe Sanders, Walter Smith III, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Linda May Han Oh, Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, and of course a slightly more established group of artists: Vijay Iyer, John Hollenbeck, John Ellis, Dafnis Prieto, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Miguel Zenón, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts, Jason Moran, Yosvany Terry and others.

We are witnessing a changing of the guard and it’s exciting but also a bit of a brave new world. The chances these players have for press are far lessened (listings for gigs are at an all time low).

But the discovery process is being facilitated by Instagram, sometimes Spotify or Apple Music playlists, and the mentorship of a new generation of “elders” who are offering apprenticeships in their own bands or through educational programs they run: Iyer, Moran, McBride, Watts, Mahanthappa, Douglas. I am sure I’m forgetting some.

It was good to get this shot in the arm of young players and their fire. Thanks to Harish for putting this band of mostly young musicians together to showcase the next wave of musicians who will hopefully make an impact. It also was reminded me that The Jazz Gallery is one of the most essential places to hear the next generation of this music (among many other Important spots like The Stone, Smalls, Roulette, Korzo and Arts for Art).

The Gallery’s Rio Sakairi is taking big and importance chances on the new talents of this music. Pay close attention to what they are doing. Their slogan “Where the Future is Present,” rings truer than ever.

February 26, 2018 on the closing of the old Stone at Avenue C and 2nd St.

R.I.P. to the original Stone. This original iteration of the venue will live on in my memory. Saw many transformative shows there. I was shocked when my now-wife Andreea told me that The Stone was her favorite venue in New York (I honestly can’t remember if she told me this before or after we were married, but it further sealed the deal on why we were together). She said she loved that it was just music, a bathroom and chairs; no frills.

I’m glad that the artists will continue to present their work at The New School Glass Box and National Sawdust and The Drawing Center. It will never be the same though and it will take some getting used to.

Some particularly memorable shows:

Erik Friedlander’s Claws & Wings; Masada String Trio; Tyshawn Sorey with Koan and solo; Berne, Black, Cline aka The BBC or BB&C; Kris Davis Duopoly; The Nels Cline Singers; Cyro Baptista & Banquet of the Spirits; Scott Amendola Band; Peter Evans solo & quintet; Mary Halvorson Trio & Quintet; Nels Cline & Julian Lage; Steve Lehman Octet; Vijay Iyer Trioing + Fieldwork; Marco Cappelli’s In The Shadow of No Towers; John Zorn conducting The Dreamers; Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog; Ben Goldberg’s Unfold Ordinary Mind; Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret & The Same River Twice; Uri Caine Trio; Theo Bleckmann, Gary Versace, Ben Monder, Chris Tordini, John Hollenbeck; Henry Grimes with Marc Ribot & Chad Taylor; Matana Roberts Coin Coin: Chapter 1

and so many more….

November 29, 2018 on the music industry needing new infusions of talent and all of us, including myself, not doing enough.

This thought often crosses my mind and certainly there are exceptions to this, but jazz is largely controlled by older people (historically white men). What if a tiny fraction of all “jazz school” or conservatory or even liberal arts graduates came to work in the jazz booking/promotion/fundraising/marketing/journalism/radio worlds. Our business of jazz constantly needs new infusions of young talent unbound to the old ways of doing things, and with actual passion for the music. I don’t think we as industry leaders are doing enough to recruit and mentor the future managers and booking agents; the future support staff of the industry that makes it go round. The jazz schools are very clearly producing a glut of supply for too little demand. I wonder your general thoughts on this. I often feel we have too many people working in the jazz business who know very little about the actual music and it’s just a job for them; not a passion. I do not seek to attack anyone individually here but I do feel this is a problem and there is a solution; mentoring young talent who have demonstrated a passion for the music but have limited career prospects because of the glut of young musicians exiting school.

May 18, 2019 praising my colleagues at JazzTimes for a great sax issue, which you can now read on the digital archive of the new and improved JazzTimes.com

If you like the saxophone, you should definitely pick up this month’s issue of JazzTimes (online in the App Store) or on the newsstand). This issue could very easily be called “the state of the horn” boasting a who’s who of those at the top of the field, underrated cats and upstarts.

The cover story is a highly philosophical interview with Chris Potter; more no-nonsense talk from Branford Marsalis; a much-needed discussion with and appraisal of altoist Marty Ehrlich, an historical survey of Gary Bartz recordings; a wonderful and also much needed update on tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, who now mostly lives in Paris but goes where the music takes him; a story on multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson’s 1924 Conn tenor; a well-deserved feature on the young rising star altoist Alexa Tarantino; a playlist of choice baritone sax cuts by Lauren Sevian and a killing Before & After with saxophonist & EWI artist Dayna Stephens and much more.

Also a new (monthly?) column by Ethan Iverson. I just read it cover to cover. I rarely do that with a magazine — even a jazz one. Bravo Mac Randall and his staff of talented writers including Natalie Weiner, Ashley Kahn, Evan Haga, Mike West, David Fricke and more.

June 4, 2019 on persistence and email etiquette and the realities of being really busy, even if you want to reply to everything.

I apologize if you’ve emailed me in the past and I haven’t responded to your inquiry, especially if it was about working together or it was a media inquiry. I get a lot of inquiries and a lot of email in general.

Sometimes emails come in at inopportune times; when I’m deep at work on something or at a personal time/on a weekend and I’m trying to stay away from my email. Sometimes those emails get buried in my inbox underneath dozens or hundreds of other newer emails (many from existing clients) and I don’t see them for a while until I clean out my inbox (which I did this week thankfully).

I sincerely try to reply to everyone and listen to the music that I am sent, closely and offer you my sincere thoughts or feelings. Other times people write emails that are way too long (kind of like this Facebook status). Those are the times when it’s best to pick up the phone and give me a call. My numbers are on my website or plenty of other places online.

I appreciate those of you who are persistent. You are the ones who have a higher chance of succeeding in this business. You cannot be sheepish about following-up after one email. This carries over to bookers and the media or really any other industry figures. Be less discouraged if an agent or manager doesn’t respond or gives you a stock ‘no’ reply.

It usually means that they are in over their head at that moment, just trying to eke out a living with the 10 or more clients they already have. It does, however, help a lot if you know what I do and you’ve researched me and my tastes. Emailing me about a hip-hop record or a noise project or a string quartet is not the best idea, but I still try to respond to everyone and provide my best insight.

I also offer one-on-one consulting sessions; which I feel more people in the industry should do; sometimes it’s not warranted to drop several thousand dollars on a PR campaign; instead it’s better to do one or two consultations and learn where you have to get to before you’re ready.

Just because this is how I feel, it does not necessarily hold true for others in the business. I know some people are just too busy to respond to every email inquiry. And some just don’t care to. I am sure many others get a lot more cold emails than me; including many in the press.

Dec 18, 2019 on topics that still baffle me and will be addressed forthwith. There is some great commentary here from some real experts in the field. I highly recommend watching the video:

Please come to my Jazz Congress panel Jan 13th at 11:00 AM

“How To Build Buzz for Gigs in the Post-Listings Era”

In an age when media outlets have less space for listings, radio interviews are harder to come by, and many newspapers are doing little in terms of editorialized pre-gig listings, it is increasingly important to rethink how we all approach gig publicity and pre-show/pre-festival promotion. The professionals assembled on this panel collectively have 30+ years of experience marketing to audiences online through social media, digital marketing, retargeting campaigns and other solutions. This session will provide specific insight into how the modern-day musician or presenter should approach marketing gigs to current and potential fans.

Thrilled to be joined by:

- Adrienne Stortz, Director of Programs and Finance, Miller Theatre

- Zooey Tidal Jones, Director of Public Relations and External Communications, Jazz at Lincoln Center

- Marquis Hill, trumpeter/composer

- Sydney Hill, social media, Red LightcManagement

Dec 30, 2021 on professional validation:

When I heard from Francis Davis in November that NPR had decided to drop the annual jazz critics poll, I was a little surprised. Almost immediately, myself and a few other fine jazz PR folks who also value this poll — not only for the professional prestige it carries for us and our clients, but the chance for musical discovery it can lead to — hurried to find it a new home so it could actually happen.

I am happy to have helped connect Francis Davis with the wonderful folks at The Arts Fuse (a wonderful Boston-based arts website). Thanks to Bill Marx for giving the poll a platform. I’m so proud of my clients, other friends, past clients and musicians greatly I admire who made it onto the poll.

Obviously this poll is neither a barometer of what is “best” nor what was popular among fans. But, this poll allows me to sort of measure my own success in the past year by the success of my clients. Of course the music always comes first. That’s why I do this instead of being a critic myself or getting a corporate advertising gig, both of which I think I could be pretty good at.

Being a jazz publicist is a terribly thankless job in which most of us face immense apathy (from the media) on a daily basis as well as intense scrutiny by many of our clients, despite our immense passion about our clients music and stories. Most of us are super fans. Many are former musicians, myself included.

I don’t seek the spotlight. (I mostly dislike it when clients call me out at shows or on social media). I am, of course, extremely proud of my clients and my team, but also myself. This is one of the only measurements I have in the business to gauge how my job had an impact on people hearing and appreciating the music I was entrusted to promote.

So thanks to the critics who made lists for making a guy feel like he’s making a difference.

May 23, 2022 briefly memorializing the 55 Bar.

The 55 Bar will always be synonymous in my mind with Mike Stern, Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Nate Smith, Fima Ephron, Dave Binney, Wayne Krantz, Ben Monder, Sean Wayland, Wil Lee, Rudder, Ben Perowsky, Pete McCann, Brian Charette, Tim Lefebvre, Henry Hey, Dan Weiss, Nate Wood, Henry Cole, Amy Cervini, Fay Victor, Jo Lawry, Linda May Han Oh, The Le Boeuf Brothers, Ben Flocks and so many more. One of the only places in the world I would wait in the rain or snow for over an hour to hear music. I will not shed any tears however, over the bathroom or the $7 cranberry juices.

January 5, 2023 on the ongoing death of listings and a momentary moment of hope with regard to that before everything fell apart from “legacy media” and went to Substack. I accede that Hank Shteamer‘s recent listings for both Jazz Generations Initiative and Gothamist render this observation a bit obsolete but these dispatches are not meant to be timely now. They are historic and fleeting, at best.

In case you have not noticed, during the pandemic the NY Times quietly dwindled (read: all but cancelled) their relatively-recently-still-somewhat-robust cultural listings in all disciplines - not just music.

Sources I’ve talked to, with knowledge of the decision, indicate they did so because the listings website pages had relatively few click counts compared to feature stories. Granted, ONCE EVERY OTHER WEEK, a Times-affiliated critic picks ONE JAZZ GIG to represent the massive continuum of creative music that happens in NYC on a nightly basis.

Of course, proper album reviews and concert reviews are a thing of the past (at least for the Pop Music desk (which strangely governs jazz-related content, while the classical desk has a completely independent group of staff critics, editors and a plethora of freelancers given much wider latitude to cover the music that that owners of The NY Times historically have deemed worthy of extensive coverage; still that desk does some nice things for “jazz” so I’m not 100% mad at them, but still..) Even though it’s been proven that album and concert reviews matter not only in the development of artists careers, but in the development of an audience for musicians and other creatives who are working in one of the most significant cultural hotbeds in the world to be discovered by the nationwide and worldwide readership at the times. Fergodssake, I get a daily email on wellness and how to build meaningful friendships from the Times. Aren’t music and the arts directly linked to wellness???

It’s been YEARS since Time Out New York has been any kind of beacon of anything in terms of serious cultural events, The Village Voice is all but gone (revived by a shady profit-driven SoCal conglomerate that ruined the LA Weekly) employing a majority of non-New Yorkers and The New Yorker now lists one jazz gig and two classical gigs per week (down from 3-4 just a few years ago), with indie rock, hip hop, electronic music, R&B and sometimes “noise” filling out the rest. One of the key functions of newspapers, alternative weeklies and radio when most of us were growing up, even though I didn’t grow up in New York City, was a source for critically sourced listings, and that has been completely obliterated by the insidious crumbling of print media in a culture of free, and a race-towards-the-bottom mentality in editorial circles, which are driven by view counts. BUT, THERE ARE NEW SIGNS OF LIFE, PARTICULARLY AT WNYC.

One of the inspiring developments of late has been the installment of as Arts & Culture Editor at WNYC/New York Public Radio/Gothamist. Steve (whom we all know from his work at The Times, The New Yorker and as former music editor of Time Out) is writing a diverse set of listings and features in several disciplines for a weekly post on Gothamist.

Just this week, the culturally omnivorous and community-focused scribe has joined WNYC, mind you, on a temporary basis (fresh on the heels of his TRULY ESSENTIAL substack Dada Strain // Bklyn Sounds (which includes way more than annotated Brooklyn music and art listings)). Check Piotr’s remarkably well-written piece of reportage on Arts For Art’s imminent “Studio Rivbea Revisited” being held at the 24 Bond Street location that originally housed the legendary Studio Rivbea, run by Sam Rivers and his wife Beatrice in the 1970s. The fact that this space is not a condo for the ultra rich is something of a marvel and the lineup features a whos-who of the new and old guards in so-called “avant-garde” NY-centric music, chiefly made by Black Americans of the last 60 years from Dave Burrell, Williams Parker, Ahmed Abdullah to Darius Jones, James Brandon Lewis and the young firebrand Isaiah Collier.

This is just a start but it’s something. (N.B. Even though Jim Macnie lost his longtime gig as an expert blurber of jazz happenings at The Village Voice (what used to be referred to as “Voice Choice[s]”) he keeps the tradition alive on his essential blog with weekly postings about essential gigs, from the ear of someone who has been living in and commenting on NY’s creative music scene since the early 1980s).

All that said, we, as a community need to confront these issues by writing passionately to the publications that have forsaken us not only as artists and organizations, but as avid concertgoers, theatergoers, dance patrons, moviegoers and art gallery goers, among other interests. Please message me and let’s ORGANIZE our efforts!

June 5, 2024 on a night at the New School celebrating Eric Dolphy. Shoutout Seed Artists & The New School Jazz & Contemporary Music.

This past weekend I witnessed the second half of Day Two of the amazing Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound festival at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium presented by Seed Artists (Pheeroan akLaff and Chris Napierala). Apparently this was only the second Dolphy festival since the inaugural edition a decade ago in Montclair, NJ, which famously featured the late Richard Davis, a key Dolphy collaborator. That event certainly does not feel like was a decade ago. Oy vey.

By the time I got there after attending my daughter’s year-end ballet recital and a kids birthday party, everything I saw was a highlight. James Brandon Lewis’ modified quartet with Kirk Knuffke, Chris Lightcap and Chad Taylor was like Red Lily Quintet, with even one or two of that band’s repertoire, but without a cellist. It was lean and mean-ingful. I believe they played some Dolphy repertoire that had never been performed publicly before.

The duo of Craig Taborn and Nicole Mitchell, arguably the chief reason I made the trek from Westchester, was partly intended to evoke Eric Dolphy’s private duo sessions with Cecil Taylor, which Napierala described as being cathartic for Dolphy when he wasn’t getting any attention for his music in the early 1960s and was really down in the dumps. These sessions happened in private and no known recordings exist. When Nicole and Craig played, they went to their own place and the music did not sound Cecil-sh in the least, at least to these ears. It was quite plucky and very soulful, almost like a religious communion. The pieces were often miniatures and while I waited for Craig to go full Cecil, he never quite went there. Mitchell played within her idiosyncratic flute range with the occasional vocal tone matching of a line she was playing in real time, switching with perfect pitch between flute and her own falsetto, something I always marvel at in her soloistic approach.

Last but not least, we were treated to a large ensemble finale performance of a Geri Allen commission for Eric Dolphy. Allen did her doctoral dissertation on the late master while studying at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. This piece Celebration Suite for Eric Dolphy has no known remaining score. So pianist Angelica Sanchez transcribed the entire piece from a YouTube video linked above from Europe in 1989. The band was a true intergenerational all-star group comprising Sanchez on piano, James Brandon Lewis on tenor sax, Kalia Vandever on trombone, Amir Elsaffar on trumpet, Jay Rodriguez on clarinets, Jaleel Shaw and T.K. Blue on alto saxophones, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, recent rising star bassist Devon Gates and two drummers: Chad Taylor and Pheeroan akLaff, who was the sole member of the original Allen ensemble. This performance was transcendent with marvelous solo turns from Elsaffar, Shaw and akLaff. It was the icing on the cake, as they say.

Sanchez, it’s worth noting, has been on a scorching creative streak these last 15 years. Her recordings for the Clean Feed, Sunnyside, Intakt and Pyroclastic labels are consistently among the best things I’ve heard in contemporary creative music with both composition and improvisation on an incredibly high level, not to mention the incredible bands she assembles as on 2023’s Nighttime Creatures. Also she’s now a VIP up at Bard College, running the jazz program there and is co-hosting a very special summer improv session in cahoots with fellow pianist Kris Davis called International Music Creators and Collaborators Workshop (IMCCW) running June 23-28, which boasts an insane one-week Summer Faculty including Dave Holland, Terri Lyne Carrington, Billy Hart, Taylor Ho Bynum, Jeff Parker, Larry Grenadier and dancer Christiana Hunte. Here’s hoping for a public performance.

