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Inside The New Era Of CNY Jazz’s January Fundraiser

• Skip Clark

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Inner Harbor Podcast. I'm Bob Brown from the Dinosaur. And joining me right now, CNY Jazz Executive Director and longtime percussionist for the symphony and an old friend. Yes, living legend.

SPEAKER_00:

And many a mile together. Larry Legend. Welcome to me, Bob. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01:

Tell us about uh what's going to be new with the uh January Jazz Fest.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, uh pretty much everything about uh our annual fundraiser is uh is new this year. The biggest news is that we're no longer at Mohegan Manor. Uh we are now on the level on one floor of uh the most spectacular new uh banquet and restaurant faciliti facility in Adodaga County, I think. Yep. Uh out at Timberbanks on River Road along the Seneca River in uh the middle of the uh Timberbanks community. I guess you call it. It's a planned community. This room will hold 600 people uh very easily. And um uh we uh for uh various reasons decided to to move there because we want to keep this event growing and and and keep enlarging it. And it's uh one of the biggest, if not the biggest, single uh banquet rooms and you're not fighting against football in all of uh uh Onadaga County. And you guessed it. You our grand strategy for January events is to avoid the football playoffs. That's right. And uh so we got into the last Saturday of uh January there at Timberbanks, and uh it's the only non-football weekend day, uh Saturday or Sunday in the entire month. So and we got it in before the end of January, so we don't have to call it the winter Jazz Fest. We can call it the January Jazz Fest, which we uh which we prefer doing. Tell us about the entertainment. We have uh a great lineup for you. We've turned an hour off of the event. We used to start really early at one o'clock. Uh now we're starting at two and going till 7 p.m. And we'll have four acts back to back on the same stage. If you remember when we were back at Mohegan, uh, which was a four-story facility, we used to uh put a different group on every floor so you could wander the facility. A lot of stairs involved. Yeah. Now there'll just be a few steps involved. You don't even have to move uh to uh uh to get from act to act because they'll all be uh on one stage in the uh in the big clubhouse room. Uh we're starting at two with uh who are we starting with? Oh, uh the uh I think the area's finest young jazz tenor. What a voice this kid has. His name is Dan Fields, and uh he's gonna be there with his brand new trio, starting us off uh at 2 p.m. And then we're doing a kind of a multi-generational shift. Uh, and uh we're putting a guitar trio up. Another, I'm gonna call him a youngster. He's in his 30s. Uh he's a youngster. Drew Drew Serafini is uh uh a new newish uh gen, I don't know what gen he is, gen Y, uh uh fixture on the jazz guitar scene. He's got a um a wonderful trio of his own, and we're pairing him with Central New York's favorite saxophonist uh in pretty much any style, Joe Carello, also the lead alto saxophonist in the CNY jazz orchestra, uh, and uh uh I'm gonna say beloved because his students love him, uh, jazz ensemble director at Lemoyne and at OCC, and he still teaches saxophone at uh at Colgate. So we've got the best of more than one generation going on. All of this fun leads up to the main attraction. We make sure that everybody has to bring dancing shoes and can just let their hair down and dance to, I think, upstate New York's premier funk and soul legacy band, Atlas. They have been a mainstay for CNY jazz for so many years. I can't tell you. Of course, I go back personally with all the guys in this band through all of their iterations. They're going on good, they're going on a half a century of music. Wow. They've gone through a lot of changes. We had them downtown at the Northeast Jazz and Winefest for many years. We make sure that they always do it, a free jazz in the city concert in the summer, and we're bringing them in as the main attraction, as it were, um, to do a powerhouse 90-minute show from 4:30 to 6. Um, that's the same schedule uh time that uh uh our mainliners uh uh always appeared at Mohegan. And then we follow that immediately with uh proof of the fruits of our labor. Uh uh uh what we've gotten, all of the talent that we've nurtured uh with our scholastic programs by doing an alumni jam. We have the older generation providing professional rhythm section, and the kids from our summer jazz workshop and uh from our youth orchestra uh will get up and uh and uh test their chops uh against the pros until seven o'clock. And throughout the day, um Timberbanks is providing wonderful uh food and drink, uh cash bar and uh and cash food stations of all kinds. So uh we're looking forward to a great party. It's on the upper level so people don't even have to climb a stair to get in. Um there's acres of parking, and uh uh I'm really looking forward to this more than I have uh in a long time.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about the rest of your season.