The Inaugural Jazz Forward Award Winners
The inaugural Jazz Forward Award recognizes JazzWeek's radio charts, Oh! Jazz's global streaming network, Seattle Jazz Fellowship's community revival, and Sligo Jazz Project's inclusive summer school.
Today on The Tonearm, we’re celebrating the inaugural Jazz Forward Award winners from All About Jazz.
Since 1995, All About Jazz has been a driving force for jazz discovery. Now they’re recognizing industry trailblazers who actively promote jazz awareness and culture.
We’ll hear from four organizations reshaping how jazz connects with audiences worldwide. Ed Trefzger from JazzWeek tracks radio airplay across North America, giving artists and their teams vital exposure data. Jesus Perezagua’s Oh! Jazz streams live performances from clubs globally, bringing the world’s jazz rooms to your screen of choice. Thomas Marriott’s Seattle Jazz Fellowship revives local jazz culture through community-focused programming. And Eddie Lee’s Sligo Jazz Project transforms an Irish town into Europe’s most inclusive jazz education festival each summer.
Each organization tackles different challenges, from measuring impact to building community to educating the next generation. Together, they show how jazz thrives through innovation and dedication.
Dig Deeper
• Jazz Forward Award Program - All About Jazz recognition of industry trailblazers promoting jazz awareness and culture
• JazzWeek - Radio airplay tracking for jazz recordings across North America
• Oh! Jazz - Live and on-demand streaming platform featuring jazz clubs worldwide
• Seattle Jazz Fellowship - Nonprofit venue presenting live jazz in Seattle’s Pioneer Square
• Sligo Jazz Project - Annual summer school and festival in Sligo, Ireland
• Sligo Jazz YouTube Channel - Concert footage and festival highlights
Radio Stations and Broadcasters Mentioned:
• WGMC - Rochester, NY jazz station; New York State Broadcasters Association award winner
• WUCF - Orlando NPR station with HD2 Latin jazz channel
• CJRT - Former Toronto jazz station (now Jazz.FM91)
Key People Mentioned:
Musicians and Educators:
• Julian Priester - Legendary trombonist, Seattle Jazz Fellowship artist-in-residence
• Rufus Reid - Bass legend, Sligo Jazz Project 2024 guest of honor
• Freddie Hendrix - Trumpet player
• Sasha Berliner - Vibraphone player from San Francisco
• Sun-Mi Hong - Korean drummer based in Netherlands
• Veronica Swift - Vocalist
• Melissa Aldana - Saxophonist
• Mike Stern - Guitarist
• Ernie Watts - Saxophonist
• Victor Wooten - Bassist
• Liane Carroll - Vocalist/pianist
• Brian Byrne - Irish composer
• Elio Villafranca - Composer
• Gwilym Simcock - Pianist
• Steve Rodby - Bassist/producer
• Adam Nussbaum - Drummer
• Nils Kavanagh - Young Irish pianist; BBC Young Jazz Musician finalist 2024
Industry Figures:
• Michael Nielsen - Sligo-born jazz guitarist, Sligo Jazz Project co-founder
• Ross Porter - Former manager of CJRT Toronto
• Marty Ashby - MCG Jazz, Pittsburgh
Venues and Festivals:
• MCG Jazz - Pittsburgh venue
• Hawk’s Well Theatre - Sligo performance venue
• Pioneer Square - Seattle’s historic jazz neighborhood
Historical References:
• IAJE (International Association for Jazz Education) - Former organization that hosted a convention where JazzWeek originated in 2001
• Gavin Report - Radio industry publication that discontinued jazz charts in 2001
• Impossible Gentlemen - International jazz supergroup
Awards and Recognition Programs:
• Young Irish Jazz Musician Bursary Award - Limerick-based competition won by two Sligo Jazz Project alumni
• BBC Young Jazz Musician - UK competition; 2024 finalist Nils Kavanagh is Sligo alumnus
• New York State Broadcasters Association Award - Won by WGMC for radio donation program
Educational Context:
• Jazz kissa - Traditional Japanese jazz café culture; vinyl listening spaces
• Jazz repertoire standards - Common tunes that allow musicians to communicate instantly
Funding and Support Organizations:
• Arts Council (Ireland) - Funding body supporting Sligo Jazz Project
• Fáilte Ireland - Irish tourism board supporting Sligo Jazz Project
• CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) - US public broadcasting funding source
• NPR (National Public Radio) - US public radio network
Additional Context:
• Pioneer Square gentrification - Seattle neighborhood facing cultural displacement
• Seattle venue closures mentioned: Tula’s, The New Orleans, La Fermata - former jazz clubs
• “Yeats country” - Reference to poet W.B. Yeats, associated with Sligo region of Ireland
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Introduction: Hello, and welcome to The Tonearm, where we connect you with the people and ideas moving culture forward. I'm your host, Lawrence Peryer. Today we're celebrating the inaugural Jazz Forward Award winners from the website All About Jazz. Since 1995, All About Jazz has been a driving force for jazz discovery. Now they're recognizing industry trailblazers who actively promote jazz awareness and culture.
We'll hear from four organizations reshaping how jazz connects with audiences worldwide. Ed Trefzger from JazzWeek tracks radio airplay across North America, giving artists and their teams vital exposure information. Jesús Perezagua's Oh! Jazz streams live performances from clubs globally, bringing the world's jazz rooms to your screen of choice. Thomas Marriott's Seattle Jazz Fellowship revives local jazz culture through community-based programming, and Eddie Lee's Sligo Jazz Project transforms an Irish town into Europe's most inclusive jazz education festival each summer.
All of these organizations tackle different challenges—from measuring impact to building community to educating the next generation. Together, they show how jazz thrives through innovation and dedication. Let's get started with JazzWeek's Ed Trefzger, who helps artists and their teams understand the reach of their music through radio airplay data.
Lawrence Peryer: I'm hoping, by way of getting started, you could tell listeners a little bit about your organization, your mission, and how you got started.