Big big thanks to the team at Seed Artists that put this event together and Dr. Keller Coker, the Associate Dean of the New School and head of it’s jazz program. You can still go buy a t-shirt if you missed the events, here.

A hearty welcome to all of you who joined me since the last post. This post is a little bit heavy on the technical, but the future will not be as dry.

In a future installation of this series, I will talk about the evolution of the media landscape shifts, what can be expected today for the rank-and-file musician making a record who is not famous plus traditional AM/FM radio, online radio, podcasts and the streaming world. For today, I’m focusing on how social media advertising (including on Meta and Google-owned properties) drives discovery for a not-insignificant portion of the populace.

Please note: I do not consider myself a digital marketing expert. I am adjacent to it and very much aware of the concepts and its efficacy. I am not qualified nor even possess the working knowledge of how to run campaigns. Nor do I really have an interest in going down that rabbit hole. There are some people I recommend hiring for best practices in this sphere. They include Missing Frequencies Creative Studio (which does much more than digital ads, including video and organic social advising), MC Digital (predominantly a paid media outfit), Visualize Mor (run by the former Melanie Nañez, now Melanie Mor, a skilled graphic designer with decades of experience in jazz, who also knows how to run ad campaigns), and Mike Charlasch at Morphist (a jazz lifer who used to work at major labels and now works with performing arts centers and individual artists).

There are dozens of others in digital music marketing, whom I don’t have direct working experience with, but whom I trust based on the recommendation of colleagues at labels and in the broader PR/marketing firmament. I have a list with contact details. Send me a direct message here or email on one of the platforms where one can do that.

It’s important to understand how these campaigns actually function. Most of the ads I’m referencing run as “dark ads.” They are not posted publicly on your profile grid. Some are but most are not. They don’t clutter your timeline with “Paid Partnership” or “Sponsored” labels (though those words may show up in stories or scrolling through reels, when you do see such ads).

These ads are ideally targeted by a professional digital marketer to specific audiences through tracking pixels data (read: cookies), geo-targeting, direct email address matching, listening habits, browsing habits, comparable artists, venue affiliations, and general online behavior. The people who see them are ideally the people you want to see them. If you have apprehension about your page looking overly promotional, that shouldn’t be a concern. These campaigns are largely invisible on your public-facing profiles.

I gave early access to this article to two of the above digital marketers. Matt Cohen of remarked:

As an artist and marketer, I agree with your stance (interesting coming from a publicist!), but I also definitely agree with “Press is one key on the keychain… but without fuel behind it, you’re just idling.” I always describe PR as a piece of the pie, for sure.

A lot of our work in paid media is that exact fuel being described. It creates a more controlled outcome and helps ensure those articles and pieces of content are actually being seen. That’s just the reality of the current social media landscape.

In my opinion, it’s basically a pay-to-play model at this point. I’m grateful we work in advertising for that reason because it’s created demand for the average person trying to grow a brand or any type of entity. At the same time, I’m not naive to the fact that this landscape is constantly evolving and will continue to.

So many of our initial sales calls start with, “I just feel like my fans aren’t seeing my posts!” Well, that’s because social media (and Spotify) want you to pay for that. The good news is we can do that in a tasteful and effective way.

- Matt Cohen, MCDigital

I also sent it the talented team Missing Frequencies, whom I did a ton of work with on my PR and management clients in 2025 and 2026 (including , Steve & Iqua Colson, , , Simon Moullier and more). Austin and Talia wrote me the following joint statement:

“You as an artist, are a business. Just as a business acquires new customers with many versions of paid advertising, so should you. This is the quickest way to finding people who actually care about you, your music, and ultimately supporting that in some way. You’re looking for those people that champion you, the idea of 1000 true fans and you’ll be able to sustain a gratifying career.

Take a recent album launch and European tour campaign we ran for for example. This campaign resulted in 1,700 follows across IG and FB, 6,000 landing page clicks from paid ads for album sales and tour ticketing sites, and nearly 650,000 views on IG and FB. All of this contributed to 350 album sales on Bandcamp and a highly successful European tour, selling out Vortex in London.

“The goal of our partnership was to increase awareness around Adam’s album release and tour, support growth in streams, audience development, and both album and ticket sales. To achieve this, we developed a bespoke social marketing and advertising strategy designed to maximize visibility while building a high-quality audience across platforms. Through a thoughtful mix of targeted promotion and optimized content distribution, the campaign focused on expanding reach while cultivating meaningful engagement with listeners.” - Talia Davis (Head of Creative Strategy at Missing Frequencies)

Now take this investment and compound it. You are making an investment in those 1000 true fans that are going to show up for you. Even if that person simply shares your material or likes your videos, that is still growing your audience. Paid advertising is an essential part of the marketing ecosystem.”

Many musicians and even professional arts institutions make the mistake of hitting “Boost Post” on their own Facebook or Instagram posts. Do it if you must and absolutely have no budget for a digital marketing expert, but at least watch a few YouTube videos. They will all tell you not to do it. Familiarize yourself with the 2026 process. What I’ve always been told about this option (by old digital media marketer Sydney Hill, who now works in management) is that “Boost Post” is the equivalent of using a fire hose connected to a hydrant to water your tomato and herb home garden. Watering cans or at least hoses with adjustable nozzles were createdselectively waters the plants you need to water. If you’re not getting the analogy yet, your plants are potential fans and your fire hose is “Boost Post.” The right fans need targeted nurturing.

Read more

Late yesterday afternoon I got an email from a musician I greatly respect. He’s not famous, but he’s respected within the jazz scene, especially among musicians and aficionados. He has 20+ years of credits as a sideman and sometimes-leader. He wrote me about doing PR for a recording with players much younger than himself; an admirable act and a tradition in jazz where a bandleader or respected “elder” invites musicians newer on the scene to make a record as a rite of passage. He is acting in the role of mentor or simply employer. And the musicians he hired; “cats” as we call them in jazz lingo, are “killin,” as we say, to indicate they are very good at music.

My instinct 10 years ago would have been an immediate, “Yes, I’d be thrilled to work with you.” It’s 12:30 AM now, and I still haven’t answered his email. The music is excellent and the story is not bad; the buzz on these musicians he hired is pretty decent within the scene. And yet, I worry about the efficacy of him hiring me, paying me somewhere in the realm of $3000-$5000 to do a global (jazz) PR effort.1

While I think I could do a pretty good job, I sincerely wonder whether his money would be well-spent with me, or with anyone who does what I, and a few other colleagues do, for jazz musicians.

The media landscape has changed irrevocably. We’ve been seeing it for years, but as a person who works in the trenches pitching the media, and consumes massive amounts of (music) media (including, but not limited to, magazines, newspapers, podcasts, radio, Substack and Ghost newsletters and social media platforms), things feel way different than they ever have before. This is both cause for caution and celebration.

Even before the pandemic, consumption habits were already shifting away from traditional outlets or even reading website and toward social scrolling. The pandemic only accelerated that.

I’m no longer selling an artist-centric PR model that existed 5, 10, or 15 years ago, because I can’t. It doesn’t exist. A strategy built around targeted audience growth and direct connection to fans will unequivocally serve artists better than hiring a traditional print/online publicist for a campaign focusing predominantly on editorial coverage or reviews. But that may not be possible for everyone.

Read more

Alto saxophonist Jim Snidero made a record called Project K in 2019. Jim, a friend and longtime client is married to a Korean woman, Myoung Shin, and wanted to make an album devoted to Korean culture which he had found so much beauty in. He had asked me to try to find a gayageum player who could improvise and read. I asked Jen Shyu to play as I knew she played gayageum. She couldn’t do it.

She suggested a student studying in Boston named DoYeon Kim. I met her the next year at Winter Jazzfest in January 2020 when she was playing with Jim at Zinc Bar. She came to The Assemblage Hotel (R.I.P.), one of Winter Jazzfest’s partner hotels in the Financial District and met Olivia as a toddler. She then followed up with an email a few days later, sent some music, and asked for help writing a letter to Ashley Capps at Big Ears. I helped her write it. The message was sent out February 12, 2020.

Then COVID-19 happened. DoYeon came out to my house in Summer 2020 and we sat on the back porch, talking vaguely about working together at some point; nothing formal. A few months later, in October 2020, when my wife, daughter and labradoodle were in Canada temporarily escaping the U.S. COVID-19 hellscape and getting help from her parents, DoYeon sent me a music video she had made with the support of the Korean Cultural Institute of Poland. It was called “From Me to Me.” If you still have not watched this video I recommend you go to it right now. I sent it to almost everyone I knew at the time. It moved me so much.

We met again in January 2025, almost 4 years later. I was interested in managing her as I had been following a Roulette residency she had been part of as a 2023-2024 Van Lier Fellow. By that point, she had moved to New York from Boston with her husband, Justin, a physicist. She was increasingly visible often via Roulette or Arts For Art.

DoYeon Kim with Cooper Moore, Satoshi Takeishi, Shoko Nagai, myself and her husband Justin at Flushing Town Hall’s Mini Global Mashup

We formalized a management arrangement in early 2025. Her signing with TAO Forms came in October of 2025 after several months of negotiations. The legendary multi-instrumentalist, instrument maker and shaman, Cooper-Moore’s co-sign after a performance with DoYeon and Satoshi Takeishi at Flushing Town Hall was a crucial instigator of the TAO Forms relationship.

Joerg of AUM Fidelity and TAO Forms was the absolute perfect person at the right label with the right skill set and a worldwide following of devoted fans to bring this music to the public. Thanks also go to Patricia Johnston who helped negotiate the contract. It was a small ecosystem of people who believed.

In June 2025, DoYeon came to Amir ElSaffar’s Maqam Studio in Sunset Park during Jazztopad NYC at my invitation and spontaneously broke into a an improvised Korean speak-sung duet with a Polish wood flutist named Marcin Staczkowski, a very talented multi-reedist from a famous musical family in Poland. This year she will plays her own music as part of Jazztopad NYC (thanks to Piotr Turkiewicz from the National Forum of Music in Wrocław and Anna Perzanowska at the Polish Cultural Institute in NYC) on June 20 for a NYC premiere at the David Rubenstein Atrium. That moment standing up at that party and signing her heart out, was a microcosm of who she is. A true improviser always living in the moment. Completely free.

Since then, she played Joe’s Pub last Summer with Kris Davis and Tom Rainey which led to a short European tour as part of Berklee & New Music USA’s Next Jazz Legacy. Then Winter Jazzfest 2026 at Loove Annex during the Brooklyn Marathon. Big Ears 2026 (once solo in the Knoxville Museum of Art; once in a first-ever meeting with guitarist and sound designer Rafiq Bhatia in The Blackbox, the former Old City Performing Arts Center). Both Ann Powers and Jim Macnie highlighted that latter performance in NPR and DownBeat,

respectively. Buzz was really building.

This week, thanks to the work of Cody DeFalco at Terrorbird, we got a hefty New York Times feature (gift link) by my friend of 20 years, Philly freelancer Shaun Brady, only his second NY Times byline. Nate Chinen featured her prominently on The Gig in an International Jazz Day “Take Five” lead-in (paid subscribers only) that same day.

As of yesterday May 1, the album Wellspring is out on TAO Forms worldwide on CD, vinyl, digital download and yes, streaming. We have three 2026 Vision Fest performances in the offing as well as a performance in Philly June 24 at Solar Myth, bringing things full circle back to my Philly roots.

DoYeon is one of the most singular artists I’ve ever worked with — rooted in tradition, genuinely experimental, and possessed of an interior life that comes through in every note she plays. It has been a privilege to watch this moment build from a back porch conversation in the middle of a pandemic. Go find the music.

https://taoforms.lnk.to/wellspring

Long Play Festival started last night at Roulette and Pioneer Works. Over five nights this year, the longest edition yet, plus two full daytime days of programming on Saturday and Sunday May 2-3, 70+ concerts will unfold from David Longstreth to Shoko Nagai & Satoshi Takeishi. From Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer-winning Anthracite Fields to the Billy Hart Quartet. 70+ concerts across Middle Brooklyn (as I like to call it).

This festival, the spiritual inheritor to the Bang on a Can Marathon, previously held every June at World Financial Center, was initially planned for 2020, but mother nature had other plans. Officially launched in 2022, with truly expert programming by David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and Sruly Lazaros, Long Play has established itself as a staple of the early spring, centered around the three Bang on a Can composers. They all have B-I-G E-A-R-S (all due respect to that other Springtime confad I happen to contract for).

In fact, Long Play comes just in time as we music nerds once again yearn for another Big Ears-like experience but without the same level of madness and FOMO. Sure there are difficult decisions here. Long Play has grown this year: from one night and two full days in 2022-2025, it now stretches from a singer performance Wednesday April 30 to Sunday night, May 3.

I’ve been going since 2023 (I missed the first year as my family and I were still being cautious about going to shows). I keep coming back. Last year I cancelled other commitments, scrounged a place to crash in Brooklyn, and made a donation because it felt wrong to walk in for free. This year I’m doing the same thing. I just spent a fortune in Europe and all the Brooklyn hotels are $200+ per night, but I’m finding a way down there because that’s how much this thing matters to me.

It’s a great festival. It’s not exactly jazz and it’s not exactly classical music but it’s kind of in between the two, and they present in some of the best venues in Brooklyn: Roulette, BRIC, Public Records, Pioneer Works, ISSUE Project Room, BAM, Church of St. Luke & St. Matthew, and Brooklyn Music School. This year adds two new venues: the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, home of Theatre for a New Audience, and Betty Carter Park, which is hosting free public performances.

I’m especially proud to see Jeff Lederer and Mary LaRose on the bill this year. I’ve been pushing for them for a long time and it feels good to see that finally happen. The programming always rewards people who show up with their ears wide open, yearning for new sounds.

While it’s hard to pick favorites, I have to go with these as the performers I’m most excited to see. Obviously I lean jazzy but I like other things like Matmos and Colleen and Julia Wolfe and John Luther Adams.

If you want to come, use the code LPSide for 20% off tickets at checkout: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/long-play-festival-2026-tickets-1979786361301

Amina Claudine Myers

Billy Hart Quartet

BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore

Colleen

David Longstreth

David Murray, Dezron Douglas, Nasheet Waits

Florent Ghys

GEORGE

John Luther Adams

Julia Wolfe

Marty Ehrlich

Matmos

Miles Okazaki

Sam Prekop

Sarah Davachi

Secret Chiefs 3

Shelley Burgon

Shoko Nagai and Satoshi Takeishi

Sylvie Courvoisier and Wadada Leo Smith

The Kris Davis Trio

Trevor Dunn

Wildebeest with Jeff Lederer and Mary LaRose – There’s a Yearnin’

If you want to come, use the code LPSide for 20% off tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/long-play-festival-2026-tickets-1979786361301

https://bangonacan.org/long-play-2026/

I know I promised you all a case study on the British jazz scene, and why it has succeeded, but in doing extensive research I realized this article has already been written by others. In addition, a compelling book entitled Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion has been released by writer André Marmot, which I am now in the process of reading. A qualified endorsement of Marmot’s book was penned by the writer, Richard Williams.

What follows is a futher attempt to describe current economic and cultural realities, stemming from nationalistic politics and the rise of right wing forces around the globe that have left cultural funding in the dust.

This has led to a fundamental mutual misunderstanding of how jazz is funded with economic realities being vastly different than they were 5-10 years ago.

On the American side, a general lack of awareness of recent political and funding realities in Europe creates skewed perception of reality. Similarly from talking to European presenters and musicians, there is a general misunderstanding of how American institutions fund the arts, that is antithetical to the majority of European social democratic policy.

In short, North American jazz musicians and the industry view Europe (particularly Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Poland), as a bastion of money to be pillaged based on old conditions that are no longer real.

This fundamental misunderstanding and a lack of mutual respect for the artistic value of each nation’s music, has caused a significant chasm in how each side perceives each other. A feeling of confusion and misinformation pervades this entire relationship.

U.S.-based musicians and the industry largely believe that jazz unequivocally belongs to the United States. On the one hand, the music was born in the U.S., but as anyone paying attention to current reality would quickly conclude, the music is a global phenomenon. We can no longer stick our heads in the sand and deny this. This all-or-nothing mentality has serious consequences for how jazz from the U.S. gets received in places that are not within our borders.

Unlike the U.S., the rest of the world have created an economic and cultural infrastructure so that American jazz musicians can go abroad and make a living touring in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa.

At the same time, somewhat ironically, foreign musicians cannot enter the U.S. to have the privilege to work without significant up-front investment (often to the tune of $3000-$8000 (numbers based on varying degrees of rushing) per musician for a work visa). And there seems to be zero interest in changing this reality on a legislative level on the American side.

For the sake of keeping this conversation somewhat contained, I am limiting this conversation broadly to European countries for the moment. Of course, Europe is not a monolith. I spoke to human rights attorney, newly minted artist manager at New Village Management and a prominent cultural leader in The Netherlands, Mike Bindraban.1 He responded with an admonition.

“If I look to, for example the development of Norwegian improvised music, that’s a different trajectory from Dutch music and a different etiology. To get to the nitty-gritty of this debate, I think that discussion on what is European jazz or what is the French heritage or the Scandinavian heritage or the British heritage or the Dutch heritage…I think you need to differentiate that.”