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, of course, as you know, the January Jazz Fest is our first um major event of uh every academic uh excuse me, every calendar year. And uh pretty much once a month we roll out uh a major ticketed event. Our Black History Month um cabaret is going to be February 22nd. We're moving it back to Drumlins this year. We outgrew the 10th floor of the Marriott Downtown, and um that is very, very close to selling out. As a matter of fact, we turned off the ticket portal just yesterday. So if you would like a seat or two, we're down to just uh um a dozen or two seats. Uh we didn't want to oversell, so uh we're taking phone calls at uh 315-479-Jazz. 315-479-5299. Call our office, and we're gonna be very careful about filling every seat without going over. Uh and uh uh that buffet is uh included, so that will be a cabaret, including a buffet line, uh provided by Drumlins and underwritten by our strong supporters, Bill and Nancy Byrne, yes, of the Byrne Dairy family. Uh, they're a wonderful couple couple and uh love the arts and we have a close relationship with them. We're bringing a double bill too. Uh Jeff Koshawa, who you may remember as a member of the Rippingtons uh back in the 80s, 90s, and and aughts. And a great soloist who will remind you of Nancy Wilson, believe it or not. I'm not overstating this. She is amazing. She works out of Atlanta. Her name is Lori Williams, L-O-R-I. So go check them both out online right now. You won't be disappointed. Uh, they're the uh they're the big attraction there. Um we are doing uh the second year of the Revived Spring Cabaret uh that we did for 20 years before the pandemic hit out at the Sherwood Inn. And that will be April 26th. Tickets will be on sale very soon. And uh, we're bringing Marissa Mulder back, who does a wonderful theme cabaret. Uh, she's a native Syracusean who's been down in New York City, ripping up the cabaret scene for a couple decades now. And uh was be a composer theme to these. So this year she's coming to do her Lennon and McCartney show. And uh uh so and believe me, that's uh that's a very deep and wide songbook, as uh as you and I know, being boomers. Uh, and uh there's just so much to choose from. So uh so that's that. Oh, and another one just dropped into our lab coming up February 15th. By the end of the week, tickets will be on sale. Um uh a brass band all the way from Portlandia, from Portland, Oregon, gave us a call and they're gonna make us a tour stop just two days before Mardi Gras. And that'll be at Jazz Central at a very democratic$20 for the whole party. Um, and so uh check out the uh ticket page at cnyjazz.org if you want to know more about these or if you're into uh uh into marching around to some great brass band music. And I I looked around on the media, I can't find another uh gala featuring a real New Orleans style uh brass band uh anywhere in town. So it'd be a pretty unique event for downtown and for central New York. What about this summer? This summer we are again concentrating on Jazz in the city. If you know about those concerts and haven't been to one yet, please come on out to these great events. They're always on Thursdays, they're over with before dark. Uh they're well organized. And uh I can tell you that uh we've never had a problem in 20 years of doing jazz in the cities. They're kind of a well-kept secret. We use city parks. We have an amazing city park system that a lot of people from the county don't know about. And we're gonna be doing a new one um to spotlight the recovery of Valley Plaza, way down there on the south side. Uh Community Bank stepped up to be our presenting sponsor this year. They have a new branch right there. Uh, so we're going to uh repay them in kind by doing a real big event. Uh, they're working really hard on uh getting a new anchor supermarket in there, and that uh deal may be able to be announced by the time we do the concert. So that's gonna be more like a family fair in that gigantic uh uh uh in the gigantic parking lot of Valley Plaza. If you haven't been down there, it's an it's an amazing uh neighborhood that's recovering absolutely beautiful. Uh beautifully. We're committed to six concerts, and uh I can tell you this there's it's never gonna be more important to help people, especially urban residents, anyone, to know more about and get educated about public health measures and where they can go. If you read the newspapers, you know that those things are starting to get harder to access and more expensive to access. The people from the health and human service agencies that are part of the healthcare village that travels with that will tell you everything you need to know. And if you want to get evaluated by a team of nurses uh from the Sycus Community Health, they will put you through your paces, ask you all kinds of questions, ask about all of your needs, uh, assign you to a personal physician if you don't have one. Many people don't have them. Uh they'll give you uh uh testing right there on the spot, uh, make an appointment for you at the brand new Syracuse Community Health Center uh in downtown south, right uh near the new Steam School. And they'll incentivize you with a$5 lottery scratch off at the end of the rainbow. So uh they do they do uh three or four hundred screenings of people who attend those concerts every year. We're very proud of what we built for the city of Syracuse.