Ed Trefzger: JazzWeek's mission is to put together a tabulation of airplay on jazz radio stations, mostly in the US but a couple in Canada, to help artists know what kind of reach they have and to help out promoters who are working with them. It got started in 2001 and actually got its genesis at the old IAJE, International Association for Jazz Education convention in 2001 in New York City.
At the time there was some buzz that maybe the Gavin Report, which was a radio industry publication that had a number of different formats that it did airplay charts for—the rumor was that jazz and smooth jazz along with it would be going away. So I got started on some of the background stuff with the idea, "Well, we'll have maybe something there or maybe even something to compete with it." By July of 2001, Gavin announced that they were going to discontinue those charts. So by August of 2001, we got started, and then about three weeks later, 9/11 hit and we didn't know what was going to happen.
But there were some changes along the way and changes in even the number of stations broadcasting jazz, some of which happened in the aftermath of 9/11 as more stations converted to all news on the noncommercial end. Here we are almost twenty-five years later, still tabulating chart data, still seeing what stations like, and still seeing how the radio programmers, who are really good tastemakers for their audiences, decide what the best music is.
Lawrence: So I don't make any assumptions and so that listeners don't have to do any guesswork—what's the importance of that work, either from a B2B point of view? Which of the stakeholders are using and needing this information?
Ed: Well, when we started out it was mostly record labels who had in-house promotion people, and there was a mix of independent promoters at the time. But that's gradually moved to the point where there are all independent promoters, plus individual artists and also publicists, trying to get a measure. But the main thing is to get an idea if a record is being played, because the job of the promoter is to get the recorded music played on the stations with the hope that will spur some album and CD sales—and maybe a little bit of that now—but also some streaming audio play, all of which creates some income for somebody somewhere.
But it's also a way for artists to get some publicity for themselves, maybe help them book gigs or get put on the roster of festivals and so forth. Without some sort of an independent measuring tool, the work that the promoters do doesn't really get measured.
Lawrence: And what's the business model?
Ed: The business model is really a very part-time thing for me. But essentially the record promoters, the independent promoters who work with stations and try to get the music on the air, pay a fee for the data that they get. So they have a monthly or quarterly subscription that gets them all the reports from the stations and a listing week by week, some things they can download and so forth. Basically, radio stations supply the data in return for getting music. I tabulate the data, and the promoters pay a subscription fee to access it.
Lawrence: It must be very interesting to sort of sit behind all of this airplay data. To the extent that you have any anecdotes, could you talk a little bit about the trends you see in terms of what gets airplay versus what gets released? What the data tells you in terms of—are there surprising patterns or do things pop out that are nonintuitive?
Ed: You know, after these many years, not too much surprises me, but there are some patterns that you can see. One that I would love to do a panel on at a conference would be to have a couple of radio programmers, really good music directors, and a couple of really good music writers and reviewers, and have them talk about what it is that they really like.
Because what we find is that radio audiences are a bit different than maybe the hardcore jazz magazine reader and so forth. You do have a kind of core jazz radio audience that's really into just about anything, but then you have maybe a broader audience who like jazz but they're not really going to go into the more adventurous stuff. And granted, you've got to also consider what time of day it is. Maybe somebody who's working at their office at ten o'clock in the morning can't get really avant-garde, but you know, a melodic hard bop tune is going to fit just right, or maybe some piano trio stuff or whatever.
So that's one of the tendencies that we see. Something that I don't think we see as much, but still do some, is some regional differences too. Some parts of the country are more into Latin jazz than others. Places in the Northeast and the Midwest seem more receptive for organ trios than other areas, and that's maybe a relic or maybe just a historical thing about what was popular. And maybe as people have migrated, a really good vocalist will have some staying power at the top of the chart, probably more than instrumentals. I think it's because vocalists are a little bit more recognizable for people.
In general, I think it's the jazz music that is artistically sound and also accessible to people—maybe a melody that they can grab hold of—that's the kind of thing that really works well on jazz radio.
Lawrence: What were you doing before this, Ed? Were you a data nerd somewhere? Were you a broadcaster? What made you the person to do this?
Ed: I've never done this full-time, so I'll start out with that. The way it got started really was about five years before we launched. My former business partner, Tony Gasper, was a jazz music director, and he would go to maybe a Jazz Times conference or the Gavin Conference. One of the things that everybody noticed is that people would come home from a conference and all that momentum and all the high from seeing everybody would just kind of fade away after a couple of weeks.
So at the time we had a nascent internet company, and so we set up—actually on an old Mac SE/30—some fairly primitive mailing list software, but started a discussion list around 1996. So there was already a community of maybe 100 or 150 people at that time in radio that were exchanging ideas and so forth. And so they were the ones who said, "Hey, you know, you guys really ought to think about doing this chart because there may not be one. And if we don't have a chart, we don't have a promotion business, and if we don't have a promotion business, nobody's going to get records." So that's kind of where it went from.
I went into the internet business after about fourteen years as a mechanical engineer, and out of the internet business have gotten back into radio. And so kind of my day job is managing a small radio group in western New York, plus some college hockey coverage, including play-by-play on the radio. So I've got a lot of hats that I wear.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about how you think about not only the state but the future of radio a little bit more broadly than just for JazzWeek. Are you bullish on radio? Is it a managed decline? How should I think about radio in 2025 and going forward?
Ed: Well, when you talk to the people in a small industry group of independent broadcasters I belong to, they're very bullish. But the thing that they say is that you've got to really serve your local community. You can't try to be like a streaming service. I think of things like—I remember several years ago when Ross Porter was running CJRT in Toronto, he talked about how the goal of that station was to be a radio station for Toronto whose format was jazz. So they played great jazz, but then they also connected to the arts community and so forth. And I think when you see stations do that, it's great, and that makes them relevant.