In retrospect, treating Europe as one entity is indeed unfair. Going forward (in future entries in this series), I will attempt to differentiate each European countries’ traditions separately, getting deeper with stakeholders in each country.

My own perspective

Over the past two decades, my work has placed me in a uniqute position. I’m known in Europe as an advocate for American musicians. In America, my work has often involved the promotion of European and other non-U.S.-made jazz.

However, as a listener, I don’t think I ever heard a single European jazz player before I entered college (perhaps beyond Django Reinhart).2 Since then, I have been exposed to a ton of non-U.S.-made jazz. In my early 20s, through my work in radio and slowly picking up stuff from reading the WIRE and my work in PR, I was made aware of musicians like e.s.t. (Esbjorn Svenssen Trio), the late Peter Brötzmann, and later Michael Wollny.

My pre- and post-college perspective forced me to confront how much extraordinary music never enters the American discourse. Foreign jazz doesn’t fit the America-first model of chauvinism, even among liberal types.

These days I’m asking myself hard questions about power, cultural exchange, and what an actual cultural exchange might demand of us.

A long evolution of economic imbalance is playing out between the United States and Europe. There is more than just a tinge of resentment among European presenters and other stakeholders that European music is not taken seriously in America and that Americans expect everything on a silver platter when they come to Europe.

At the same time, most of the music that comes across my plate on a day-to-day basis is by New Yorkers or other Americans. I am incredibly biased; a product of a NYC-centric world view.

However, if a person logs onto Apple Music, Spotify, Qobuz or Tidal, one is confronted with a very different reality. Jazz from France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Spain, Denmark and Norway, to mention just a few are incredibly well-represented in playlists and featured album placements.

Despite the streaming ecosystem, most of the music that I, and my fellow Americans actually get a chance to see played is by Americans.

European jazz is not a monolith…

What even prompted me or others to lump European jazz into a codified sound, as I did in my previous entry. I could easily name a dozen European record labels of today and yesteryear that present vastly different sounds. ECM, Edition, ACT Music, Stunt, Smalltown Supersound, We Jazz, and Hubro are just a few European labels with a distinctly non-U.S. sound. I can’t say many of them sound similar to each other. Each has its own unique sound world. And each artist on these labels of course, sounds different from one another.

And yet, most of us on my side of the Atlantic are ignorant. Unlike the average U.S. consumer, I’ve not only had the opportunity to see a ton of jazz from European countries, but I’ve worked on dozens of campaigns for French, German, Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Polish, Spanish and Belgian musicians. They all sound different!

Some deeply value Black American aesthetics (swing, sway, a sense of connectedness to forebears like Louis Armstrong or John Coltrane or Anthony Braxton). Others are charting their own path entirely.

Some truly excellent music I’ve heard in the past few years has come from the French pianist Eve Risser. France’s answer to Kris Davis or David Virelles, Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra and White Light Orchestra are two of the most stunning large ensembles to emerge from French creative music in the last decade. I am not as up on her small group work but if I ever see her name on an album, I know it’s a sign of quality and experimentation. I first encountered Risser through my work with the Orchestra National de Jazz, led by electric bassist and record producer Daniel Yvinec.

Two others whom I always know are going to deliver the goods are German-Swiss drummer Christian Lillinger and Austrian pianist Elias Stemeseder (who lives in New York). Stemeseder came to NYC over a decade ago and quickly joined the band of American expat drummer Jim Black. Recently via their work on Intakt Records with various New Yorkers like Peter Evans, Brandon Seabrook and Russell Hall, they have been gaining more and more looks from the American scene; and not just musicians.

As noted before, the British pianist and a true original Pat Thomas is a titan of modern improvised music. As I stated on my instagram late last year:

Having been in the music business for close to 20 years professionally, it’s rare that I become newly enamored of a living elder. I thought I’d heard all the old heads in my 20s and 30s, if not live, then at least on records…it took this solo album, Hikmah on the TAO Forms label, to make me realize what a true original U.K. pianist Pat Thomas is. Thomas stands at the forefront of Black creative music. His music truly contains multitudes - the entire span of Black music.

Others who can really play annd deserve greater notice include Eivind Aarset, a Norwegian guitarist whom I was privileged to work for on the Jazzland label. Aarset is heavy, along the lines of an Adam Rogers or a Raoul Bjorkenheim. And yet almost no one knows him in the States; even guitar nerds, which is a shame.

In recent years I’ve come to be aware of the French musicians Emile Parisien (a soprano sax specialist) and his frequent bandmate, the virtuosic accordionist Vincent Peirani. They form the core of the French supergroup Les Égarés, along with Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal, which miraculously has toured in the United States a couple times.

Additionally the Swedish trumpeter and bandleader Goran Kajfeš recent knocked me out. His band Tropiques for Helsinki-based We Jazz Records I’d heart a few times on Bandcamp, before finally getting knocked out by his music on Perth, Western Australia-based jazz show.

Of course anyone who has not been living under a rock has heard Jakob Bro, the preeminent Danish guitarist. Known both for his extensive work with Europeans and New Yorkers starting notably with Balladeering with the late Lee Konitz and many others. He is now releasing tons of music on his Loveland imprint, with much more on the way. Just in the last year, he’s released music by or with Palle Mikkelborg, Thomas Morgan, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille and Mark Turner, among many others.

The Norwegian trumpeter Matthias Eick has been capturing my ears for a good 22 years since I heard him on a Jaga Jazzist album at my college radio station. Another fine Norwegian trumpeter, whose sound often reminds me more of a clarinet than a brass instrument is Arve Henriksen. His appearance on Bro’s 2023 ECM album Uma Elmo (linked above) with Jorge Rossy on drums is one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever hear. He is truly unique and an international treasure. I was first introduced to the music of drummer Kresten Osgood and saxophonist Kjetil Møster via Mark Christman’s Ars Nova Workshop, who has had his ears open to Nordic sounds since the early 2000s, often partnering with the Norwegian consulate in NYC to bring Norwegian musicians to U.S. audiences.3

, who writes the Substack , left Chicago, made the move to Berlin to immerse himself in the European scene that he had chronicling in America since the early 2000s. Margasak is not an all-or-nothing guy. He loves music made by all kinds of people from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, Finland, Germany, Norway, Australia and so many other countries. He long ago got past the nationalistic rhetoric that defines so much jazz discourse in and around the U.S. (“America’s classical music” or “the most American thing since Baseball”).4

“This move was not about a handful of people I wanted to see… The infrastructure of Chicago, they brought tons of these people to the United States and no one in New York was calling. Chicagoans had always been intrepid about bringing in Europeans."

The influence and engagement with jazz from the U.S. is is evident in the sounds of European jazz. Kurt Rosenwinkel, Steve Coleman, Jim Black, Tim Berne and more recently, Ambrose Akinmusire and Robert Glasper loom large in the European consciousness.5 However, European musicians are and have been (for some time) adapting those influences to their own contexts, creating something distinct — often less tied to the blues, swing, and other more literal lineages that define much jazz being made in the States.6

In my interview with Bindraban, he addressed this very issue: “A lot of the European-based improvised music has a classical tradition in it. A lot of the improvised music is institutionalized in conservatories.” Furthermore, “the multicultural[ism] of certain cities in Europe, the idea of superdiversity7 is reflected in a way that people make improvised music and reference the Black American jazz to…correlate and translate that into their own style. Hence the development of, for example, acid jazz in the 90s….in London, which has a distinct sound, which is for me [is] very much London and….Northern UK-based...it comes from a black American tradition somehow, and it has had its own development.”

There also exists a powerful and relevant modern example that complicates the idea of American hegemony over the jazz narrative. The extraordinary success of British jazz. This worldwide success (admittedly of only a few artists), including in the U.S., calls into question whether the U.S. can truly remain chauvinistic about jazz.

My old friend, the Norwegian concert promoter and curator, Jan Ole Otnaes, told me last year, “History is repeating itself,” he wrote. “Twenty five to thirty years ago we had a similar situation as the British scene today. [Norwegian jazz keyboardist and electronic musician] Bugge Wesseltoft released his New Conception of Jazz and Nils Petter Molvær released Khmer.

[The British writer] Stuart Nicholson published a book “Is Jazz Dead (or has it moved to a New Address)?” and Wesseltoft was interviewed in the New York Times. He spoke quite negatively on jazz from the U.S. Some Norwegian and European festivals claimed that nothing was happening in the US scene and preferred to focus on what was happening in Europe.”

It was right at this time that Otnæs was appointed as festival artistic director at Molde Jazz. He wanted to focus both on Norway/Europe and on great talents on both sides of the Atlantic. Otnæs booked artists like Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Tony Malaby, Ikue Mori and many more, in addition to artists from Norway and all of Europe. “I got some criticism from Norwegian colleagues because of this,” said Otnæs by email.

What Stuart Nicholson had been saying all those years ago is now coming true but from within his own country, predominantly.

Look at the undeniable ripple effect of players like Shabaka, Nubya Garcia, Theon Cross, Yazz Ahmed, Moses Boyd, Yussef Dayes, Camilla George, Alfa Mist, Kokoroko and Ezra Collective. I don’t personally love all these artists. Some I find more remarkable than others. But you have to admit they have broken through, well beyond the UK.

How did this happen? How has British jazz broken through globally when other European scenes have struggled, relatively speaking? The answer lies partly in intentional cultivation and partly in incredible marketing and branding.

Organizations like Tomorrow’s Warriors and jazz re:freshed have quietly played an outsized role. Janine Irons and Gary Crosby founded Tomorrow’s Warriors to create a more inclusive and representative jazz ecosystem rooted in community, access, and cultural integrity. Drawing on backgrounds in music, education, and leadership, they sought to support artists often excluded by structural and financial barriers. Their work has centered on nurturing confidence, honoring Black musical traditions, and building sustainable pathways so emerging musicians can develop their voices and contribute meaningfully to a broader, more equitable cultural landscape. They have nurtured two generations of musicians who understand the American jazz tradition, but aren’t beholden to it. Their music blends jazz with grime, Afro-Caribbean musics, Nigerian high life, UK club culture, and London’s Superdiversity, to quote Bindraban.

My colleague, Yvette Griffith of jazz re:Freshed told me that my work with them in 2017 in the U.S. promoting shows by Shabaka, Moses Boyd, and Theon Cross, actually had an outsized influence in legitimizing U.K. Jazz in America. I wish that my advocacy could have included a larger swath of the music there (so much incredible U.K. jazz — from Pat Thomas to Orphy Robinson to Neil Charles to Tom Ollendorff to Alex Hitchcock) has been marginalized by the anointment of four or five major artists with a global reach), but I’ll take the compliment.

As has been noted elsewhere, there’s been a serious and admirable (almost punk) DIY ethic to the London and other UK scenes. The saxophonist Nubya Garcia told the British journalist Philip Watson last year, “We had a strong community, and we all played in each other’s projects, and we rose together. It happened slowly and collectively.” She continued, “We’ve been pushing at this since we were 20 and at university, proving that we could fill venues and provide the energy that people didn’t attribute to jazz, changing perceptions and making a difference, a cultural movement. So it’s great [that] the world decided to catch up and take notice and support us. We were very, very strong in knowing that other people’s ceilings [were] not our own.”

This current British scene proves that European jazz can absolutely become a global cultural force. European jazz is not about rejecting American influence. It’s about engaging with it, transforming it, and creating something real enough, urgent enough, to stand on its own terms.

Meanwhile, American musicians find themselves caught in a bind. Without strong national arts funding, without institutional support for domestic or international touring, and facing rising logistical costs. We have fewer and fewer levers to pull.

Agent Sergio Merino of Arco y Flecha says, “I think we’ve got to [consider] the contrast between the E.U.’s subsidized scene and independent promoters. The E.U. has coordinated a cultural industry that is producing and launching hundreds, if not thousands of professional musicians every year to E.U. stages, starting with music schools, management offices, and music export platforms, all subsidized; an incredible amount of support from every country that keeps everybody moving and creates[s] a fertile environment for Europeans and Americans alike. I don’t have information [on whether these] efforts are successful in placing E.U. artists in our ears. In my case, I am an independent aficionado, promoter, booker and producer. I like to [seek out] the free thinkers worldwide because it brings richness to [me].”

Conversely, there’s no easy way for America to formally “reciprocate” unless we are talking about engaging private money—accessing the wealth of individual millionaires or billionaires, who, by and large, are not currently supporting American musicans, let alone European ones.

Further addressing the “trade imbalance” referenced in my first article’s sub-headline, another insidious reality is exposed by Otnæs.

“American musicians [playing in] Norway do not need a work permit and can earn up to $10,000 per year without paying any tax. On the other hand, Norwegian musicians and bands going to the United States have to pay around NOK 13,000 (Norwegian Kroner) to get a work permit, play for low fees and pay tax from the first dollar earned.”

When Brice Rosenbloom and I first spoke of assembling Freedom Riders, NYC Winter Jazzfest’s first touring all-star band spreading a message of unity and a dedication to social justice ideals amid Trumpism, we were advised, wisely and sternly by veteran agent Katherine McVicker of Music Works International—in today’s Europe, collaboration with local musicians isn’t just appreciated; it should be expected.

It’s not about appeasement. It’s about showing that you see and respect the scenes you’re entering.

Jazz was originally music by Black Americans, brought to Europe and the world as such, but we are 100 years on and we face a different cultural reality surrounding the music.

If musicians from the United States want to remain a meaningful part of the global conversation around jazz and funding, we have to listen as much as we enjoy the sounds of our own voices and instruments. We have to engage with European musicians as peers, collaborate in each others bands and find ways to bring Europeans into the U.S. without making them foot the bill entirely.

Organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, Berklee Performance Center, IU Hancher, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the LA Philharmonic and others need to start thinking about programs to put aside some money to subsidize the Visa process. Otherwise we face a potential disastrous effect from Europeans who continue to open their doors to our artists.

As a manager, I’m encouraging all of my artists to develop bands that include Europeans or other foreigners not as a means of cultural diplomacy, but an act of economic pragmatism. There are plenty of European musicians who can play. I’m not saying that every American musician needs a token European in their band to work in Europe, but it wouldn’t hurt.

You only have to look at an institution like UNESCO and The Hancock Institute’s International Jazz Day — a gathering last year in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and the year before in Tangiers, Morocco, both of which drew musicians from every corner of the globe, united by the spirit of improvisation, freedom and Democracy (remember that?) — to be reminded that this music was never meant to belong to any one country forever. That tradition continues next week in Chicago where Herbie Hancock, Kurt Elling and the City of Chicago host international jazz day for the first time. Major props need to go to side person Bryan Farina for helping push this initiative through. Farina had a big role in getting local state politicians to be willing to serve as host city. It would be interesting to know who paid for the visas for the foreign musicians traveling into the U.S. for International Jazz Day.

As a corrolary to all of this, I have to thank my longtime friend and jazzahead’s Artistic Advisor Götz Buhler for recognizing this as a major issue in our industry. He invited me and Lydia Liebman, my fellow U.S. publicist to take part in a talk on European-American relations in the jazz sphere. I think this talk will largely focus on basic awareness of music from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the consideration of jazz from South Africa, South Korea, South America (particularly Brazil and Mexico) and Japan.

This talk will take place Thursday 23 March from 6:30 PM to 8 PM CET in Halle 7 at Messe Bremen. I’m not sure if our talk will be live-streamed but I hope it will be recorded and archived as it’s a very important conversation we need to be having, not just at jazzahead but at Winter Jazzfest, Big Ears, and every major festival or funding institution in the States.

The changes we’ve been seeing across Europe—particularly in talent buyers opting for more and more music from their own shores, isn’t coming with a bang. It’s a slow, but unmistakable progression. Of course American stars (Joshua Redman, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dianne Reeves, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian McBride, Brad Mehldau) will always be welcomed with open arms, but for the “rank and file” American musician, it gets harder and harder.

At the same time, American chauvinism over jazz and a lack of initiative to correct our myopic-ness has made it virtually impossible for Europeans or South Koreans or Africans or Brazilians or Egyptians or anyone without a U.S. passport to even enter our shores to share their art, let alone make an economically viable go of it.

To my knowledge, Yazz Ahmed has never toured the U.S. Certainly enough ink has been spilled on her recent albums that an American tour is warranted. Similarly, Eve Risser has never toured the U.S. except with a state-sponsored ensemble over a decade ago. Pat Thomas has barely done it beyond a handful of dates with [ahmed]. Surely not the Danish-born U.K.-based Jasper Høiby whose fantastic new trio I saw in London last week, since Phronesis disbanded. The list goes on and on. Our closed-mindedness happens without most of us batting an eye.

The door isn’t yet slammed shut in either direction. And there are good actors in this dialogue proposing change. But current trends in Europe are giving us a preview of the future. Whether we walk through that door, ready for real dialogue — or whether we ignore the warning signs — is entirely up to us.

In just over two weeks, Tyrone will release his debut album, which I am representing (which could be conceived as a conflict of interest, but f*** it.). I decided to do this interview long before he asked me to work on the PR for UPWARD (Dreams & Fears Records). I am posting it now out partially out of guilt that I didn’t do it a long time ago, and to some extent, it serves as a preview to those who have the record in their inbox (as a pitch) but haven’t checked it out and to those who haven’t heard a peep about it yet.

