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.
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.
“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.” - Danny Melnick
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.
Artists scheduled to perform and/or speak at the Jack DeJohnette celebration of life “Sound Travels” at Ulster Performing Arts Center include: Don Byron, Michael Cain, Will Calhoun, Terri Lyne Carrington, Billy Childs, Denardo Coleman, Steve Coleman, George Colligan, Ravi Coltrane, Marc Copland, Dave Fiuczynski, Bill Frisell, David Gilmore, Edsel Gomez, Larry Grenadier, Drew Gress, Jerome Harris, Billy Hart, Dave Holland, Bruce Hornsby, Joe Lovano, Linda May Han Oh, Rudresh Mahanthappa, John Medeski, Roscoe Mitchell, Jason Moran, Ra Kalam Bob Moses, David Murray, Greg Osby, John Patitucci, Danilo Perez, Chris Potter, Luisito Quintero, Rufus Reid, Tim Ries, Wallace Roney Jr., John Scofield, Marvin Sewell, Wadada Leo Smith, esperanza spalding, Bill Stewart, Tani Tabbal, Charles Tolliver, Nasheet Waits and more.
I personally saw Jack with Keither Jarrett, the late Geri Allen, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and Jerome Harris, Trio Beyond with Larry Goldings and John Scofield, his own band circa 2012-2014 featuring Dave Fiuczynski, Rudresh Mahanthappa and George Colligan and the supergroup Hudson with John Scofield, John Medeski and Larry Grenadier and at the Geri Allen tribute performance at Winter Jazzfest alongside Terri Lyne Carrington, He put together some of the most intriguing lineups of musicians to interpret his own music from the 1960s to the early 2000s including Special Edition and various other ensembles. Late in life he came back to the piano, which was his first instrument.
Marie Saint-Louis passed away in June of 1999.
Glorious read and just amazing all the stuff Dan does and have done. The raising of money for justice impressed me the most. What a mensch! And thanks for asking great questions and highlighting all the work of someone who works behind the scenes, but is very important for the health of the music industry and who has supported countless musicians and their audiences over the decades!
Great interview and insights - especially the lessons from George on the presenter/production dilemma. Thanks to you, both!