Where I live in Rochester, New York, WGMC just won an award from the New York State Broadcasters Association for a project they did to get people to donate new or lightly used radios to provide to nursing homes and memory care facilities. And that's a case of stations getting involved in festivals and live broadcasts and program production. So they all stay relevant in their communities. And as the distribution has gone from just out of a transmitter to streaming, apps are a big part of it, and video production from them. So you kind of have to evolve with the times. But if you're going to just be a jukebox, then you become irrelevant. But if you really reach where you broadcast and where you serve, then you should stay relevant.
Lawrence: What about, at least in America, what about the reality of the public broadcasting situation? Do you see that having a particular or outsized impact on our genre, or are we in the same boat with other compatriots? How do you think about that?
Ed: I was concerned when things were first cut, but then I've seen stations do a pretty good job of filling the gap with some fundraising efforts. And I know it's a struggle for some still. It's also interesting to see the range of stations too—the range of budgets. You can have a station that relies a lot on volunteers that's not an NPR or CPB affiliated station that will run on a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, where you have multimillion-dollar operations in there too. So that changes a lot.
In fact, that's one of the things about jazz radio that I think makes it a lot different from commercial radio or just about any format: you have such a variety of types of stations—college stations, community stations, all staffed by volunteers, or fully professionally run large-budget stations.
Lawrence: Going forward for JazzWeek, what do you have to do to keep going? Is it still focused on terrestrial radio? Are other types of radio, be it streaming digital only or online only—are they allowed to report, and how do you think about that for the future?
Ed: We do have a few online reporters. The tough part about it is what kind of reach they have. Somebody could be an online station and be really happy if they've got fifty simultaneous streams or something like that, just to grab a number. But you could have a radio station in a relatively small town that might have a couple hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred people listening at a given time, up into the tens of thousands in the major market ones.
So we need to make sure that a streaming station doesn't end up having an outsized impact on things. So we want to make sure they have a pretty good audience. I've also been looking at monitoring streams using a service that monitors the stream to tabulate. The problem is that ends up being about thirty dollars a month per station, and if you get eighty or a hundred stations, that's a significant amount. Making that financially realistic is tough. Plus, there are stations that may have ten hours a week of jazz, and you're paying to monitor them all the time for those ten hours. So that's difficult too.
Lawrence: Do you have to do any weighting or indexing? Are all reports created equal, or do you weight based on reach or DMA or anything like that?
Ed: Actually, when I was creating the software twenty-four years ago, I put a place in there to weight stations, based hopefully on some Nielsen numbers. Now Nielsen used to be Arbitron, but the problem is getting access to that. Nielsen has clamped down on what they will report. It used to be able to get everybody's overall numbers from what's called Radio Research Consortium for noncommercial stations, but even that's not really available now. So there's no good way to do it.
I've thought about sizing it by market size, but that's not even realistic because you could be one jazz station in a small market and have a greater percentage of the audience than in a bigger one. But we do have jazz stations with really significant ratings numbers. Even, you know, one just anecdotally I remember is WUCF in Orlando, which on its HD2 stream is all Latin jazz, and they get high enough ratings that most jazz stations would be happy with those, and that's just on their Latin channel. So I wish there was a way to do that that might be helpful, but we just don't have a way to do it. So each spin counts the same.
Lawrence: Ed, congratulations on the recognition. You've been at this for a long time, but it's an innovative service that remains innovative, and I think that's really exciting. Thank you for making time to talk to me and educate our audience on what you're up to.
Ed: Well, it's my pleasure, and it indeed was an honor and humbling to be recognized.
Introduction: Now we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Jesús Perezagua, whose Oh! Jazz platform streams live jazz performances from clubs around the world, with significant subscription revenue going directly back to artists and venues. Here's Jesús.
Lawrence: I'd like to start by getting a little bit of an introduction to your organization, Jesús, if you could tell us what you do, what your mission is, and how you got started.
Jesús Perezagua: Wow. It's a challenge to do it in half an hour. I can be speaking for days. This is a beautiful experience. Look, the origin of this came from an idea to capture all of the jazz that is happening every day in all the corners of the world. A lot of jazz is happening every day in all these beautiful temples of jazz, the jazz clubs. And all of them, they all have this, they all face the same. We are probably the music genre that is worse regarding promotion and promotion. We see all the other genres in a better promotion than jazz.
And there is a reality—each one of these jazz clubs, sometimes they are very, very small, some of them—they are a temple for us because the magic is happening each night. And this magic, when it's finished, it's not recorded, not recorded, what happened. Imagine this is happening every day in maybe 250, 300 jazz clubs around the world. And nobody is capturing this. How can you pass this to, let them listen to the people and show the world that jazz is alive? It's happening. And the artist, they are an artist—very talented, very good, not so known, or they are a legend.
And for us, they all have the same value. We are a music platform. We don't get into the consideration, how do we say that, about the personality of the artist, only the value of the work that is doing. This is a very pure, very different approach than mainstream. For mainstream, you need to be doing all the hype around something to make it interesting and to make it meaningful. Jazz, the important thing is that. So we created a live streaming on-demand platform that is getting in touch with all these jazz clubs in all over the world, different formats, different ways of understanding the music, different artists, with one thing in common—they want to share this with other people, and we are helping them to do it.
Lawrence: Can you name some of the cities and places that you're in? Just so folks can visualize the network that you've built?
Jesús: Yes. We are in, well, first of all, we started in Spain. Spain is our origin and our development origin was in Seville in the south of Spain. Later we expanded into other cities like Madrid, obviously, and Barcelona, Bilbao, et cetera. We have, including the festival because we also created a festival—that is a different approach that we have—but we have in different places of Spain like the center in the south. We are in the UK. We started in the UK with a very special place that is all about jazz, but the venue from All About Jazz, and this was our first connection with All About Jazz.
Lawrence: The physical club? The physical music venue?