I even produced a beautiful sounding companion podcast that is sitting all-but-finished in my Dropbox account, just lacking an introduction from me. Maybe someday, huh?

I hope you will read this, learn something and then go check out some of the music. He is one of the brightest young minds on the double bass, and, as I reference below, he is playing with so many people in so many scenes, it is head-spinning. Since I conducted it, we have met in person a couple times but never spent quality time together. Here is Tyrone Allen II.

Matt Merewitz (Matt): I think we met once at Bar Bayeux, briefly. I haven’t really been out in Brooklyn much lately — mostly just The Jazz Gallery or The Village Vanguard when I go into the city.

I first noticed you through Kazemde George, then Miki Yamanaka, then realized you were playing with Sullivan Fortner — and then I saw you also play with Joy Guidry, Wendy Eisenberg, and even show up on a Louis Cole record. I assume there’s a lot more you’ve done that isn’t on records yet.

So let’s go back. You’re from Prince George’s County, Maryland. Tell me about growing up there and your early musical life.

Tyrone Allen II (Tyrone): I grew up in Temple Hills, Maryland, in Prince George’s County. My father introduced me to music really young. Between him and my mother there was always music playing in the house. My dad started teaching me recorder when I was three. He taught elementary school in D.C. public schools, and recorder was basically the music class.

Over the years I tried piano, then tenor saxophone, but I couldn’t get a sound out of it. I gravitated toward guitar when I was maybe 8 or 9. I took guitar lessons for about five years. I loved Jimi Hendrix, Santana, John Mayer — that was my zone. My dad is a bass player, mostly as a serious hobbyist. There were electric basses in the house and even an upright. He’d play late at night. So bass was always around.

There was a summer band program at Hot Licks Guitar Shop in Waldorf, Maryland, where you learned a couple songs and then played in a band. I did that on guitar. After the performance, I basically felt: “I actually want to play bass. That seems more fun.”

Around that time I was going to Cornerstone Baptist Church. The choir director asked me to play guitar. I said, “No, but I’ll play electric bass.” That’s when I really started playing bass consistently — using my dad’s bass — in church.

Matt: This is all before you got into a school music program?

Tyrone: Yeah. The saxophone attempt was at home, and my schools didn’t really have music programs before high school. This was all pre–high school.

Going into high school I actually tried to audition for jazz band on guitar. The teacher, Mr. Canto, said, “We already have a guitar player. You can play bass — but if you play bass in jazz band, you also have to learn upright, and you also have to play in the string orchestra.”

That summer before 9th grade I took an intro upright bass class with a few other eighth graders. That’s how I got into upright.

Matt: This was at Bishop McNamara High School, right?

Tyrone: Yeah, Bishop McNamara in Forestville, Maryland.

McNamara was known more for sports. I loved basketball, so early on in high school I was trying to balance basketball and music. I played freshman and junior varsity ball. I remember playing against guys who went on to the NBA or hit big NCAA tournaments.

By sophomore year I was really in the music program: jazz band, string orchestra, eventually wind ensemble. I also did West African music and dance with Victor Bah, who ran a big production at the school called Sankofa. I played djembe with him from sophomore year through the rest of high school.

After my first year in jazz band, going into junior year, I met Paul Carr.

For people who don’t know, Paul Carr is a legendary D.C.-area saxophonist and educator. He’s mentored a whole generation of DMV players. He came in as a guest artist with our big band, and then he gave me a scholarship to his overnight Jazz Academy of Music summer camp before my junior year.

At that point I was still mostly on electric. I didn’t yet own an upright. Pepe González was there on upright. I remember being really struck by how good the other young bassists sounded on upright. It made me want to take upright more seriously.

Between junior and senior year I went to the jazz camp at Eastman School of Music in Rochester. That’s where I really heard a lot of players my own age who could really play. It made me feel like, “If I work, I can play with people at this level. This could be my life.”

So going into senior year I started practicing more seriously. I was torn between studying physics or music in college. It got to the point where I was skipping physics class to practice for college auditions.

There was also one specific moment. My school did a gala, and I had to put together a small group for cocktail hour — I was picking tunes. I went looking for versions of “My Funny Valentine,” and I dug through my dad’s record collection. He’s got a huge vinyl collection, and I found Miles Davis’ My Funny Valentine.

There’s a moment about a minute and a half in where the tension builds and then Ron Carter drops the time in this really deep way. Hearing Ron there — the way he moves from rubato into groove, the way the bass lands — it gave me chills. It still does. That moment basically told me: I have to do music.

Matt: You end up choosing Eastman for undergrad. What were the key things about your time in Rochester that shaped you?

Tyrone: First, my teachers — Jeff Campbell on jazz bass and James VanDemark on classical bass — were both huge for me. I was doing both classical and jazz, and I played in the symphony orchestra my first two years.

Second, the community. I had peers who were starting bands, producing tracks, doing DIY shows around town. My friend Abe Nouri started a pop band with horns that played house parties. My friend Ryder Eaton connected me with musicians in Rochester who weren’t strictly “jazz.” I met people doing folk, R&B, experimental, beat-oriented stuff. Mikaela Davis, for example — harp and songwriting. I met George Caldwell, a pianist from Buffalo who had deep connections to Mulgrew Miller and Donald Brown.

Those scenes showed me I didn’t have to stay in a narrow lane. I could be in orchestra, play straight-ahead, and also be around people making folk-influenced or beat-driven music.

Matt: After Eastman you did the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. That program is basically Danilo Pérez, Terri Lyne Carrington, John Patitucci, Joe Lovano, etc. Tell me about that year.

Tyrone: Berklee was huge for practice and for access. I studied jazz bass with John Lockwood and Ben Street, and classical bass with Susan Hagen, who really helped me understand my body and technique on the instrument.

It was also a big networking moment. A lot of people in that program were already touring musicians. I connected with folks like Ben Solomon (who’d toured with Wallace Roney) and (trumpeter) Aidan Lombard, who is on my record.

And I went to the Banff International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music around that period. Hearing Harish Raghavan and Tyshawn Sorey — that level of precision and internalization — showed me a different standard of preparation and focus.

Matt: When did you move to New York?

Tyrone: October 2018.

Matt: What were the first calls that made you feel, “OK, I might actually work here”?

Tyrone: Jazzmeia Horn was the first person to take me on the road. That was my first professional touring situation. Anwar Marshall was on drums. Ralph Peterson Jr. and Eric Wheeler had both put my name in her ear.

I also started working with Sullivan Fortner, Nicole Glover, and Kazemde George. Sullivan basically heard me and said, “Find a drummer.” That led to trio gigs. Nicole called me and Kayvon Gordon because she liked how we sounded together. JD Allen heard us and hired us.

Matt: You’re on Miki Yamanaka’s trio record Chance with Jimmy MacBride. How long have you and Miki been working together?

Tyrone: We met on one of my first New York gigs — an Aaron Seeber gig — but we didn’t start playing regularly until late in the pandemic. After some people moved away, she started calling me for trio gigs. By 2022 I quit my after-school teaching job because I knew when I was in town Miki would call.

Matt: You’re also in Sullivan’s orbit. What’s it like being on the bandstand with him?

Tyrone: It’s wild. He has such a huge book in his head. He’ll just start something, and you’re in it. Playing with him and Kayvon in trio is one of the most exciting things I do. You can’t predict it — in the best way.

Matt: You also work in less “straight-ahead” contexts, like Joy Guidry and Wendy Eisenberg. From the outside those feel like very different aesthetics — groove and harmony versus texture, abstraction, electronics. How do you switch modes?

Tyrone: I try to approach everyone with an open ear and not assume too much. In one band, my job might involve a lot of quarter notes and clear time. In another, it might be drones or electronics. The real difference is how much of a plan there is. I like situations where there’s room to move and mutual trust.

Matt: During the pandemic, a lot of musicians either left town or shut down. What did that period look like for you?

Tyrone: I stayed in New York through that first summer, then went home to Maryland. I was playing with Rodney Green — he stayed really active with livestreams. That kept me sharp.

I also used that time to dive into production — building tracks, making things I wanted to play along with, rooted in hip-hop and R&B feel but open harmonically. I also got back to electric bass, because in New York you can get pigeonholed as “the upright guy.”

Matt: That leads us to TY.000. What is TY.000?

Tyrone: TY.000 is my project to bring together everything I love: acoustic bass, ambient and experimental sound, R&B/hip-hop sensibility, and dance-floor energy.

I grew up on producers like Pharrell and Timbaland. I also love free improvisation and sound design. With TY.000, I don’t want separate “acoustic” and “electronic” bands — it’s all one ecosystem.

It’s mostly been solo so far — me with basses and electronics — sometimes duo. The sets can go from ambient to techno-adjacent to R&B pulse to abstract noise. It’s meant to move bodies and immerse people.

Matt: What are you most proud of so far, and what’s coming next?

Tyrone: I’m proud of the trio work with Sullivan and Kayvon. I’m proud of Nicole Glover’s trio record with Lester St. Louis. I’m proud of Luke Norris’s upcoming record, and of what I’ve done with Miki. And I’m proud of TY.000 — that’s the truest version of me as a whole: upright, electric, electronics, production, improvising.

Also, I have to shout out Alex Hamburger. She’s a flutist and composer I’ve known since D.C. I get to play electric and synth bass in her music, and that really hits home.

Matt: You’re 29. You’ve already got road work, you’re on a bunch of records people know and even more they don’t know yet, and you’re building your own voice in TY.000. That’s a lot.

Tyrone: Thank you. The most important thing for me is being honest about who I am musically across all those spaces — and documenting it.

Come see Tyrone’s band(s) play their album release shows live in NYC on March 12-13 at CloseUp. More tour dates to come.

Album releases March 13, 2026

Tyrone Allen II - Upright Bass, Electric Bass, Synth Bass, Electronics
Aidan Lombard - Trumpet (2, 4, 13, 14)
Neta Raanan - Tenor Saxophone (1-2, 4, 6-8, 10, 12, 14)
Lex Korten - Keys (1-4, 7-8, 10, 12-14)
Samantha Feliciano - Harp (1, 3, 6, 8-10, 14)
Abe Nouri - Live Effects (2, 13)
Kayvon Gordon - Drumset (1-4, 7-8, 10, 12-14)

Producer - Tyrone Allen Il, Abe Nouri
Recording Engineer - Alex Conroy, Abe Nouri, Tyrone Allen II
Mixing Engineer - Abe Nouri, Dave Darlington
Mastering Engineer - Dave Darlington
Recorded at Bunker Studios April 4-5, 2024

Photography - Avery J. Savage
Graphic Design - Laura Isabel Tropi

Here are two pre-release singles out already:

I have to thank Brice Rosenbloom, first and foremost, for the opportunity to present a Fully Altered Artists stage at NYC Winter Jazzfest.1 It had been a long-held wish to curate my own stage. I’ve wanted to be involved in curation for many years. For me, that began with presenting music at Carnegie Mellon University, writing for AllAboutJazz.com starting in 2003 and shortly after, becoming a DJ, and later overall music director at WRCT-FM Pittsburgh at CMU.

There’s an element of happenstance that occurs when you put something like this together. When people come and receive it, it can be this crazy, nerve-wracking experience, but also incredibly rewarding in the end. I got a lot of messages from the artists and from others in attendance who shared that they were excited by the curation and by the artists they got exposed to—many of whom they’d never had a chance to see or hear prior.

Some highlights: finally getting to hear Ohad Talmor’s Back to the Land played live after two years hearing that music on record (and with that band: David Virelles, Joel Ross, Chris Tordini, Eric McPherson–a mini-reunion for myself, Ohad, Joel and E-Mac from our cherished week in Cortona, Italy this past Fall). Another highlight was sitting in with alto saxophonist Alden Hellmuth on a new tune she wrote for drummer Tim Angulo; a moment where was playing Monk’s “Epistrophy” or “Well, You Needn’t” with Dillon Vado, Ben Goldberg, Hamir Atwal and Keita Ogawa and the room felt like a New Orleans dance party (I myself was dancing; scary thought, I know); DoYeon Kim talking about the body and the spirit and later Adam’s own band ELEPHANT playing Ryuichi Sakamoto’s composition “Bibi No Aozora.” which received wider exposure in the 2006 Alejandro González Iñárritu film, Babel.2

So many folks I heard from later (including many close friends) told me they got turned away at the door because the venue was full all night. I think that speaks to the quality of musicians, but also the vibe that our staff, Josh and his amazing staff and our community set for the evening.

When I took over the reins doing PR for Winter Jazzfest in late 2016, I only had plans to be a PR guy.3 I quickly expanded on my role, especially with regard to our festival social media, tapping into my obsessive modern jazz brain, full of minutiae and bios of everyone on the scene. I probably jumped in a little too deep, caring a little too much for my own mental health. Nine years later, I was ready for a new challenge. This year, I officially passed the festival PR baton to my comrade-in-pitches Taylor Haughton, a knowledgable and personable music-head, who had started with me as an assistant in 2014 and later took work at other PR firms, before landing back with me during the pandemic.

I asked Brice if I could curate my own stage in exchange for my help in another capacity. I ended up becoming co-director of marketing (and if I’m being honest, more like marketing assistant and chief copywriter), working closely alongside my colleague Melanie Nañez Mor, who cares as much about the live jazz ecosystem as Brice and myself.4

For what it’s worth, Brice has always been attentive and appreciative of many of my recommendations over the years, even taking suggestions before I was officially on staff. In an interview following this year’s festival to promote the inaugural Winter Jazzfest Tokyo, I heard him articulate his approach to programming over the years. As a presenter, especially one who makes over 90% of his budget from hard ticket sales, he has to balance art with commerce; artists with very little following to ones with enough fans to carry the festival.

Essentially, for every act the average festival goer has never heard of, there is an artist or two booked that needs to be there for the lights to stay on; for enough people to come out each night so that everyone can get paid and the whole thing happens. I will say that from the inside, nothing this year felt like a betrayal of the mission or the scene. Quite the opposite, it all felt earnest and needed.

I know that there is a small segment of the community that feels Winter Jazzfest has “sold out,” or forgotten about the undersung art music that was once the focal point when it was born at The Knitting Factory. Or when it was only in three venues (LPR, Kenny’s Castaway’s and The Bitter End). For better or worse, as the festival grew in size, for every stage like mine that presented an aesthete’s viewpoint, there have to be two stages presenting established artists with agents or some form of “mass appeal.” As for artists whose music doesn’t strictly adhere to “jazz” as the “jazz police” deem it, that’s just too bad. I would argue that the jazz-adjacent programming sells the majority of the tickets.

As a jazz snob in recovery, I can tell you of at least five artists I discovered this year in making the official festival playlist on Qobuz, introducing me to a bunch of music I hadn’t considered before this year’s edition.5 The ones that stand out are: Bex Burch, Mei Semones, Amy Gadiaga, Merope and INSTANT ALTER.

My lineup at Loove Annex (thanks to Josh Roseman and your amazing venue team) represented something of a throwback to the programming of musician turned show promoter Adam Schatz (gift link) of Search & Restore, a presenting organization and video documenter of shows that has been dormant for a good decade now.6 But I wasn’t trying to emulate anything. I was curating my personal taste, which this year included a mishmash management clients (Adam O’Farrill & DoYeon Kim7), former PR clients (Ohad Talmor, Alden Hellmuth), and in the case of Carmen Staaf, someone I’ve admired for a long time, whom I asked to be part of my stage this year because she deserves it. If you’re a musician reading this, that doesn’t mean you didn’t deserve to be on it. I just had five slots.

I also assisted in getting several other, none of whom appeared on my branded stage. One of these acts, Civil Disobedience: Blue Note in the Progressive ‘60s, led by bassist David Ambrosio is a band of enormous consequence to this terrible moment in our nation’s history. With a debut coming in May, their music carries the message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through the late 1960s compositions of Jackie McLean, Harold Land, James Spaulding, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Chambers, Stanely Cowell and Duke Pearson. They will be on tour across the U.S. in February and April.

My list for next year’s stage is already 20 names deep, representing both acts I’ve worked with plus many others I have not. And like I said, I’m working on more presenting work in 2026. Look out for that.

A MUCH-NEEDED REALITY CHECK

Winter Jazzfest is not sufficiently funded. The festival does not benefit from major grants, institutional backing, or large foundation or brand partnerships that allow presenters to absorb losses—a reality that defines much of the U.S. performing arts landscape (and the rest of the world for that matter). Musicians often participate in these events without seeing the economic reality behind them.

Over the past 22 years, Rosenbloom has taken on that risk personally, some years losing significant money and others making only a marginal profit, while ensuring that artists and staff are always paid. Despite this, he has been unfairly singled out by Local 802 and others who assume that the festival’s scale implies high profitability or, worse, exploitation. Brice’s strengths have always been curation, production, and building a community-centered model for jazz, and he has done the best he can with the resources available.

At the same time, a lifelong calling for him has been to support social justice and racial and gender equity in the way the music is presented. I think Winter Jazzfest does far better than most U.S. festivals in centering jazz as Black music and booking proportionally more Black and women bandleaders. I’m sure everyone has their own take on this.