SPEAKER_01:

For those that don't know, uh how did you get started in this business?

SPEAKER_00:

How did I get started in this business? Well, I got a pair of drumsticks when I was seven years old. And uh you can you can take it from there. Actually, I was part of the of the garage band baby boomer movement, uh, and was in countless bands growing up. Uh, we were kind of like the junior members of the baby boomer bands, like uh let's pick a couple. Uh Carmen and the Vikings. Oh, yeah. Um, oh gosh. Oh boy, names escape you after a few decades. Come on, help me out here.

SPEAKER_01:

Swede greasers.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that was yeah, that was my first touring experience. Yeah. Uh six of us took to the road in a bus and truck around the same time, bands like Jam Factory and 805 uh 805. 805, yeah. Yep, 805. Dave Porter's group uh were out there looking for record contracts. Uh we started as a backup group for the original wave of oldies reviews. Uh so we put in a lot of gigs behind Chuck Berry, Gary U.S. Bonds, Dell Shannon, the Sherelles, the Coasters, the Drifters, the Everybody's, okay? It had to be plural back then. And uh it was a great way. Uh it was a trial by fire, let's put it that way. Seeing the seeing the music business that way. And then we started to write our own material and got very close to getting a contract. I think we still have a demo album uh on ice at Decca Records. If there's still a Decca Records, they they were like a major uh uh major label back then, and we thought we'd hit the big time big time. But as you know, you gotta get your product to market at the right time. And uh that was in the fall of 1974, and before you knew it, the the uh gas lines were starting and the Arab oil embargo hit, and there was a huge recession, and all kinds of bad things happened to the music business, believe it or not. Uh, there were no new artists signed for about a year. Uh back then, guys, if you can remember this, records were an oil product. Polyvinyl records are made from oil. So um uh the national speed limit went down to 55. All kinds of all kinds of things were kind of just designed to destroy traveling small businesses. And that's what bands looking for contracts were back then, were just a small business like every else. So I took that, I took all of that knowledge and great victories and bitter defeats, and uh went back to school, started to study classical percussion seriously, and uh was tapped to become the uh uh second chair after Steve Marconi from Jan Factory, who was the founding chair of Syracuse University's uh music business department uh that I led and taught in for several years. And then uh in the early 90s decided to uh found CNY Jazz. That was 30 years ago. We did our first concert in November 1996. Fast forward to today, and I'm still vertical, still solvent. So there you go. The end. Wow, enough about me.

SPEAKER_01:

Um remember saddle shoes?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, how could I forget it? Yeah, I think you can still find it online. Somebody who knows who uploaded it, uh, over an advertisement for saddle shoes. So uh every girl in the world loves a boy in saddle shoes. Uh hit the charts here, uh, and and was played many, many, many times from this very building that we're sitting in right now. Man, what what nostalgia. Um, I don't know. I remember we were neck and neck with the Rolling Stones running up the charts in the top 10. Uh uh they had that that ballad Angie on the charts as a as a single. We were watching the watching the charts national nationwide. That single hit 60 plus markets, and uh we started to get reorders uh from uh distributors who remember record distributors uh in Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta. There were big regional distributors there, and then smaller district local distributors called One Stops. Yeah, uh I feel like we're talking about the horse and buggy days, and uh uh and we broke, we made playlists uh back back then. Disc jockeys broke records, yeah. What a what an amazing filter system for American music we had back then many, many, many moons ago, um like 1980.

SPEAKER_01:

I was in Detroit, WHYT. Yep, and uh I broke Laura Branagan's Gloria.

SPEAKER_00:

No kidding.

SPEAKER_01:

And yeah, I mean it went to number one. Bang. She came to the um St. Patrick's Day Parade is one of the you know stars, yeah. And she got out of the limousine and came up and she grabbed me and she gave me a big kiss and she said, You never forget your first one. Oh, that's great so much. So that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great origin story. It's it's so amazing that and and I think so sad that we've lost that uh that uh way of breaking records. They used to call them local breakouts or regional breakouts, and then it would spread, it would go viral back in the old uh analog days, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Before I let you go, we recap a little bit about about uh January 31st, the Jazz Fest. Of course, and so everybody knows what to look forward to.

SPEAKER_00:

2026 January Jazz Fest, Saturday, January 31st, 2 to 7 p.m. Continuous music, uh cash bar and cash food stations. It is a fundraiser for all of our scholastic uh and education programs. We promise you you're gonna have a great time. Tickets are on sale right now at cnyjazz.org slash tickets. There you go. And again, who's playing? We are gonna start with Dan Fields. Go to Drew Serafini and Joe Corello, have a great dance party with Atlas, and then finish up with uh the funnest part of the event, in my uh opinion, our CNY Jazz alumni jam session.

SPEAKER_01:

Those those kids must uh have such an such an incredible impact on them being able to watch you know the the program.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. We consciously make these things multi-generational. You're gonna see performers between the ages of 15 and I'm not gonna guess at how old the oldest ones are gonna be, but uh probably approaching uh our age. Our age. Thank you very much. I appreciate the compliment.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's it's been a thrill to have you here again and uh wishing you all the best to January Jazz Fest and the Jazz in the City and everything at CNY Jazz. Yeah. Um big hand for Larry Luttinger.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, thank you, thank you. My mother thanks you, my father thanks you. CNYjazz.org, give us an email, get on our weekly e news list, you find out about every one of the 150 events we do year round.

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Skip Clark

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