Jesús: The physical club in London, in Soho in London, a very, very small club, but with a great commitment for jazz music. And that was our first connection with the All About Jazz universe. And we expanded in other cities like Bristol and Edimburgh. And then we arrived at the North American countries—we are in Pittsburgh with the MCG Jazz, with Marty Ashby and the great jazz venue that they have in Pittsburgh with a different approach. And we are in Havana. Havana is a very, very interesting place, not only for the jazz club, what we are recording in the jazz club in Havana, but also for the connection with all these incredible Cuban musicians. It's a very special place.
And also we expanded in South America. We are in São Paulo in Brazil and Buenos Aires, and a few months ago we arrived in Tokyo. And Tokyo is, uh, it's starting to be an amazing place for jazz. It's interesting where we are in Japan is the club is more in a jazz kissa tradition, meaning it's a jazz café, and in this place they do very crazy things. They do traditional way of, let's say, a jazz kissa where they can put an album and listen to all the album. They have, all of them are vinyls, and some of them are only 45 RPM and seventy-eights, vintage vinyls.
It's a temple. You listen, and they are experts. They are really connoisseurs. But then they do something that I think is quite unique in the world—they put one track and everybody is going to talk about this track, this particular track. And they do different events like that. But they also open the door for the young generation to come and play. So they have two days of the week where younger people, they are starting a professional career or they are experimenting with the music. They come to the stage, like once it was in Manhattan years ago, probably fifty years ago. This feeling that the young people, they can come and experiment.
And well, you have that in several places in the world, but in Tokyo, the way they do it, it's very special. This is where we are. We are going to start very soon to bring new locations like maybe in Canada, maybe in Australia. We are talking with different places about this. So we are going to continue expanding our footprint, let's say, over the next months.
Lawrence: I'm curious. This year I got to visit Asia, and so I got to see the differences in terms of how jazz is perceived culturally and its prominence relative to other forms of music. Does it sometimes vary from culture to culture? You're in all these different countries and cultures around the world. Do people relate to the music in different ways, or is it something a little bit more universal across the community?
Jesús: Look, it's a very, very interesting question. We went to Tokyo with this, we expected to come and see something and we found a different way of appreciation. So jazz is jazz. Is the same note. A is A in all the places and A4 is four hundred forty hertz in all the, but there are ways to embrace the music. And for me, I tell you my experience, and this is the way that we as a company, we embrace it—it's a very enriching way, meaning it's beautiful to see the differences and to see different approaches and to see how the people from one culture, they appreciate in one way.
And when you listen to an artist from Tokyo and an artist from Seville, they are coming from completely different approaches. This mix is beautiful, and this is what we value, because I don't want them to be unified, meaning they are coming from different angles and that they have this, it's a celebration because they come from different places and they bring all the experience and all the cultural background that they have. And you put all this together, and it's—you appreciate the differences, but you are enriching yourself. The important thing is a dialogue. They don't need to become in homogenous.
And I think it's not a barrier—the opposite. It's bringing more richness. Another thing that we are doing—we are digital, but we have a very strong physical component, and we have all the tentacles in all different places of the world. So we go and try and meet the artist. I go to the club here in Tokyo as much as I can. So one of the things the artists are telling us—they want to travel. And "Why do you want to travel?" Because they want to meet other musicians. And what is it? It is to learn and to share with them.
So one of the things we're doing and promoting is to let the artists come to the different locations where we are and to play with other artists. This kind of magic happens when you put an amazing, crazy guitarist from Tokyo doing at the limit of J-pop and extremely talented with this young pianist in Seville in Spain. We put them together. They play a show knowing themselves, meeting for the first time at eleven in the morning, and they play at seven o'clock in the evening an amazing concert. We record it. And the level of appreciation—they're friends, and they're thinking of doing touring together.
So this kind of mix of cultures, way of thinking, way of doing music, is not only a privilege for the people listening to discover and to enjoy—it's also for the artist, and they need to continue growing themselves.
Lawrence: That's so in keeping with the tradition of this music as well. There's always been such an oral tradition and a teaching tradition between generations. And people talk about—when you talk to musicians, they talk about how they learn on and off the bandstand from other musicians, whether it's musical technique or even how to live and how to comport yourself and how to survive on the road. That network of musicians supporting other musicians has been such a part of jazz tradition. It's fascinating to see you adapting that to the twenty-first century.
Tell me a little bit about how can people support you? How can consumers and fans—where can people go to learn more? Tell me all the things that people need to know if they're compelled and interested in what you've talked about today.
Jesús: Yeah, we have—you said you have an ambitious project. Yeah, it's ambitious, but it's humble. We know we are a humble platform. We are not crazy and doing things wrong. This is for perpetuity. This is until—we want to do it forever. How can people discover us is through our website that is managing the best possible way. We offer eight to ten shows per month live that they can come and connect. We do the promotion through the artist and the clubs and our own media.
We have no need to oversell anything that doesn't need to be oversold. It is legacy. It is something you come to watch live. If you're curious, come live wherever you are in the world, because the show is happening in Tokyo, it's going to be midnight or whatever in the early morning in the US East Coast. But you can then, after, have everything on demand, or you can connect to our television channel in the cable company where you are connected in the world. And 35 percent of the money that they contribute is to support the artists and to support this beautiful project.
So they can discover us through multiple ways. We are trying to increase that part, being more present. We have done certain, not experiments, but niche projects in movie theaters. We've done them in Spain, in Canada. We select the shows, put them on Wednesday nights or Friday nights for the people to see something special. It's an event. We are not driving big masses of people to the theater, but it's good promotion. It's something for the people to start discovering, appreciating.
We do the development in Dolby 5.1, in Dolby Atmos of selected shows, so people can go and see and experience it. So how can people help? We have the normal subscription. I mean, if they come and stay with us, they will have a beautiful way to discover jazz, but also supporting the jazz artists and the clubs. The clubs are suffering a lot. This is something that we are helping them as well.