Winter Jazzfest has hired sponsorship staff in the past, but most have fallen short of what the festival actually needs. We’ve relied on seasonal, commission-based partnership specialists, and it’s become clear that we need to level up with a year-round staff in this regard. Those of us who are drawn to the pragmatic side of presenting music need to step up and help build the festival into what it must become.

I’ve spent much of the past year volunteering my time to help build the infrastructure for a board of advisors—supported by our new fiscal sponsor, Music’s Promise—so members can make tax-deductible contributions. I realize it’s never an ideal time to ask for money, but the reality is that the festival needs sustained support. To be properly funded, Winter Jazzfest be able to:

1. Pay artists more.

2. Pay each of our executive staff a wage commensurate with 4-6 months of work.

3. Pay Brice a modest salary. He built this whole endeavor on love and passion and wanting to create a way for musicians to find more work around the APAP Conference. He has never taken a salary or a fair wage for thousands of hours of work.

4. Take greater chances in programming.

5. Expand the mission of the festival to year-round presenting, education and community-building through music.

We need capital to hire professional fundraisers. And we need a network of influential New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers who care deeply about the musical and social mission of the festival to keep it going. We humbly ask for your help to do this!

If you know of anyone who could help us in achieving these goals, please reach out to me or Brice. Thanks for reading and donating.

It is now eight months later and themes of what I wrote continue to come up, again and again in my professional life. I see them coming up in my work as a manager of American artists trying to tour in Europe, Japan and other markets. They are coming up in my work with NYC Winter Jazzfest. And just today they came up as the result of a year-end solicitation email I sent this week, including records that I worked this year hoping for some last minute love from critics who hadn’t yet made their lists.

It also contained a Top 15 of my own favorite albums (some of which I worked, which is maybe unethical, or in poor taste), that I will post at a later date (perhaps edited from its current form), with an accompanying list of about 20 other records I thought were very good, but not the best.1

The first comment came from Adam Olschiewski, the editor of the wonderful German jazz magazine, Jazz Podium, which he runs with his lovely wife Anja Freckmann. “We took notice [of your email] and share most of your choices,” Adam wrote “and regret a bit [none of] your Top 15 contain[s] Europeans.” Fair point.

Unlike most of their European counterparts, Jazz Podium places avant-leaning American and European musicians on an editorial pedestal, both in terms of covers and features, but their reviews section is unparalleled in international diversity. Down Beat and other magazines could take a page from their playbook. They are genuinely interested in everything, from everywhere.

Then an hour or so later, the eminent AllMusic.com critic Thom Jurek wrote in response to the same email, “Way too much American music.” And clarified in a subsequent email, “I am talking about jazz made in other countries that deserves to be highlighted among American critics. Because it’s as good as or better than or just plain different than what we have here. [American critics] ignore the French, the British, Brazil, The Netherlands, Germany, Columbia, Argentina.”

On a long follow-up phone call, Jurek emphasized that much of his favorite jazz in the last few years had come out of the UK, Brazil and South Africa. And that Bandcamp is a significant way he is finding out about all this new music. Additionally, as a critic of 30 years, he has a lot of connections and often writes directly to artists and labels out of genuine curiosity. Jurek is one of the most voracious listeners I’ve ever encountered and our intermitted phone calls are epic and wide-ranging.

After Thom’s response, I decided I needed to publish my piece in some form. So here is the first installment of this piece. It’s not perfect, but I can’t sit on it any longer.

There’s a conversation that has been brewing for some years across Europe that American musicians and music professionals urgently need to hear. And not enough of us are really listening.

If our American musicians want to keep crossing the Atlantic the way we have for the last 90 years, we’re going to have to face some uncomfortable truths about how this market is evolving.

At the annual jazzahead! conference in Bremen, Germany, I heard a common refrain from multiple European presenters, along the lines of: “We don’t really need American jazz anymore.”

It wasn’t a hostile pronouncement; nor an insult. It was very matter-of-fact. The dependency that once defined the relationship between American and European jazz cultures is quietly fading, and a new dynamic is taking hold: one where Europe is asserting its independence—creatively, institutionally, and economically.

It’s not hard to understand why. Europeans are increasingly aware that, historically, American musicians and their advocates have often treated European contributions to the music as secondary — something derivative rather than original or at the very least, less than. And in the early years, to some extent that may have been true. When the originators of this music were alive and playing or living in Europe, the music was evolving in real time. Europeans have been soaking it in ever since.

I think it’s fair to say there’s been an unspoken core belief for decades among both Americans and many foreigners, that jazz music made by Americans is irrefutably “the real thing,” and everything else is a respectful approximation at best. A bastardization at worst.

Whether or not you believe that — and for the record, I’m not sure I do anymore (though I definitely did in the past) — it’s clear that this perception is influencing decisions about programming, media coverage, and who gets prioritized.

You can see the reaction to this belief system most clearly in present day European festival lineups and media coverage as well as major playlist placements, especially on Spotify, which is run by mostly European editors. I arrived in Frankfurt a few days early for the conference, an annual meeting of the European, and now global jazz community.2 As I was arriving to my hotel early Monday morning, I passed a poster for the upcoming Jazz Connections Festival, to take place the following week.

As is evidenced by the above poster, more and more, European festivals and many clubs are programming predominantly European or non-American artists, with lineups filled with names that even deeply connected Americans might not recognize. From the above poster, I recognized the Australian trombonist Shannon Barnett (who lives in Germany and plays in the WDR Big Band), Moses Yoofee (who played at this year’s Winter Jazzfest), Kaisa Maënsivu, Sasha Berliner, Nicole McCabe and Eva Klesse (whom I only know about from reading German media), plus Barbara Dennerlein (a prominent German organist, mostly unknown in America). That leaves 75% of a festival in a major German city presenting artists even I have never heard of.

Jazz magazines across Germany (Jazzthing, Jazzthetik, Jazz Podium), Switzerland (Jazz ‘n More), the Netherlands (Jazzism, Jazzenzo), Poland (Jazz Forum), Norway (Jazznytt) and France (Jazz Magazine, Jazz News, Citizen Jazz) are increasingly focused inward, highlighting their own local or European stars, with American artists no longer automatically positioned as the gravitational center, though still often featured. This has been the case for many years now.

This is to be expected, as European jazz is not some nascent movement, but one that has been developing since the 1940s, when Black American musicians came to Europe to appreciate greater freedom, more appreciation and an easier pace of life. These artists like Sidney Bechet, Don Byas, Kenny Clarke, Eric Dolphy, Johnny Griffin, Art Farmer, Oscar Pettiford, Bud Powell, Archie Shepp, Nina Simone, Art Taylor, Randy Weston and many others would influence European musicians. In the 1960s and 1970s, a distinct European sound began to emerge.3

It‘s not all bad news, though.

Roel Vanhoeck is a programmer I met from Brussels, who is on the programming team of Bozar, a large performing arts venue with at least six spaces to present music to different size audiences.We met at the U.S. umbrella stand at jazzahead. When I asked him for feedback on this post just after the conference ended, he told me “One can not deny the fact that [the] European jazz scene including artists, producers, promoters and presenters [has changed] a lot [in] the last [few] years. COVID sped up things, but was not necessary the cause, rather it facilitated the speed of the changes.”

“As a presenter, I’m always looking for the new, the changes, the discoveries, and I must say that I’m a bit disappointed in the American jazz scene in the last 10 years. In contemporary classical music, a lot of the new artists I like come from the US (Jlin, Caroline Shaw, Bang On a Can, Tyondai Braxton). The Chicago scene is definitely one of the most interesting right now, but in Europe a lot of new artists also have that spirit, energy and imagination. And don’t forget that we’re having a renaissance of the jazz scene in Eastern Europe. And the Japanese avant-garde scene is also more into international touring right now. A fantastic experimental scene is developing in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco. So yes, by definition our focus is becoming more global every year.”

“What we don’t have in Europe are the big stars (Herbie, Metheny, Wynton,...) that commercially can make a difference, but perhaps that is just a matter of time.”

“I’m still programming a lot of Americans (Natural Information Society, Sullivan Fortner & Fred Hersch Duo, Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood, Mehldau & McBride, Ambrose Akinmusire, Meshell Ndegeocello, Ben Wendel’s BarCode) but it is true that number [of U.S. acts] is shrinking.”

The Spanish agent Sergio Merino, of Arco y Flecha, a large-scale production company and boutique booking agency for largely avant-garde artists based in Barcelona is someone I work with as an agent for three of my management clients. He told me: “I think the Europeans that you’ve mentioned are seeing this subject in a narrow way, music is what matters, if the music is good, who cares from where it comes?”

Merino continues “Many European promoters want to be exclusive and promote their own [favorites]. They may think that they don't need Americans because obviously there're plenty of musicians in Europe but if you want to have the whole taste, you need to have everyone in it, and U.S. artists are a major ingredient of which we are all used to.”

One has to wonder. Does the average European concert-goer or festival-goer know the difference anymore? Do they care if a band or artist is from New York or Berlin or Paris or Cairo? What happens to American musicians who built careers assuming Europe would always be there as a financial and artistic refuge?

Of course, this is not just about cultural perception anymore — it’s about economics. The practical realities matter.

The price of flying American musicians to and from Europe has skyrocketed. And of course vice versa. Rising fuel costs — driven in large part by the ongoing war in Ukraine — have made every aspect of international touring more expensive. Trade tensions, ignited and amplified by Donald Trump’s tariffs and policies, have complicated and strained transatlantic commerce — including the movement of artists in all discplines.

Meanwhile, some American acts, understandably trying to cover increased travel costs or capitalize on their outsized fame and stature, request higher fees, which many European presenters simply cannot meet.

Merino said: “I think artists, agents and promoters have been taking advantage and profiting for many years and many are now are disconnected from the current environment. Their model is failing.”

This sentiment was echoed by Jair Tchong of Ha Concerts in Ghent, Belgium. “U.S. artists are becoming way too expensive and are missing out on opportunities. [Presenters] I talk with a lot, have had huge problems making program [with these fees]. When I [programmed] KAAP in Bruges, it was almost impossible, because of these costs.”

Put it all together, and the message becomes very clear — not only at jazzahead but if you look at programming across the continent, and arguably, the world: they don’t need American jazz artists like they once did.

When I shared an early version of this piece with a German colleague, Jan Kobrzinowski, editor of the German magazine Jazzthetik, he pushed back in a conciliatory manner. He told me this trend is “not yet anchored so much in European minds but obviously already unconsciously performed.” He also lamented, “I must say reading your piece, I feel sorry if not slightly embarrassed [that] it seems there’s no room for a profound interchange on [this topic] at a meeting like jazzahead.” Word, Jan.

One major downside of this piece, as it stands is that I was not able to get any American (or even foreign) musicians to speak to me on the record (despite a few attempts), but I imagine many Americans, especially older ones, will read this and say “Yeah, but we’re better. This is our music. Jazz is American music.” Therein lies the core problem. It’s true. And it’s not true. Not anymore.

We also have to take a hard look at the issue of reciprocity. In my role at NYC Winter Jazzfest, we are constantly being pitched acts from abroad, many of them very good. But due to our funding structure and the often unproven track record of many of the artists wanting to come and play, we are unable to take those risks, nor do we have the funds to pay the exorbitant visa fees for foreign musicians to work in America, nor can we afford many flights from overseas. And this is the case for many U.S. festivals.

But I have a hunch that the real underlying barrier to any sort of real reciprocity is not the economic risk or a lack of general funding for the arts in America. Rather, its the typical American exceptionalism that leads people like me, who are aware of what’s out there to make a year-end list that is filled with all Americans.

We aren’t curious and we think we’re better. This mentality well could very well spell our demise.

Next week, I’ll publish a Part II of this article that extends this dialog and addresses the elephant in the room: British jazz.

Much of my energy these past months since I last posted has been tied up in my management work for Adam O’Farrill, DoYeon Kim, Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, and Tarbaby as well as my development and marketing work for NYC Winter Jazzfest. Additionally, I continue to be inspired by my podcast production work on Big Ears: Conversations About Music. These two organizations which I’m blessed to work on, have become mirrors for my own values.

With Winter Jazzfest, this year’s theme, Still We Rise, inspired by the poem, “Still I Rise” by the late Dr. Maya Angelou has felt like an anchor, a way of insisting that Black culture and the communities around it cannot be erased, no matter how loud the forces of erasure get. I mean…wow.

Some have accused Winter Jazzfest in the past of virtue-signaling with its emphasis on social justice. But founder Brice Rosenbloom’s commitment is rooted in his personal history and values — he didn’t simply adopt this as a marketing angle; it follows from his experiences and convictions.

As a college sophomore at Northwestern University, Rosenbloom volunteered to help bring the late South African saxophonist Zim Ngqawana to campus. That experience led him to study for a semester in Durban and briefly in Johannesburg, where he immersed himself in the community of South African jazz musicians — an early example of connecting music, culture and social context.

The seeds of activism can also be seen in his programming philosophy. From the earliest iteration of Winter Jazzfest in 2005, Rosenbloom sought to spotlight artists outside the mainstream jazz circuit — artists he believed deserved greater attention and whose music often carried social meaning. Over time, Winter Jazzfest added explicit components for panels, conversations and artistic works that address equity, race, gender and the role of music in civic engagement.

In the COVID years, when live performances ground to a halt, Rosenbloom helped launch the Jazz  Coalition — a grassroots effort that raised funds to commission new work by jazz musicians facing economic hardship. At the same time he joined the steering committee of The Blacksmiths, a coalition of artists and culture-producers focused on arts as a vehicle for Black liberation and equity.

Rosenbloom’s activism isn’t peripheral to his work; it’s woven into the fabric of how he programs shows, structures the festival and engages with the broader music community. Rather than relying on token gestures, he has made a sustained, evolving commitment — drawing from his early encounter in South Africa, seeing music as a conduit for cross-cultural understanding, and building platforms for voices that might otherwise be marginalized.

Rosenbloom’s Winter Jazzfest is not just a jazz festival—it’s a broader cultural project. By interweaving creative practice and social concern, he reinforces the idea that music — particularly jazz, which is directly connected to Black history — can be a form of both celebration and resistance.

And that brings us to this moment. Saturday’s #NoKingsDay protests — a nationwide mobilization against rising authoritarianism under President Donald Trump and his administration, spanning thousands of rallies across all 50 states — underscore Rosenbloom’s spirit of collective voice and resistance. Winter Jazzfest’s ongoing efforts to center Black music, culture and social justice now mirror a broader public moment: when citizens and artists alike refuse to be silent, when the stage becomes a platform for change, and when art and activism converge.

Before I go, here are a few other things I’ve been working on.

For Big Ears, the conversations I’ve been producing continually remind me of how much I love expanding the dialogue around music, giving artists room to connect their work to something bigger, whether that’s civic life or cultural history.

I was fortunate to set up a conversation recently between noted new music writer Steve Smith and composer Lisa Bielawa regarding her commission, Knoxville Broadcast, “a large-scale site-specific ‘spatial symphony’ that united hundreds of musicians from across Knoxville in three free public performances at World’s Fair Park.” Those performances concluded today. I learned a lot about Lisa’s past site-specific works as well as her journey through music, which took a very curious path by dint of who her father was. Have a listen.

We also produced two prior episodes for this new season of the podcast on Cécile McLorin Salvant with critic Natalie Weiner, as well as a preview of the 2026 festival featuring Ashley Capps with Ann Powers.

Expanding my role as manager for O’Farrill and Kim have been major parts of my professional life in 2025, shaping the rollout of both of their forthcoming recording projects. I’m also thinking long-term about where each wants to go and how to help them get there. I will write in more depth on both Adam and DoYeon soon.

There have been some bright spots in my PR work as well: Linda May Han Oh’s Strange Heavens receiving strong, thoughtful coverage; Lex Korten’s Canopy making its way into the conversation as a debut of real originality; Jacob Garchik’s Ye Olde II is sparking critical curiosity with its unusual medieval-jazz meets sci-fi blend. And Luigi Grasso’s Gil Evans-inspired timbrally diverse compositions for the NDR Bigband in Hamburg has begun to receive some nice plaudits.

Those kinds of wins remind me that publicity still matters, even as the media landscape contracts and shifts and does not favor any central news source, but rather exists as a patchwork quilt of divergent agendas, covering myriad artistic scenes, often with little overlap between outlets. When the right story finds its moment and willing ears, it can amplify an artist in ways that ripple outward; especially here on Substack.

Recently has been crushing it with album reviews on his Substack . Yes, he’s covered almost all of the above clients but his broader cultural coverage represents the rather rare critic who often engages with music that’s not often in the critical conversation. In other words, he’s a free thinker. And all of us in Substack-land are beneficiaries of his years of accumulated insight. Let’s collectively welcome him to Substack after many years at PopMatters.

And just the other day, my old buddy the audiophile Stereophile columnist, came over and interviewed me for his YouTube channel, which focuses on jazz vinyl and gear reviews. I talked about five recordings that I love from my vinyl collection that feature saxophonists:

1. Woody Shaw - Blackstone Legacy (Contemporary) - featuring Gary Bartz & Bennie Maupin

2. John Coltrane - Giant Steps (Atlantic)

3. Cannonball Adderley Quintet - Live in San Francisco (Milestone)

4. Woody Herman - Woody & Friends: At the Monterey Jazz Festival (Concord) - featuring Stan Getz, Frank Tiberi, Bob Belden, Dick Mitchell, Gary Smulyan

5. Darius Jones - Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) (AUM Fidelity)

Music has the power to hold us together. We just have to do the work and inevitably reap its benefits from the stage, from the audience and whenever we gather for music.

The most distinct memory I have of Philly music lover and taper, Tom Leies (aka “Taper Tom” or Tom Lindel, to those on Facebook)1, is along the left wall of a gallery space in South Philadelphia. He was quite conspicuously taping a show by Mostly Other People do the Killing circa 2007.

I distinctly remember the creaky floors and the atypical location of the show. This was in the early days of Ars Nova Workshop, before there was a permanent venue. At the time, concerts were on a movable feast model.

Tom was at most ANW shows I attended with little black microphones wound around the temple of his eyeglasses and perched right over each hinge. They were always “hidden” under a curved black baseball cap. He often wore a black leather jacket or occasionally just a loose fitting t-shirt, but only if it was really hot. He had a grayish ponytail. Tom didn’t talk much, but you knew he was there for the music and the fellowship of fellow music heads.

Leies was one of those figures that make music scenes what they are. I think of die-hard NYC jazz fans like George Korval, Annie Imbaud, Jazz Judy, Mark Reboul, Postal Steve, Ken and Gammy Miller, Lebab Fallin, Richard Berger, and the late Carl Goldfarb, Peter Cox, Sal Capozucca, Irving & Stephanie Stone and many more. Bertrand Uberall and the late Jerome Schneidman in the DC scene. Wayne Bognar in Pittsburgh. Hope Carr in Seattle. Like all these folks, Tom was a fixture of the scene. He was the scene.

My old DL Media colleague Ron Bock, an obsessive fan himself (who told me he grew up down the street from Tom and cut his mom’s grass for years), informed me of Tom’s passing the morning he died of complications from Parkinson’s disease. The disease had stripped Leies of his ability to attend most shows since about 2017 through the last years of his life. His diagnosis was a particularly cruel punishment for a guy who lived for live music.2

Bock informed me that Tom’s recordings were meticulously preserved and most are in his or Mark Forman’s possession. It's an incredibly valuable opportunity to have an archive of 2-3 decades in local music history.3 Taper Tom would tape at the TLA (now known as The Fillmore), North Star Bar, The Tin Angel, World Cafe Live, The Electric Factory, Keswick Theater, Gojjo, The Painted Bride, Johnny Brendas and more.

I didn’t want Tom’s passing to transpire without a formal acknowledgement of his contributions so below I’ve gathered a few remembrances of Taper Tom.

Forman was a DJ years ago on WXPN before it became a “professional public radio station” and kicked out all the community members, in favor of “professional DJs.” Mark had kept in close touch with Tom prior to and during the pandemic.

Before I give him the floor, I’d like to share some off-the-cuff comments my old pal Dan Blacksberg, after I broke the news to him the morning I was contacted by Bock:

“Of course, Tom was somebody who was dear to me, if not quite near to me. I'm sure you know what I mean. He was such an important part of my ecosystem in terms of being a part of a music community and he'll be greatly missed. Also, because I'm not on social media very much right now, I might have easily missed this news. It's really a long life that we get to lead and taking in so much music over so much time; all the people coming and going in all the different ways, including passing away like this, reminds me that no matter how elliptical our orbits end up, we're always connected through the time we spent together and the things that we took in around the same time in our lives.” - Daniel Blacksberg

After my talk with Dan, he wrote something beautiful on Facebook.

Tom was a fixture for me at every show for the first many years of my career in Philadelphia. He'd be everywhere and always recording, whether fully or sort of authorized, or with a pair of mics stealthily clipped onto his glasses frame, only kind of hiding under is baseball cap, running right to the DAT recorder in his pocket. Countless times he would walk up to me at a show, speak a word in his quiet way, and hand me a burned cdr of my most recent performance. And if I missed a show, chances were I could get a copy asap. I have a large binder with cds of most live performances I did in Philadelphia from say 2007-2010 or later. It was a gift and a thrill every time.

Philly saxophone legend and Warriors of the Wonderful Sound bandleader Bobby Zankel chimed in on Facebook with an apt tribute to Tom:

Tom was actual proof of how important the human beings who listen and love music are to the creation of new music and the existence of a community that supports and nurtures the music and the musicians. His chosen mission of recording music and sharing the fruits of his labor was inspirational and critical to our awareness. Peace and blessings Tom I thank I have a vision of what you will be doing in your next existence. On the stage with an instrument giving other joy.

As did Philly trumpeter Bart Miltenberger:

Thank you, Tom. You were a blessing to the community. I don't think it's exaggeration to say that you were as important to the scene as many of the best musicians. Man, did it feel good to be setting up for a show and you walked in and began setting up those condenser mics. It signaled that this gig was the place to be that night. Instant validation. I asked you multiple times over the years about your motivation and you just smiled from under your baseball hat and you’d quietly say something about how you thought that the scene in Philly was special and important for the music and that it needed to be documented. To be even included in something that you felt should be documented sure felt good to me. You were a one of a kind. Thanks, Tom, and rest in Music.

Mark Forman remembers Tom Leies

Now I’ll give the floor to another Philly musicker, Forman, who knew Leies possibly longer than anyone mentioned here besides Bock, who grew up down the street from Tom’s mom.

I can’t say exactly when I met Tom Leies. It feels like he was just always there—maybe going back 25 or even 30 years. Most likely the early 2000s. I’d see him again and again, mostly at jazz shows. It took time to get to know him—he was so quiet, shy even—but eventually we started chatting. That’s how the connection grew.

He wasn’t just at the jazz gigs. I’d occasionally see him at rock shows too, Among the CDs he left behind, there’s a 1998 Lucinda Williams show, but most of what he collected was more recent.

He worked at NAPA Auto Parts—his sister confirmed that. It was a low-paying job. He lived with his mother in the same house for decades. He was one of seven kids. His financial situation was always tight. But he didn’t complain.

Where his love for music came from? I’m not exactly sure. Maybe just from growing up with the radio on. His sister said she picked up a lot of psychedelic influences from him—The Doors, Cream, that kind of thing. His father was an alcoholic. According to his sister, Tom bore the brunt of that pain. I think music was his refuge. It became the thing he could hold on to.

People called him “The Lone Gunman.” I believe that nickname came from the times he appeared on J. Michael Harrison’s longstanding program, The Bridge on WRTI-FM. He didn’t ever speak on air, but he brought his recordings, and J. Michael would play them on his show. Tom would just be up there quietly, handing off DAT tapes or CDs.

The fidelity of his recordings wasn’t great, but the music was always worthwhile. I’ve got dozens, possibly over a hundred of those CDs myself. He must’ve handed out thousands over the years. It was like: “Oh, you missed the show? Here’s the recording.” It was his way of sharing beauty.

Tom always had a baseball cap, a ponytail, and this look that didn’t quite fit into the mainstream. He mumbled. He was awkward. He didn’t make it easy to get to know him, but if you were patient and stuck around long enough, you’d find out he was a really smart, kind guy with deep passion for the music. He’d open up, and then you were in.

He loved guitar music—had a deep thing for Larry Coryell, probably owned 20 or 25 Coryell CDs. Martin Kline, who knew him well, told me Tom took guitar lessons for 20 years from a guy named Donahue in Delaware. Evidently, this teacher even wrote books about guitars. Tom had some gorgeous instruments, some made of stone, even. He left me one.

He wasn’t just a listener. He tried to play. That surprised me. It made sense, though. He was always reaching toward the music, even if his confidence wasn’t always there.

There are so many shows I could point to where I saw Tom, but the truth is, he was just always there. That’s how you noticed him. Not because of any one event, but because he never missed anything. Every Ars Nova show. Tons of Bowerbird events. The Rotunda. He helped define the community without ever calling attention to himself.

He was meticulous. So many of the CDs he bequeathed me were still shrink-wrapped. It makes you wonder—did he listen to them, or was the act of collecting and sharing what really mattered to him? I think it was both. Once you got past his shell, he could talk music all day. He appreciated the rare imports, Japanese editions—the good stuff. He just didn’t flaunt it.

I want people to know this: Tom was a genuinely good person. Whatever it was that made him hard to reach at first, it melted away when you finally connected. He was generous. He was loyal. He didn’t ask for much. He was just there, adding to the music scene in a quiet, essential way.

People like Tom are what make scenes special. They don’t chase the spotlight. They build the foundation. They give the whole thing flavor. He was a mensch. I told his sister that. And I mean it.

I miss him. I miss talking to him. But I feel honored to be holding on to a piece of his legacy—a personal archive of the Philly jazz scene from the early 2000s through 2015 or so, recorded by the Lone Gunman himself.

Rest easy, Tom. You were one of the good ones.

Since I launched this newsletter, I’ve developed an even stronger respect and appreciation for the hustle of newsletters like , , , , , , , , , plus ’s almost daily snarky-but-true political commentary.

Cuba on Record

Sunday Listening: Five "Back and Forth" Albums

The Spanish expression “ida y vuelta,” when describing songs, most often refers to a musical exchange between Spain and Latin America. The phrase, literally “back and forth” or “round trip,” is applied to specific styles; but it’s a term I love for any itinerant fusion. Here on…

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a year ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · Judy Cantor-Navas

A recent discovery is ’ , which like ’s Substack, is partly a serialized book, which you should support. From dealing with her as a journalist over the years, I knew Judy had good taste and got Latin jazz into Billboard whenever she could, but man, she really knows her shit. A great discovery. Highest recommendation.

NR MINT

More Herself

Abbey Lincoln’s work as a musician, writer, activist, and actor bears on multiple histories: of jazz and the music’s underacknowledged singer-composers; of film and theater; of Black liberation movements and feminism, though, it’s true, Lincoln didn’t herself identify as a feminist. It benefits from the sort of panoptic criticism practiced by the writer…

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 12 comments · Dylan Hicks

’ is a stellar newsletter written by a musician and erstwhile critic. Hicks’ posts on Abbey Lincoln and Kevin Sun were some of the most engaging and worthwhile reading anywhere and are a case-in-point for Substack’s existence. ’s remains a necessary long-form scholarly outlet on drummers and non-drummers. Not to mention ’s Finally, (formerly of WRTI) is publishing weekly capsule reviews of new releases in addition to pieces on classic jazz vinyl. His piece on André 3000 is what broke the news of that album for me.

The ideas and inspiration these folks put forth on a weekly basis is staggering.

For a hot minute, I thought I could juggle my obligations as a publicist, manager and podcast producer. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t be as prolific as my colleagues above. Of course, some of these folks are doing this for money, as a side hustle to other ventures or day jobs. Money is not as much a motivator for me, as contributing to the cultural discourse. But I would still appreciate your support if you can open your wallet today. This does take a lot of my time.

What’s Coming…

You’ve seen my published chats with “side people” like Paul Carr and Mark Christman. I have also spoken to bassist Tyrone Allen (who is at The Village Vanguard this week with the precociously talented Nicole Glover; he was there a few weeks ago with Sullivan Fortner, whose Southern Nights is the best piano trio album of the year). I spoke to my longtime friend–concert promoter, manager, impresario and overall doer, Danny Melnick (whose recent bookings at Carnegie Hall have brought me to the city for shows by Steven Bernstein and Ravi Coltrane with Flying Lotus). I also convened a panel in celebration of the life of the late Larry Appelbaum, just days after his passing. Larry was really big for me growing up listening to jazz in the DC area.

I spoke in January to the critic and author Mark Stryker whose book Jazz from Detroit, published in 2019, has a forthcoming documentary version featuring talking heads including Geri Allen, Ron Carter, Regina Carter, James Carter, Barry Harris, Christian McBride, Pat Metheny, Endea Owens, Karriem Riggins, Don Was, and more.

All these pieces are in draft form and will come out over the course of the Summer.

I’ve also been deep in the weeds producing Big Ears: Conversations About Music, which is easily among my proudest professional achievements to date. Thanks again to Ashley Capps for his trust and believing in the product. Also to Trevor Smith for being the best producing and editing partner a guy could ask for.

The late Roy Haynes would have turned 100 years old on March 13. Kevin Whitehead had this moving appreciation. Soon after, Fresh Air published an insightful appreciation for Gene Ammons on his centenary soon after.

The Gig

Francis Davis, RIP

Francis Davis, who died on Monday at 78 after a long stretch of worsening health, was the kind of listener who balanced a voracious appetite against a discerning palate. He was the sort of writer who combined acute observation with elegant yet unfussy craft. As a critic he …

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a year ago · 40 likes · 11 comments · Nate Chinen

Speaking of Fresh Air, we lost Terry Gross’ husband, the inimitable jazz critic Francis Davis. Francis founded the Annual Jazz Critics Poll from 2006 to about 2020, which I had a vested interest in and which I benefitted from professionally for many years. I happened to have called Francis by phone while I was in my hotel room at Big Ears. I knew he had been sick. I wanted to make sure I spoke to him at least one last time. It had been over a year since our last conversation. It was less than 3 weeks later that he left this mortal coil. Terry later told me that our conversation was one of the last he was able to have. I’m working on an appreciation of Francis.

Please stay tuned to this space. More coming soon.

I think I first noticed it with Robert Glasper.

I remember hearing Canvas for the first time circa 2005 and thinking: here’s someone who could be the future. I loved the elegance of his touch, the subtle modernity, the Radiohead/Maiden Voyage mashup. In My Element was thoroughly promising in this same vein. But then Double Booked came, and Black Radio after that—something in me recoiled. Where were the uptempo burners? The harmonic daredevilry? Why was this brilliant pianist vamping endlessly over neo-soul grooves? Why was the improvisation so… easygoing?

I was a Glasper fan who had become a Glasper skeptic. And that skepticism revealed something deeper. I wasn’t just reacting to the music—I was reacting to the packaging, the popularity, the genre fluidity. I had become a jazz snob.

Not the kind that posts in audiophile forums about vintage Blue Note Records pressing or Prestige editions or insists on only listening to 1964 Wayne Shorter. I mean the kind who works in the jazz business, promotes artists, believes deeply in current state of the art form—but who has also knowingly distanced himself from trends that didn’t align with his own sense of what jazz should be. For years, that has left me disconnected from the broader cultural zeitgeist, and out of touch with a lot of good and relevant music in our midst.

I’ve long resisted anything in jazz that resembled pop music, incorporated more broadly popular music of today or broke away from the more “outside” strain of the music. Not entirely, of course—I’ve often supported certain cross-genre artists, who have made excursions into more mainstream sounds. Nate Smith & KINFOLK. Mark Guiliana. Kurt Rosenwinkel (think Heartcore or Caipi). Even theatrical or cabaret-inflected performers who lean into entertainment like Kurt Elling, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Hilary Gardner. I have stanned these folks whole-heartedly.

But the Kamasi Washingtons of the world? The broader phenomenon of acts like Greg Foat, Yussef Dayes, Jacob Collier, Kokoroko, Ezra Collective. Kamasi felt, when he broke out big in 2015, and still feels like branding over substance. A pretty good sax player, whom I had heard in Gerald Wilson’s Orchestra in LA in 2007, but felt otherwise unremarkable aside from the star-making machine.

Nubya Garcia? Talented, clearly—but when she based her debut on the dancehall tradition––which admittedly is as important to her musical identity as Joe Henderson––I quietly dismissed it as a sellout move. I did like her recent follow-up much more. This type of silent judgment applied to keyboard whiz Kiefer until I heard him profess his love for such greats that I personally identify with such as Phineas Newborn, Mulgrew Miller and Sullivan Fortner on Nate Smith’s YouTube series, Pocket Plus One.

Shabaka Hutchings actually earned my respect, because I felt he came from a sincere and studied place–especially with the album Shabaka and the Ancestors, which preceded his overwhelming fame. Makaya McCraven always had my respect as a dyed-in-the-wool jazz musician who started to experiment with beatmaking and production after a long stint as an instrumental hip-hop player and happened into the phenomenon that is International Anthem.

This disposition of mine ran deep.

A ranting tone was my default posture for years. I framed myself as a defender of my own strange form of musical integrity—skeptical of anything marketed too easily, wary of narratives designed for viral traction. When Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah/a.k.a. Chief Adjuah was turning heads in the press (with a rock publicist on the payroll), I rolled my eyes at the framing. “What does wearing Air Jordans and listening to Migos have to do with the future of jazz?” I wrote at one point on my Facebook. It wasn’t about his music—Adjuah was talented and I still believe that. I was infuriated by the narrative machinery used by the media––how social media aesthetics, fashion, and media-savvy began to outweigh musical substance in the public eye. Same for Kamasi and I resented that these things got these folks over. That kind of thinking kept me suspicious of anything marketed based on non-musical merit.

That suspicion turned into cynicism. At one point I posited “Does anyone know of any examples where the ACTUAL MUSIC drove an album's acclaim or success in the jazz or instrumental music world?”