And we are putting together a way also to attract philanthropists, because this is a big undertaking, as I'm saying, and anyone that wants to participate somehow in promoting more artists, giving artists the possibility to tour more and to appreciate—this is another way. We are working with philanthropists and the people around jazz can support us also. Yeah, the All About Jazz website is a big support. And this kind of prize that we are receiving is a recognition, and we've been only over three years in this world. And being a part of this community is a good recognition for us.
We have contributors. They come in. They want to write and to comment. We continue being more kind of ingrained in the jazz scene. But it's completely dispersed, and it is difficult to frame the people and to make them be part of it. So making an audience is always complicated in whatever genre we are. We are not surprised by it. So we are committed to going to the different ways of exploitation to give this beautiful content, the magic that's happening that night, to be recognized and valuable, and for the artist to receive an important part of what it's worth.
Introduction: While Oh! Jazz connects global audiences to local jazz clubs, our next guest focuses on rebuilding jazz culture for local audiences. Thomas Marriott founded Seattle Jazz Fellowship to address a decline in performance and mentoring opportunities in Seattle's scene. He also sought to create a sustainable home for live music in Pioneer Square, Seattle's oldest neighborhood. Here's Thomas Marriott.
Lawrence: Tell our listeners a little bit about your organization and what you do, specifically the mission and what drove you to get started.
Thomas Marriott: Sure. Seattle Jazz Fellowship is a nonprofit organization founded in 2021. Our mission is to build community, to increase mentorship, to incentivize excellence, and to lower barriers to access jazz for artists and for listeners alike. We accomplish this mission by promoting six nights a week of live local jazz and other events in our own venue in Pioneer Square, which is a historical jazz area of Seattle, Washington's downtown.
Like a lot of people during the pandemic, it was kind of a time of reflection, and as being a local artist in Seattle, being a local jazz musician in Seattle had just become increasingly untenable by the time the pandemic rolled around. So I did a lot of thinking about where we got off the rails, you know, and what it was like when it was better and what it's like in other places where there's a better jazz community.
Wages had just been stagnant or had gotten lower. There were no venues to play. There weren't gigs that paid money. The people who were sort of in charge of the venues and booking and things like that didn't really have the best interest of the music in mind. I think they were concerned more about promoting their organizations than the music itself. And I think this is one of the things that had led to a reduction in audience, a reduction in the professional class of jazz musicians in Seattle. So there aren't any anymore. There are no full-time jazz musicians in Seattle anymore. Everybody's a teacher or has something else that they do to make income.
And so without a professional class of performers, the level of music continued to slide from the eighties and nineties to kind of where we are. And so also the outsized impact of jazz education in Seattle—it caught the media's eye, and I think they sort of took their eye off the local community of musicians because the local jazz high school programs had gotten so much attention, and rightfully so. They mean they deserve all of that. No question about it. But not to the exclusion of the local performers in the local community.
There's not even really, or hasn't been for a long time, really an infrastructure for promoting a gig in Seattle if you're a local jazz performer. So—no venues, no elders, low wages, low opportunity. If you're a fan and you want to hear great jazz music, you've got to go to Jazz Alley or pay a high ticket, you know, concert ticket price. And that's out of the reach for a lot of people, especially musicians.
So a confluence of problems that have eroded our jazz community locally over time. And so our mission is basically set up to provide the conditions that will allow the music to thrive. And these are conditions that existed before, but also they are conditions that exist in other jazz communities that are more successful, that are more robust.
So we look at the first part of our mission, which is community—um, building community. And that means a lot of things. That's building the audience for sure, but that's also engaging all these little scenes in Seattle. What we've kind of gotten into is everybody plays with their friends and nobody gets any better because there's not a lot of intermingling. These people hang over there, and these people hang over there. So a lot of little scenes, not much community.
So we try to create a place, a space that's inclusive to everyone that calls themselves a jazz artist, and to focus on that and to that exclusively. So in other words, we don't do jazz-adjacent music. We just do jazz music. And so it kind of makes the community self-identifying. But also, you know, how do we build community? We have to show up for community, but there has to be something to show up to.
So we have been trying to provide events and spaces for the jazz community to show up to, to gather community, because we don't have a space. Since Tula's closed and since the New Orleans closed and since La Fermata closed and since all these places closed, we need that home base, you know, so that we can have community. So that's the first part.
The second part is mentorship. You know, we are in a community without a lot of elders, or at least without a lot of elders that want to take responsibility for that position—grooming the next crop of elders. Honestly, I think some of the people have kind of abdicated their responsibility for the next generations because honestly, they're still trying to make a living, still trying to make a name for themselves, because it's just gotten so much harder. So they're still working, and they don't have the kind of comfortability to, I think, be more concerned with others. They're still trying to eke it out, and I appreciate that. I mean, a lot of it is an economic situation in Seattle, ninth most expensive city in the world. So rent's gone up, wages for musicians down, commercial rent very sky-high. These are the issues that affect our community.
The elders in our community, we've really got to put them on display, you know, especially the really old elders like Julian Priester. He's ninety and has a lot of wisdom to share, but also was like sitting at home because he wasn't really performing that much. But that also means people like Jay Thomas and Phil Sparks and the other seventy-plus-year-olds in our community who, when I was coming up on the scene, those elders were really visible. You had access to them. They would tell you stuff if you wanted, and just holding the bar high—they were out there doing that.
Now they're not so much because there's no place for them to play. Now there is. So that's part of our thing about mentorship: we need a community where the young musicians are wanting to learn from the older musicians and the older musicians are wanting to pass on to the young musicians. It's a whole cycle that has kind of broken down. The young musicians who are great in the high school programs, they don't really see that there's anything more for them to learn in our community until they move away. And they might be right about that. So we're trying to change that so we can have some retention and some of those great players stay here and are able to learn and grow from the elders that are here.
Incentivizing excellence—well, that basically comes down to pay. Who's going to spend the extra time? Who's going to go the extra mile? Who's going to write that extra project? Who's going to rehearse that band more for a gig that pays maybe fifty dollars a person that you might get to do one time? It's a lot of work for not a lot of reward, or even just keeping a band together over years, weeks, months, whatever. There's no opportunity for that either. So of course the music is going to be mediocre.