I was becoming the kind of snob who romanticized an era that likely never existed—a time when musical merit alone supposedly opened all doors. A purist fantasy. In truth, jazz has always been shaped by charisma, style, and myth-making. And the more successful touring acts has had some combination of those three traits. I also revered a certain kind of musician who met my criteria of being the real thing.

I viewed the artistry of contemporary artists like Aaron Parks, Ambrose Akinmusire, Craig Taborn, AlasNoAxis, Vijay Iyer, among others as the real thing. I viewed artistry through the lens of cultural capital rather than broad resonance or popularity.

What began to shift in me? A mix of new professional experience and self-reflection. In 2019, I began working with the drummer, beatmaker and rapper Kassa Overall. Kassa was this unique example of a bonafide jazz musician with actual years of experience on the road and street-savvy hype man, who was willing to reject continual work as a sideman in service of working out his live act as backpack jazz rapper. Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz was a tectonic-plate-shifting revolution for me. I was completely floored at an artist maintaining jazz-adjacent improvisational abandon with the lyrical flow of a nerdcore rapper spilling his heart out in ingenious raps.

The single “Whats New With You” (feat. Sullivan Fortner) – from having pianist Julia Chen replay the iconic opening “riff” from Ahmad Jamal’s take on “What’s New” from Live at the Pershing to clever lyrics like “I used to check in before I take a flight / Just to have good sex we would fake a fight” and later “Wedding on a frozen lake, try to cut a frozen cake / Spear made of molten lava, hope your heart is as cold as Kassa,” we hear an artist who takes sampling to a completely different place while having a wealth and breadth of poetic references, clearly referencing his own life. There are so many examples like this all over this masterpiece, which continued on his following album on Brownswood, I THINK I’M GOOD, a subtle nod to his longtime struggles with mental health problems.

Later, working with Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band opened me up to the emotional immediacy of more mainstream vocal/big-band jazz. Marquis Hill’s album Composers Collective: Beyond the Jukebox hit me in the chest—not because it was radical, but because it was beautiful. I realized that I’d shut out music that brought other people joy simply because it didn’t challenge them enough.

Why did I wall myself off from joy for so many years?

A recent Butcher Brown album—covering Wayne Shorter, full of funk grooves—was marketed to me on a playlist. When I listened, I was floored. Not intellectually—emotionally. It was just… fun. And that mattered.

I started thinking back to all the times I dismissed “fun” as unserious. When once said that I wasn’t ready to accept the “feel-good” movement in jazz, I bristled. But now? I think he was right.

I’m learning to let go of old hierarchies. Of the need to defend the fringe at the expense of the middle. Of the belief that discomfort equals depth. Sometimes, music can simply lift you. Entertain you. Invite you in.

I still stand by the “challenging” artists I’ve championed—William Parker, Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, Cooper-Moore, Craig Taborn. But I no longer feel the need to diminish other music to validate theirs. The world is big enough for all of it.

And so plan to go to the Alice Coltrane tribute concert at Carnegie Hall this Friday, which I’ll admit, initially made me recoil. You know, the one with Flying Lotus, Ravi Coltrane, Brandee Younger, David Virelles, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts. I plan to experience it and let it move me. (And maybe even be off my phone.)

I’m trying to be less of a snob. To go to the 2025 Newport Jazz Festival in its current incarnation of pop-jazz and feel-good. To upport Black popular music’s intersection with jazz without interrogating its intent. To stop deciding what’s “for me” based on reflex.

And I’ll keep reporting back. From a place of curiosity, not control.

Big Ears is over. The musical event that I most anticipate and long for year-round is gone for now. It lives on in my mind and my heart—and in the hearts of so many fans and musicians, who take part on an annual basis.

Big Ears is a singular beacon on the musical calendar—a sanctuary where genre dissolves or is sublimated to the totality of musical sound and vibration. It calls to the soul of the curious listener, the seeker, and the artist alike.

Trying to move beyond my jazz roots

This year a few weeks before the festival, I made a promise to myself. Go see the acts you don’t know. So often, it’s my wont to gravitate towards the things I already know at these types of events. The path less trodden, but subtly encouraged at a festival like Big Ears is to seek out what you know little to nothing about, trusting in the curatorial vision, exposing oneself to the multitude of sounds available at a boundary-less event of this magnitude - roughly 180 bands, another 20-or-so films and 30 talks.

Limitations this year

As luck would have it, about two weeks before the festival an already hurting knee turned into a very bad injury; one that may reverberate in its effect for years to come. I was running up some steps, heard my knee pop, and was in excruciating pain. I had to go to the ER that night, then waited a few days for an MRI. A day before I was supposed to travel, my orthopedist drained some liquid from my knee so I could walk again. Two days later, I woke up with a terrible sore throat and head cold. Nevertheless, I got on the plane because I would have felt much worse missing the entire thing than having a less-than-ideal weekend with some limitations. I was miserable for the first two days. That, plus the fact that I never sleep well in hotels during festivals—adrenaline is pumping, excitement off the charts. This meant I didn’t catch as much music as I’d hoped.

Big Ears is so special because it brings me in contact with jazz and the jazz-adjacent (Adam Rudolph, Tyshawn Sorey, Ambrose Akinmusire, Nels Cline, Mike Reed, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Fay Victor, Josh Johnson, Steve Lehman), while piquing my curiosity and cementing my broader interest with outliers I have loved for years, but perhaps not kept up with (Anohni & The Johnsons, Anoushka Shankar, Joan As Policewoman, múm, Mivos Quartet, Explosions in the Sky).

Some of the things I enjoyed most this year were completely new to me: the pianist and singer Phil Cook (who also plays a mean banjo), the Pittsburgh-based singer-songwriter Merce Lemon, the Scottish bagpipe player Brigde Chambeuil, and the “freak folk” singer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Hurley (thanks to Jim Macnie and Ashley Capps for their hearty recommendation). Hurley sadly died, just three days after the festival ended.

The FOMO While You’re There

Everybody talks about the FOMO you feel from not coming entirely. But the FOMO that you feel when you’re actually there and even in the days after, is just as bad. It was still plaguing me 3 days after returning home. I’m still kicking myself for missing so many artists I had put down on my own personal schedule. The following were names I’d seen in the media, on playlists, heard from friends—artists who are so special—and given all the factors between my leg injury, my head cold, my poor sleep and just the sheer muchness of music, art and atmosphere, I did not get to. Here are some notes I had written to myself (before my injury and illness).

• Kate Soper's Ipsa Dixa (heard the name a dozen times, never heard the music) - Didn’t make it.

• Astrid Sonne (keep hearing this name often on New Sounds with John Schaefer, but have not consciously checked out the music) - Scheduling conflict.

• Joy Guidry (heard her music on streaming sites, never saw her live) - Missed, but can see her in New York again soon.

• DARKSIDE (everyone is talking about this band and about Dave Harrington in general; Grayson Currin picked them on the Critics Roundtable episode that ran several weeks ago) - Saw it, maybe not worth the hype, but I see its appeal as a late night closing act.

• Cassandra Jenkins (because Ann Powers talked to her for the podcast and I've heard a lot of buzz these past 3 years, maybe its something that clicks live) - Missed due to a scheduling conflict.

• Swamp Dogg (heard some music on a Big Ears fan-generated playlist; been hearing about him for many years and never seen him; I intend to change that) - Missed duo to a scheduling conflict/unplanned hang with a friend.

• Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn (I often try to avoid the buzziest acts, as some kind of defense mechanism to my non-commercial roots, but my co-worker told me he saw them at Winter Jazzfest and they brought tears to his eyes, so that's something) - Missed for unknown reason, probably to see something more familiar.

• Jessica Pratt (heard the buzz and some of the record on streaming; never seen her live) - Missed for unknown reason.

• Michael Hurley (Jim Macnie's highest recommendation; Ashley Capps has talked endlessly about him) - Saw the secret show at The Jig & Reel, enjoyed very much.

• Merce Lemon (keep hearing her name on critics lists and I think she's on a label I like, but have not checked out the music) - Saw it, one of my favorite acts on the festival.

• Lara Somogyi (interesting name and interesting bio; I know nothing else) - Missed it, due to exhaustion.

• Lankum (Ann Powers highest recommendation) - Missed it, due to exhaustion

• [Ahmed] (top album of the year in the WIRE, recommended by three members of the Critics Roundtable) - Saw them at Regas Square. Good show and intense industry hang. But a bit overrated.

• Mabe Fratti (heard about her on WNYC New Sounds, such an intriguing name) - I missed this one Sunday, due to exhaustion; later was told she was one of the best acts on the festival. Kicked myself.

What I did see…

All that said, I did see a lot of amazing music, and I feel grateful for that. My cold kept me out of the game most of Thursday night, but I make it out around 10 PM to see the following.

• Barry Altschul’s Axiom 5 @ The Bijou Theater - Standard fare free-bop; very much enjoyed Uri Caine, Jon Irabagon and Mark Helias contributions, particularly the latter’s completely-alone bass solo late in the set.

• Phil Cook @ First Presbyterian Church - This former Megafaun member was unknown to me before poring over the Big Ears fan-generated playlist on Spotify. I heard Phil’s music and it touched me deeply. Then I saw my friends at Big Fish are booking him so I felt an extra obligation to go. I was not disappointed. I especially loved how he broke out with almost a stand-up set mid-set talking to the widely dispersed audience, answering their questions with good humor.

• DARKSIDE @ The Mill & Mine - noted above

Friday March 28, 2025

• Conversation: Ambrose Akinmusire & Nate Chinen @ Blue Note Lounge - a true highlight; a Big Ears: Conversations About Music podcast is forthcoming

• Conversation: Barry Altschul & Ashley Kahn @ OCPAC - I learned a lot about Barry’s early years. Probably also will be a mini podcast episode.

• Kelly Moran @ St. John’s Episcopal Church - a bit tepid for my taste, though a pleasant interpretation of Ryuichi Sakamoto at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

• Adam Rudolph: Hu Vibrational @ Jackson Terminal - I lay down on the cool ground of Jackson Terminal and blissed out to the therapeutic sounds of a band I have long admired but never seen live.

• Jeff Parker ETA IVtet @ The Bijou Theater - This was the second or third best set of my festival, it began super minimalist and later progressed into one of the most dramatic arcs I saw; Josh Johnson on alto and Jay Bellerose on drums were particular highlights in addition to the classic Blue Note and CTI-inflected guitar riffs from Parker. My first time seeing Anna Butterss in person.

• esperanza spalding @ Knoxville Civic Auditorium - One of my most disappointing shows. Many unfortunate artistic decisions including gratuitous booty-shaking.

• Mike Reed’s Separatist Party featuring Ben LaMar Gay, Bitchin Bajas & Marvin Tate @ Jackson Terminal - After two previous festival misses, I finally caught the set from this ecstatic declaration of musical and social subversion. You can always count on Chicago musicians to go against the grain with something totally fresh. Marvin Tate was particularly on one this evening.

• Ambrose Akinmusire: Honey from a Winter Stone @ The Bijou Theater - easily the best set of the entire festival for me. It had all the elements. Melody. Harmony. Rhythm. It reflected a lifelong immersion in so many sound worlds and a deep dedication to compositional

Saturday March 29, 2025

• Kokayi @ The Standard - Only saw a few minutes, before getting sidetracked by a call from my daughter. Kokayi is one of a small number of hip-hop auteurs actively creating in the creative music space for the last 30 years with the likes of Steve Coleman, Dafnis Prieto, Jason Lindner and Akinmusire.

• Carla Kihlstedt & Present Music: intO tHe WiLd! Featuring Carla Kihlstedt's 26 Little Deaths @ Knoxville Civic Auditorium - That typical whimsy that Carla brings to all her projects, this set was long but fulfilling, despite the subject material being just a tad macabre.

• Brìghde Chaimbeul @ Boyd’s Jig & Reel - I guess I needed some ancient drone because this set from the Scottish bagpiper had me rapt.

• Joel Harrison’s Free Country @ The Standard - This super-band didn’t disappoint bringing reminders that jazz and country come from the same root - Black music. Saxophonist Greg Tardy, organist Gary Versace, electric bassist Stephan Crump, drummer Rudy Royston and especially violin soloist Darol Anger plus the local Knoxville singer Evelyn Jack raised an hour-long hootenanny.

• Fay Victor: Herbie Nichols SUNG (feat. Michael Attias, saxophones; Anthony Coleman, piano; Ratzo Harris, double bass; Tom Rainey, drums) @ Regas Square - Slamming but I’m biased. I’ve been listening to and promoting this music for over a year now, having worked the album on TAO Forms. Anthony Coleman is a national treasure who is far more deserving of acclaim and gigs. Tom Rainey swung his ass off. Fay has really done something historic with this music that I hope to elaborate on at a future date.

• Tyshawn Sorey Trio (feat. Aaron Diehl, piano; Harish Raghavan; double bass) @ The Bijou Theater - Truly transcendent music for piano trio with tons of liberties taken in time, structure and harmony. I have some history with this trio that I’ll detail at a later time. One of my favorite sets.

• [Ahmed] - I was happy I got to see this group, of whom so much has been made of late - including much chatter on the Big Ears podcast from Grayson Currin, Peter Margasak and Vanessa Ague. I am super into the concept and appreciate it, but Thomas, Wright & co. might be the most over-hyped group in jazz at the moment. Their records are cool but not quite as transcendent as everyone is making it seem. Better in theory than in practice. Still grateful to have had a chance to hear them at Big Ears, realizing this was their first ever U.S. tour.

• Free Form Funky Freqs (feat. Jamaaladeen Tacuma, electric bass; Vernon Reid, electric guitar and G. Calvin Weston, drums) - By this point in the night, I was truly exhausted, and the Mill and Mine is somewhere I usually enter oblivion, but this group carries a special place in my heart. I was just finishing my college radio era when their one and only album came out on Thirsty Ear, as I recall, worked by my friend Kevin Calabro. I remember this record and that period vividly and it was a sweet reminder of more innocent times almost twenty years prior. I have personal history since with Mr. Tacuma, whom I helped get on Jazz Night in America in 2022, and with Mr. Weston through my good pal, Stephen Buono, who exposed me to much of Calvin and Jamaaladeen’s music in the years between that recorded debut and now.

Sunday March 30, 2025

• 1965: Sound, Fire & Revolution with Nels Cline, Melvin Gibbs, Chad Taylor and Nate Chinen - My last festival day started off with this amazing panel I helped logistically to convene. It was my great pleasure to see Messrs. Cline, Gibbs and Taylor come together at once, as their collective musical and life wisdom could fill a vast library. (This conversation will come out very soon as a podcast on Big Ears: Conversations About Music).

• Conversation: Wadada Leo Smith & Vijay Iyer with Ashley Kahn - An equally riveting talk as the first and almost immediately, a more heightened sense of purpose, given how quickly their talk went the the sitation in Gaza and the responsbility of artists to speak honestly about current events and war. Not sure this will come out as a podcast due to extreme political nature, but the festival did record it. Masterfully handled and moderated by Mr. Kahn.

• took a 6-7 hour break due to total exhaustion

• Josh Johnson - I dug deep and found renewed energy to see Mr. Johnson again after his wonderful set with Mr. Parker earlier in the weekend. His solo set and albums, which I had seen and heard before, are a curious mix of harmonic and rhythmic layering. It can initially sound deceptively simple but when he combines his extended production techniques with ingenious post-bop influenced solos and staccato loop patterns (including multiple chordal stacks), the sonic possibilities become dizzyingly engulfing and you lose yourself deep in trance-inducing sound world.

• Nels Cline Consentrik Quartet - I left the Johnson set somewhat wistfully, but knew I had to catch a bit of my old friend and longtime client, Nels Cline, whom I had missed otherwise all weekend. I knew this group with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Tom Rainey had gotten together at least 5-6 years ago, and perhaps I’d heard about them during or just before the pandemic but their debut album had dropped on Blue Note Records either the week before or the week of Big Ears. I knew I had to see/hear this and I am so glad I made the extra effort to walk over. This was easily Nels’ jazziest conglomeration, aside from 2016’s Lovers. The sympatico between band members was astonishing with Laubrock giving Lester Young vibes and Lightcap offering his trademark thick and woody tone, as Tom Rainey’s idiosyncratic Brooklyn freebop beat kept things spry. They played a beautiful piece called “Allende” that I intend to return to. And then I thought… “What if I’d made that decision to go see Julia Holter? Or Astrid Sonne? Or Beth Gibbons?” That’s the agony of Big Ears. You’re right there, but split-second decisions are everything. And this year, with my leg, my cold, and low energy, I couldn’t always pivot like I wanted to. Here, thankfully I could.

• múm - I really only saw 20 minutes; barely enough to have a strong impression but it was a treat to finally see this Icelandic band, whom I began listening to in college two decades ago. As luck would have it, some of the band and their team were on my flight home so I got to connect with them a bit more at the airport.

• Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner: The Music of Anthony Braxton (with Matt Brewer, bass and Damion Reid, drums) - For this set, I was about 10 minutes late and the clock on my proverbial parking meter was quickly running out. For most of the set, I sat on a chair in the adjoining room at The Standard listening while resting my leg, but hearing Lehman and company tackle my favorite Braxton composition, “23b” was a thrill, in and of itself. Very interesting to hear Lehman and Turner together. Both are now Angelenos and have been playing gigs together with increasing frequency.