And there are a lot of reasons why wages have stagnated over time, but I think for the large part, some of the bigger institutions have sort of had the mentality—and this is not a local problem, this is a problem everywhere—we're going to pay the local musicians the least amount of money we can get away with paying them because we need all this extra money for the out-of-town musicians. Well, I appreciate that there needs to be a balance, and we're not going to have a professional class if local musicians can't make a professional wage. So with the lessening of wages over time, the music has lessened over time because people aren't spending as much time at it because they have to make money doing other things.
And the access part—well, like I mentioned, if you're a fan of the music and you want to hear something excellent, there's a very high price tag attached to that. And so you want to really create a pipeline for musicians. We have to make the music accessible. If it only exists in the classroom for people, then it's totally an abstraction. It's totally an academic experience. It has to exist in the real world somewhere. What are they all studying in school? It has to be somewhere. In Seattle, prior to 2021, it wasn't anywhere. Well, there was no real local jazz thing happening here—pockets, little bits here and there, but nothing centralized or organized enough that was attractive for people to really want to participate in.
So that's what we're trying to get at. That's what they have in other cities. They have communities where musicians hang out with each other, where elders participate in learning with younger musicians, where there's gigs that pay money, a place to gather, where there is incentive to get better, and where the ability to get a gig is not dependent on how many people you can draw but on your artistry. Those are the things we're trying to achieve.
Lawrence: How do you get artists excited about this and get them to join? Do you reach out to them? Do you have to audition people? What does onboarding for the program look like?
Thomas: Well, for a while there we're just trying to get gigs happening. So I guess it's evolved. You know, when we started, we had this sort of weekly jam session for everybody. And it was kind of like this thing where anybody could come and do their thing and play with a bunch of people. And we had a house band, and I was paying them at least. And then we'd had other gigs that—I was literally calling people up and saying, "Hey, will you come play at this venue?" And there was a little bit of convincing people because I would say, "Yeah, I'll pay you."
And they were like, "Well, wait a minute. Nobody's paid me to play here in Seattle in—ever." And so there was literally kind of selling the concept. And then for a long time it was me kind of putting the gigs together because I just wanted to see gigs happen. I wanted to see the music, and so I tried to think of things that I thought were interesting. And then recently, in 2024, we've kind of transitioned to a more artist-led—like people sending their information to us and submitting, and we have a committee that reviews those submissions.
And so we've kind of evolved into that position now where we can—I mean, still, if there's something that I want to happen, I make it happen, but we still kind of keep to the parameters of the mission, which is—we want all the jazz music that's happening. There's a place for it at Seattle Jazz Fellowship. And we kind of pride ourselves on that.
There are places where we don't book. If we don't think that it fits the mission of the organization, like if we don't think it's primarily jazz music or if we don't think it's the right place for the music. But we also just opened up a second venue because the demand is just high. We needed to create more opportunities, and we had a space we weren't using. So we're really trying to accommodate as much as we can for anybody who wants to get down.
Lawrence: That's wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about where does the money come from to make this work? Do you charge admission at the door for these concerts, or do you have other sources of revenue?
Thomas: Yeah. So it's a weird model. When we first started, I was funding it all. And then we got our 501(c)(3) status, and then we started getting donations. So donations and memberships are the primary funding mechanism. And we do charge a nominal cover at the door, like ten to twenty dollars. But that actually doesn't go to the organization. That goes directly to the artists. So we basically, you know, whatever they make at the door, it's divided by five or by whatever number of people are in the band, and it goes right to them as a tip effectively. But there's a guaranteed payment, and the guaranteed payment comes from the organization, and that's what the donations fund.
So musicians are guaranteed to get paid, but they have the opportunity to make more money if people show up. And so what we've kind of seen is that the audiences have grown as the quality has gotten better and as the music has gotten more consistent and as people know that they're going to get value for their entertainment dollar. And so now our musicians are regularly making way more than scale, way more than what they would get paid because there are people showing up and they're supporting the music.
But the funding is really through donations and memberships, primarily. And we have memberships that start as low as sixty dollars a year, which—I mean, for a jazz organization—we're trying to make it as accessible as possible. And then from there, you know, people can donate what they can. We have some very generous donors that have really helped us stay afloat, especially during the leaner months.
Lawrence: What does the future look like for you? What's on your wish list? What do you still need to get to where you want to be?
Thomas: Well, one of the big things is we want to expand our educational programming. We have Julian Speaks, which is this mentorship program with Julian Priester, which has been amazing. We want to do more of that kind of thing—workshops, masterclasses, really giving people access to the knowledge and the history that these elders have.
We also want to—we're planning a jazz festival for 2025 in Pioneer Square. So that's a big undertaking. But we want to kind of shine a spotlight on the entire Seattle jazz community and bring people from outside the community to see what we're doing here. So that's exciting.
And then just continuing to provide opportunities for musicians. I mean, that's the thing. We need more venues. We need more places to play. We need more opportunities for people to make a living doing this. And so if we can continue to expand and create those opportunities, that's the goal. But it all comes down to funding. I mean, that's the reality. We need support from the community to make this happen.
Lawrence: Where can people go to learn more or to support the work that you're doing?
Thomas: Yeah, so our website is seattlejazzfellowship.org. You can find out all about what we're doing, our calendar of events, how to become a member, how to donate. And we're also on social media—Instagram, Facebook. We try to keep people updated on what's happening. And if you're ever in Seattle, come check us out. We'd love to see you.
Lawrence: Thomas, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for taking the time to talk with me today.
Thomas: Thank you, Lawrence. I appreciate it.
Introduction: Our final Jazz Forward Award winner is Eddie Lee from the Sligo Jazz Project in Ireland. For over two decades, Sligo Jazz Project has offered one of Europe's most unique and inclusive jazz education experiences, bringing world-class musicians to Ireland's west coast each summer. Here's Eddie Lee.
Lawrence: Eddie, I'd love to start with you telling our listeners a little bit about your organization, what you do, what your mission is, and how you got started.
Eddie Lee: Thanks, Lawrence. Yeah, Sligo Jazz Project—we've been going since 2005. We were founded by myself, Eddie McFarlane, Felip Carbonell, and Jim Meehan, alongside Sligo-born jazz guitarist Michael Nielsen. And the idea was really to bring world-class jazz education to the west of Ireland. We wanted to create something that was accessible, inclusive, and immersive.
Every July, we run a week-long summer school that brings together about 150 students from all over the world—we've had people from their teens up to their eighties—and about thirty world-class musician-educators who come and teach workshops, masterclasses, lead ensembles during the day, and then perform concerts at night. It's a really unique format because the students get to learn from these incredible musicians and then go see them perform in the evening. And there are jam sessions throughout the week that are open to the public, so it's very much integrated into the community here in Sligo.
Lawrence: And what drew you to do this? What was your background before starting Sligo Jazz Project?
Eddie: Well, I was a bass player in a rock band for years—a kind of prog-rock band back in the nineties. We were writing our own material, and it was a very exciting time. Very creative, great creative outlet. And we were one of those "almost made it" bands that operated for about seven years in my twenties. And I had a lot of fun doing it.
But when that finished, I guess I had to broaden my horizons musically. And I actually went back in my late twenties and early thirties to actually learn music theory for the very first time because I was totally a self-taught player. I just learned by listening to records and trying to figure stuff out on the bass. I grew up listening to Frank Zappa and sort of fusion, jazz fusion. When I was sixteen, I first heard Frank Zappa on the John Peel show on BBC Radio on medium wave. So I used to go to sleep on my school nights listening to John Peel, and it was an amazing experience. I heard some incredible music.
So I think that's always stayed with me—that I never had an opportunity really to learn music theory and to learn the actual, to get all the tools that you need to be a musician that can walk into any situation. I think what jazz education does is it gives you those tools to go into any situation, whether it's a reading situation, an orchestra piece, big band, rock sessions, pop sessions. Jazz education gives you the tools you need to survive in any of those places. And obviously it also gives you a lot of tools for composing, which we've started to do a lot of focus on in the last number of years.
We've had some amazing people like Brian Byrne, the Irish composer. We've had Elio Villafranca, people like that who are well known, well renowned composers, and they've done workshops about composition as well. So that's another thing we've really enjoyed bringing to people here because it's been very inspired. It's a very inspiring thing.
For example, we had Brian Byrne—I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work. He does a lot of movie soundtracks and stuff, but he's an incredible jazz pianist. He did a composition workshop one morning at the college where we run the summer school, or jazz camp, I think they call it in America. And Brian had people crying in his workshop because basically he said, "I want somebody to shout a note." He got three people to shout three notes, and he says, "Okay, I'm going to write a melody with those three notes."
And he wrote a melody, and then he varied the theme using the same phrase but with slightly different rhythm. And he wrote this beautiful piece of music in front of our eyes, and it was just quite an emotional experience for everybody that was at it. So I think those are the kind of things that really inspire the people who come to our events when something that's just a one-off thing happens. And then, of course, that evening Brian is probably going to be jamming with some of the other guys that he's never met in his life. Other magic happens.
And that's the other thing about—I think the great thing about—jazz learning, a jazz repertoire and learning to play jazz is that you can walk into any room with a bunch of musicians and join them, and you'll always have some tunes in common. And it's a beautiful thing to be able to communicate instantly with others musically.
Lawrence: Eddie, tell me a little bit, if you would, about the actual summer school, sort of the mechanics of it. How long does the session, if that's what you refer to it as, last? What's a day in the life of a student?
Eddie: Yeah, so it's six days actually, every July. That's it. We've toyed with the idea of making it longer, but I think to do it within a week—people need to travel the day before and after. To have sort of an eight-day thing, getting here and getting home again, that's probably as much as most people can make in their summer.
So what happens is we have morning workshops, which could be on a variety of things. And the tutors—basically when we assemble a faculty, probably a year in advance or a year and a half in advance—the organization is funded by the Arts Council and summer school fees. Basically that covers, I would say, 80 percent of what our budgeted required budget is. And this year we had our biggest faculty ever. We had thirty-three tutors, musicians, and tutors.
And so they would basically volunteer—we'd ask for volunteers to do morning workshops. So there'd be an hour in the morning or an hour and a bit in the morning, which would consist of—could be ear training, could be rhythm training, it could be transcription, people talking about their favorite solos that they may have transcribed when they were learning their chops. And some of those have been very interesting too.
And sometimes we have a band in residence. For example, we had a few years back the Impossible Gentlemen with Steve Rodby, the great bass and producer, Gwilym Simcock, amazing pianist—both of whom would be renowned for their work with Pat Metheny—Adam Nussbaum, drummer now based in Philadelphia, amazing guy too. And another British player—sort of a super, an international supergroup I guess. But they did some fabulous morning workshops as a group and talking about how they interact. I mean, to get up and get into a college at ten in the morning and see these guys playing and talking about their music, it's a real treat. And we've done that with lots of other people since as well.
So that's kind of what would happen in the mornings. And then there's a masterclass before lunch. So everybody gets divided up into their instruments, and there would be somewhere between two and six tutors on each instrument, depending on the numbers for each instrument. That's something we always have to juggle with as well. It's very difficult because we haven't so far limited numbers except on one instrument because there's always too many piano players.
But we've had to limit piano players because the reason for having—trying to have a sort of an equal division of people on instruments is for the ensemble sessions. And the ensembles are the most important of the whole lot, really. The ensembles happen every afternoon on the summer school—two-hour sessions, sort of from two to four. The tutors lead—tutors get divided up into ensembles, and all the participants are divided into bands or ensembles.