The Hangs

A good amount of time was spent hanging. Mike Reed, my oldest independent client and now friend of 15+ years and I sat for almost 2 hours at the Jig & Reel talking about career and life. I had a beautiful, spur-of-the-moment hang with Joe Lovano, backstage at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium during Carla Kihlstedt’s set and subsequently another with his tour manager, an old acquaintance, Danny Schwartz, who used to general manage The Hamilton in DC and has acted as a tour manager and front-of-house sound man for acts like Jerry Douglas and Aoife O’Donovan. He was there tour managing Lovano’s Paramount Quartet. I had not laid eyes on him in 20 years. Only possible at Big Ears, apparently.

Ambrose’s masterpiece

The Gig

Ambrose Akinmusire: Bloomed at Big Ears

As part of a suite of coverage from the Big Ears Festival, here’s another special collab between The Gig and That Million Dollar Bash, focusing on a single concert. Please enjoy…

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a year ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · Nate Chinen and Jacob Blickenstaff

Probably not surprisingly to those who know me, my favorite Big Ears performance was Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone. I had been thinking along these lines this well before & posted their notable Substack two days ago. This was actually a common refrain I heard from more than one person; that one of Akinmusire’s two shows was among or the most compelling show of the festival. None of the festival’s official photographs of the set due it justice, so I’ve linked above to and ’s gorgeous photo essay collab. (Hey JB, when are we gonna team up, bruh?)

During the show, I texted Ashley Capps to convey my excitement and to get him there: “No one is creating work on this level with this amount of intricacy, complexity, attention to detail and social relevance.” The only artists I can think of who come close are Julia Wolfe, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Cécile McLorin Salvant with Darcy James Argue, Sorey and Wadada Leo Smith.

In this set, the composer and ringleader was channeling the creative legacies of Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Don Cherry, Terence Blanchard and Kendrick Lamar—while powerfully integrating strings via the (seemingly-de-facto-Big-Ears-quartet-in-residence) Mivos Quartet, with stunning solo cadenzas from pianist Sam Harris, powerful synth work from electronics artist Chiquitamagic, and Justin Brown on drums.

honey is already one of my favorite albums of the year—and has been since they dropped the first 13-minute single in November 2024. As discussed, a conversation between Nate and Akinmusire will be coming soon on the Big Ears podcast.

Starstruck in the Airport Shuttle

On the way to the airport, I ran into old friends Cline and his partner Yuka Honda (who performed at Big Ears as eucademix and with The Nels Cline Singers) in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where we had all stayed. As it were, we were on the same shuttle. Chris Lightcap joined soon after. Then, we picked up Gen Z music journalist/influencer Margeaux, whom I had been informed was coming via internal talks, but hadn’t seen all week. She has a very distinctive look. Then we picked up the legend, Andrew Cyrille at the Courtyard Marriott. A Big Ears tradition on the LGA→TYS→LGA Delta route, it was avant-jazz star-spotting at the airport. I saw Blake Leyh, Brandon Ross, Ashley Kahn, and others before our flight was thrice delayed, then canceled. Luckily most of us were able to rebook for early the next morning. Stranded out-of-town Big Ears folk caught a few hours of shut-eye at one of the several airport hotels, woke ass early and made our way back to NYC by 8:30 AM. I grabbed my luggage, got in a Lyft, and went straight to my orthopedic surgeon… for a cortisone shot.

Eternal Gratitude

That was my Big Ears 2025. So many others had a different one, but this was mine.

I’m sure I’m leaving things out, but I have to extend eternal gratitude to festival founder and creative director, Ashley Capps and festival director and producer Bryan Crow, who with their incredible team run this festival like a well-oiled machine. By meeting members of the team over the course of the weekend, I came to understand how intricate the many parts were to this festival together—and I feel so honored to be part of it; not just as a fan, but in a professional sense, I feel like I’m going to grow so much from this. More on that in my next post.

See you next year, Knoxville.

It’s Sunday morning. I’m sitting in a room with two Moroccan leather couches, two Bo Diddley-style wooden-body square guitars mounted on the wall, and a round copper table stacked with kids’ introductions to Led Zeppelin, Madonna, Prince, ABBA, Dolly Parton, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and the Beatles. Nearby, there’s a coffee and tea area, a mini fridge, and a lamp that looks like it could be from Crate & Barrel. The walls feature photos of Billie Eilish, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Marley.

This is the setting at my daughter’s music school in Mount Kisco, New York, Green Room Music founded by one Eugene Song.1 It’s her second lesson. We knew Eugene because our daughters went to to preschool together. We wanted to support a local music school and we signed her up for Music 101 for Kids.

Watching my daughter step into this world brings back memories of my own lessons at Dale Music2 Then there were very early saxophone lessons in 5th grade at the long-shuttered Bethesda Music, where I remember seeing Pat Metheny’s photo on the wall of 1980s and 1990s rock icons, thinking he was some hair metal dude. Later on, I moved to lessons at Washington Conservatory of Music with Jim Carroll3, Andy Axelrad, Steve Ticknor, and later independently, Paul Carr. Now, seeing my daughter start her own musical journey feels incredibly special.

Her teacher, Francesco, is introducing her to everything—drums, piano, guitar, bass—using her Spotify playlist of songs she discovered through us as a guide to explore the things she’s hearing musically. She’s always been musical. In the car, she’s constantly requesting songs—music is her preferred entertainment, second only to the iPad. I think about what I grew up with—Jewish music, oldies, R&B—versus the unlimited access to music she has in 2025. She’s inevitably more sophisticated in her taste than I was at six.

I don’t know yet what instrument she’ll gravitate toward. We didn’t want to push her into formal piano lessons before she had a chance to explore. She loves to sing and has a natural sense of rhythm. That day at Green Room, she even repeated back what her teacher taught her while I fumbled through a steady beat on kick, hi-hat, and snare. It’s encouraging, but I want her to find her own way.

Two nights earlier, I had another moment of musical reflection at Carnegie Hall with Steven Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra, celebrating their 25th anniversary with a program ranging from Sly Stone to Bessie Smith to Ellington. This, mind you, was to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall’s downstairs space, Zankel Hall, the home of the Shape of Jazz series programmed by Danny Melnick of Absolutely Live Entertainment, with support from the George & Joyce Wein Foundation.

Seeing so many familiar faces reminded me how much I value this community, even as it becomes rarer to experience this music at all, whether uptown or downtown. The lineup was incredible—Erik Lawrence, Ben Allison, Ben Perowsky, Matt Munisteri, Peter Apfelbaum, Doug Wieselman, Corey Wallace (now sitting for the late Curtis Fowlkes), Charlie Burnham. Seeing John Medeski, Catherine Russell, and Vernon Reid with MTO completed a broader feeling of community, built on the scene and in recording studios over the last 40 years. (These were also several of the guest musicians on the tetrology discussed below.)

The set, featuring a thrilling rendition of “STAND” with Russell, Medeski and Reid all joining in, was a reminder of a truly joyful era of music that has been largely overshadowed by streaming algorithms and Meta ads, which are the only thing left aside from word-of-mouth, and perhaps radio, to get audiences out to shows.

Bernstein’s music, introduced to me originally by my old pal , then a publicist and radio promoter at Hyena Records, originally thrived in underground spaces and clubs like The Knitting Factory, Tonic, nublu, The Stone and The 55 Bar (I have one particularly memorably MTO gig forever etched into my brain from 55 Bar with Doug Wamble on guitar and Michael Blake on tenor sax subbing for Wieselman or Lawrence). This scene is more fragmented now. Real estate, cultural shifts, and a changing overall music landscape have made it harder to unify fans and musicians under one banner. Read this essential piece by Piotr Orlov of on this very topic.

And yet, here we were, gathered for something truly unique representing a scene that has reached the ripe old age of social security benefits (though perhaps not for long). As my wife and I filed to our seats, Marty Ehrlich called out to me, critic Jim Macnie and his wife Holly spotted us. Ashley Kahn plopped down next to us in the last row about 20 minutes into the show. Before the show, I saw trumpeter in the foyer; at the end, trombonist Mark Patterson and writer and editor Larry Blumenfeld. These are people who have been part of this ecosystem for decades. I am a relative newcomer. But we are all family.

This shared energy, is what keeps a scene alive. Seeing a concert like this in such a grandiose setting reminds me that, though changed and scattered, this community still comes together for milestones.

Bernstein has a way of holding these musicians together. That’s increasingly rare: a bandleader who fosters an environment where every musician’s personality shines and keeps them together for a quarter century through thick and thin and many odd jobs in between. It made me think about Mingus, Threadgill, and Butch Morris—the way their ensembles were much more than just a collection of players. That kind of individualistic dynamic is something we see less and less today.

I called Bernstein to talk about the meaning behind his aforementioned Community Music tetralogy4 released between 2022 and 2023 via Royal Potato Family, Bernstein’s on-again off-again label and the home of many similar sonic travelers.

MEREWITZ: Why call it Community Music? You’ve been making what one could call community music your whole career.

BERNSTEIN: The idea was to record as much music as possible without burning out the musicians. It wasn’t about getting a perfect take—it was about documenting the music as it sounds. The idea of Community Music came later. It became clear: this is the music that happens when a community of musicians gets together for four days, capturing what they’ve been creating for 20 years.

MEREWITZ: Right. And the core of that community was Millennial Territory Orchestra?

BERNSTEIN: Right.

MEREWITZ: This idea of a band made up of strong personalities— Gonsalves, Hodges, Cootie Williams in Ellington’s band; Richmond, Dolphy, Jimmy Knepper in Mingus’ bands; Cherry, Barbieri, Redman and Bley in Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra—each musician standing out while still being part of something larger. That’s rare now, but MTO carries on that tradition.

BERNSTEIN: The culture has changed. We’re probably one of the last few full bands of musicians who didn’t go through a codified jazz education system. We were already professional musicians before college, already had our personalities developed. I feel like a lot of modern composed “jazz music” comes from a school of thought where it's a lot more like classical music, the way it's played. If you're playing in a symphonic situation, a Broadway show, studio music, which we all also do, there’s a certain kind of playing that is required to get what the composer-arranger wants. And that is often when we don't hear the individual voice. That's how that music works. That’s what the desire often is now – to create 17 musicians that sound like one.

MEREWITZ: Right.

BERNSTEIN: It’s just a different philosophy of what you want the outcome to be, right? I don't want a very unified sound where you don't hear the individuals. The way you do that is you make all the musicians have a unified attack. Unified release. No vibrato. That's another thing that we do. People don't play with vibrato anymore. Every one in my band has a unique sound. That is a lost art. So I'll tell you something. When Joel Dorn heard our band 20 years ago, he came running back to me. He said, “I never thought I'd hear this sound again in my life!”

Of course are times when I want things to be tight, but sometimes we'll do something that has a few different phrasings at once and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, that's fine. I want it like that.’ Most people now, would be like, ‘Oh no, everyone needs to sound like this.’

MEREWITZ: You studied with Don Cherry and Karl Berger at the Creative Music Studio. That kind of apprenticeship from originators is becoming a lost art. Seeing musicians in their 60s still creating with openness and energy is a reminder of how vital this tradition is. Where else do you see this? I personally think there are glimpses of it, perhaps in Mary Halvorson’s groups, in Arturo O’Farrill's ensembles, We've seen it for years in the Mingus Big Band and to some extent in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra's earlier editions with Wessell ‘Warmdaddy’ Anderson and Wycliffe Gordon and Walter Blanding. But those seem to be distant memories. Those folks were big personalities. But so much of the individual is being sublimated to a more tamed sameness. So what do you say to that?

BERNSTEIN: Yes. I would also add that part of my training, why I am here, is that my teachers, at least my trumpet teachers, were from the big band era. That really is something you can't forget. My teachers were Jimmy Maxwell and John Coppola. So I have this whole history of teachers who sat next to Cootie Williams and Ben Webster and were there with the Condoli Brothers and Conrad Gozzo and Shelley Manne, when they were in their early 20s and late teens. And Bud Shank and Art Pepper and Teddy Wilson.

Jimmy Maxwell came up with Teddy Wilson. Jimmy Maxwell was there the day Charlie Christian showed up. John Coppola was in there the day Maynard Ferguson showed up. These people taught me about how those people thought about jazz music. Not many people of my generation had the opportunity to study with those musicians.

MEREWITZ: Mhm.

BERNSTEIN: So my teacher was the guy who could tell me stories about going out to eat after the gigs with Ben Webster and Count Basie and Mildred Bailey. He's telling me these stories and he's also teaching me to play with a vibrato with a very, very large sound and how to play the beat right.

People don't play a beat like that anymore, That's what the beat was; dance music. He was teaching me to phrase jazz as dance music. So I always had both. Once I told Roswell Rudd, “I said, yeah man, I'm just trying to find the fine line between Jimmy Maxwell and Don Cherry…and Roswell said, ‘that's one hell of a line’.”

The idea of, being a swing jazz musician, but also being willing to to play and accept any sound; any sound that comes out. That's what Don Cherry would teach you. You accept that sound. You don't fight that sound. Jimmy was saying, you practice to be able to perform or produce this specific thing, with consistency. This is how we play music. And then Don was like: ‘a sound comes, you accept the sound and you build from it.’

MEREWITZ: After I asked that last question, I thought about Carla Bley’s bands, obviously.

BERNSTEIN: Absolutely. Absolutely.

MEREWITZ: Are there any people you feel that warrant mention who are still around who attempt to do this?

BERNSTEIN: I don't know how much he's doing it anymore, but, 8 Bold Souls, Edward Wilkerson. That band was incredible. And I met him ten years ago in Chicago. We both had a commission and got to meet. I don't know what they do anymore. Also any Threadgill band. It tends to be more what people unfortunately call “avant-garde.” Any Zorn ensemble. You know, that's John's whole thing. Each person has a very strong personality.

And I'm sure there's a lot in the so-called improvisers scene, which, I'm not so much a part of because, people make this artificial dichotomy between improvisers who don't use song form or dance rhythms and someone like me.

MEREWITZ: Or who don't use chord changes, perhaps.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, right. But you know, but I'm sure once you get into that, there's probably a whole bunch.

MEREWITZ: I just thought of an ensemble where, the individual is not sublimated. The Nels Cline Singers. Everybody gets to let their freak flag fly in that band, you know? Also The Microscopic Septet and The Jazz Passengers and of course, your old band, The Lounge Lizards.

BERNSTEIN: Yes. This was all in the East Village. That was the only way to be. Any Frisell large ensemble. Any of the Joe Lovano nonets.

MEREWITZ: And The Cookers. They all bring their own shit to bear. I don't know how common it used to be.

BERNSTEIN: Everyone played like that because that was the only way!!! That was the ethos of jazz music. Play your own sound. Unless you were playing in the Stan Kenton band, or the Buddy Rich band, those kind of bands required a very uniform phrasing and sound.

MEREWITZ: So basically the message is that the institutionalization of jazz education changed the direction of this whole field, and made it less about the individual and more about the ensemble and also discouraged being different.

BERNSTEIN: The ensemble does not seem to be encouraged, but rather the virtuoso soloist, working within a specific set of harmonic choices and less attention paid to sound, rhythm and magic. That's what I want to get. I went and heard a good band recently, And I heard the saxophone player; very great. And I just thought to myself, “Where is the weirdness?” Like, where is anything at all surprising?

All the East Village music [of the 1980s and 1990s] that was inspired by The Art Ensemble [of Chicago] and Cecil Taylor. When we went to concerts as young people, that's who we'd see - the Art Ensemble and Cecil Taylor. So those were our immediate forbears.

But we're not them. How do we take this music and filter it through who we are as human beings, through our culture? Everyone plays true to their culture. And so if your culture is about like having a more inside way of playing, then that’s going to be your truth. My culture is my truth. And I come from growing up in the 1960s; understanding the whole idea of opening the doors of perception. That's what I want. I want history, and I want the unknown.

Some people say, ‘I don't want the unknown. I want the known. I want perfection. I want clarity. I want something that sounds like something they already heard.’ And it sounds like that. And that's what they want. That's who they are. They're playing to their personal truth.

Amen.

In a time when so much music feels homogenous, I left the concert thinking about how important it is to celebrate strong musical personalities. New York, despite its challenges, is still the center of the jazz world. Other cities—Los Angeles, London—have growing scenes, but you can’t replace the history, mentorship, and deeply embedded jazz culture of New York.

From my daughter’s first music lessons to an unforgettable night at Carnegie Hall, I’m thinking a lot about how we experience music—how we come into it, how we pass it on, and how we keep these traditions alive.

Surely Olivia’s exposure to pop iconoclasts via Spotify will do more for her than jazz school or any formal education. But I do wonder—does the overwhelming sameness of today’s landscape encourage originality?

I want both my daughter and the musicians I go hear to have some swagger, some sass. I want them to stand out.

This is something that’s been sitting in my archives for far too long now.

While working press on his 2024 album Slow Water, inspired by the Erica Gies book Water Always Wins, I conducted an experiment. What if I, a storyteller, were to make a podcast exposing the full breadth of my client. Stephan Crump is an incredible bassist, composer and deep humanist whom I have been either listening to or working for since 2007. I needed to get it out there, so here is the first in my long-promised podcast series via Substack.

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