So it's difficult when there are thirty-odd piano players and there's only nine bass players or ten bass players in the school. We had 150 people at the summer school this year. It's our biggest ever. So it's difficult to juggle. As it gets bigger, it's difficult to juggle. So we're anticipating having to actually limit the numbers next year. It's just reached capacity, and certainly we will be limiting piano players. So piano players, if you're listening, you've got to get your booking done quick because it will sell out.
That's basically how the school part of it works. But I think the unique thing about Sligo is that after the summer school every day, everybody heads over to town. It's a small town. It's fifteen minutes' walk from the college to the center of town. So everything is walkable. And there's a lot of live music in town. A lot of it is the tutors, mostly. In fact, the last few years have been pretty much like 95 percent of the people performing at the festival have been the guys who are coming—the amazing artists that are coming to teach.
This year we had a really strong female faculty as well. We had Sasha Berliner, the amazing vibraphone player from San Francisco. We had a Korean drummer called Sun-Mi Hong, who's starting to win a lot of awards now in Europe. She's based in the Netherlands. We had a few fantastic singers as well—Veronica Swift. I should have my program here in front of me so I could list them out. But we had, I suppose, fourteen countries or something represented in just the tutors alone, and about the same, I'd say, in terms of people coming to the summer school.
So there are jam sessions, concerts. There's twice-daily jam sessions for the participants as well, before and after the main concert. And then there's a main concert every evening in the local theater at the Hawk's Well, which features the tutors in various formats. Sometimes we might have a band in residence, but otherwise it's just—it's literally, I have the job of asking people to play together who may not have played together before.
Obviously, there's a lot of back and forth: "Who would you like to play with?" and all that. This year, of course, everybody wanted to play with Rufus Reid. Rufus was our guest of honor, and Rufus is a true bass legend and also an amazing human being. So it was such a treat to have him back, and one of his protégés, Freddie Hendrix, who's a wonderful trumpet player from New Jersey, from the same town as Rufus, in fact. So we brought a little bit of Teaneck, New Jersey to Sligo this year.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about the relationship with Sligo, because as I was listening to you speak, I was thinking, wow, what a treat for the town to have this week or so of all these incredible musicians converged from around the world. Is there a relationship with the town? How is the festival component and all of the evening performances—how is that received by the townspeople? Are you engaging with the townspeople, or is it mainly the student body?
Eddie: Yeah, no, it's the townspeople, the people from Sligo as well. In fact, I think somebody remarked a few years ago that it's unlike any other summer school that they've taught at, or jazz camp or whatever that they've taught at, because it's so immersed in the community here. And all of the jam sessions are public, are open to the public, so anybody can go and see them, and they're free. And also all of the afternoon sessions that we have each afternoon.
So there's a local pub, four o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, people pouring out of it after hearing some of the greatest jazz musicians on the planet. And that's a rare thing for a small town in the west of Ireland. And I think a lot of people really do appreciate it. And I think a lot of—it started—a lot of people in the local authority here are starting to cotton on as well. So we're getting a little bit of funding from the local authority as well, the county council here in Sligo, and some national funding as well from the tourism board here, Fáilte Ireland.
But yeah, it's a struggle. The funding thing is a major—it takes up, I'd say, a good third of my year every year trying to raise funds. It's one of the necessary evils, I'm afraid, of going out with the—half begging people for money. But it's so rewarding when it comes to the end of the week and you have people coming up to you saying they had the best week of their lives. And a lot of kids as well. We've had, I'd say in the last few years, we probably had 50 out of the 140 or 150 people that come to the summer school have been eighteen or under. So there's a big interest from young people now in the music.
And yeah, the only thing I wish for would be to be able to do something throughout the year that would keep the interest going for the younger kids. And I've been applying for funding. I haven't got it yet, applying for extra funding for sort of a year-round program to allow the younger participants at summer school to have a forum to have some jams in a safe space and to do that locally in Sligo. And hopefully that'll happen in the next year. We'll get that going.
Lawrence: That actually dovetailed into the final question I wanted to ask you, which was if you could tell me a little bit about what would be next in terms of the vision or your to-do list for the organization. And if what you just said answered that, great. If there was something else you wanted to add, I'd love to hear it. And then maybe also, as part of that, if you could let us know where listeners should go if they want to support or get more information about the organization.
Eddie: Sure. Well, that's easy. I'll answer the second question first. That's sligojazz.ie—that's the website, and you can get in touch with us via that as well.
I would say in terms of—I don't think we'd be doing any expansion in terms of the size of the actual main event in the summer, but I would like to expand in terms of a year-round program. And we just haven't been successful in getting enough funding to do that. So we have to concentrate on the summer school, the one thing that we're doing, which is really the most valuable thing that we've been at and what we formed in the first place to do, obviously. So we've got to concentrate on that.
And yeah, I suppose the other thing would be to do the year-round program for the young people as well, for young musicians. And also I would like to bring the festival a little bit more into the community and have more free events in the town. There's a couple of new spaces that are opening in the town, outdoor spaces. The logistics of running anything outdoors in the west of Ireland—they're pretty difficult because of the weather, obviously. But it has been done quite successfully in some places, and you do need covered areas, obviously. So we're working on that. And it would be lovely to run something, a free concert at some part of the week in the actual middle of town, in the middle of Sligo. And that's definitely on the to-do list.
Lawrence: Wonderful. Well, it sounds like such a terrific program and a fun way to spend six days. I hope that I make it to western Ireland one of these days and check it out. That sounds so wonderful.
Eddie: Yeah, please do. And if anybody wants to see what it's like, actually, you can also go to our YouTube channel, which is just Sligo Jazz, S-L-I-G-O J-A-Z-Z. We've got some lovely videos there—happy musicians and concert footage, you know, a mixture of vox pop and some clips from concerts and stuff. So yeah, check us out there.
Lawrence: Eddie, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for taking the time to speak with me today.
Eddie: Thank you, Lawrence. It's been a pleasure.
