Interviews

Thea Crosby: I am with Jack Levine, who is the senior marketing manager at primary wave. So tell me a little bit about what you do. Jack LeVine: Awesome. Great to be here, Thea. I work at Primary Wave, which is a music catalog acquisition company and the largest independent music publishing company in the world. We partner with artists and artists' estates on their master and publishing rights for all the songs in their catalog. Then, through marketing, tactics, and strategies, we aim to create new value for those artists by introducing them to new audiences and developing innovative marketing initiatives. Thea Crosby: Cool. So my first question for you is, you graduated at U Miami with a bachelor of Business Administration with a focus in marketing, music, business, and finance. What drew you to business in music in particular and how does this differ from other fields of business? Jack LeVine: Great question. I grew up in the music industry; my dad was involved in it and still is. From a young age, during 'Take Your Kid to Work Day,' I was at the Sony offices, playing with CDs and vinyl records. I immediately developed a passion for the field. When I was choosing a college, it was clear to me that I wanted to pursue a career in music — just as some kids consider medicine or law as their futures. It always felt like a natural choice. I decided to study core business to gain essential knowledge, but I also aimed to specialize in the music business through the courses offered at the University of Miami. Thea Crosby: That's interesting. So, I know that you also worked at Paradigm, so there you collaborated with many different artists and their agents while they were on tour. Can you explain your role there and how the tours were more successful with your help? Jack LeVine: Absolutely. So, it's a completely different company, and that's the beauty of the music industry, especially in the United States. There are so many different facets. Paradigm Talent Agency was a booking agency primarily focused on the live side of the music business—concerts and festivals. If you're a festival buyer or promoter, like Live Nation or AEG, or even an independent venue, and you want to get an artist to perform at your venue or as a headliner at your festival, you need to call that artist's agent, who is often the exclusive representative of the artist. The agent is responsible for pitching, negotiating, and booking the artist for respective festival shows. Once that show is confirmed, contracted, and scheduled, and ready to go on that artist's calendar, that's where my team stepped in—the Tour Marketing team. We were a service department within the company that worked on high-priority tours. Essentially, we collaborated with the artists, their managers, the agents, and often the record labels to help the artist sell tickets. Additionally, if the artist had a new song they were trying to push on the radio or an album they were launching alongside the tour announcement, we helped market the album, set up ticket bundles, and more. Most importantly, we also assisted artists in collecting fan data for remarketing on future tour dates. So, we worked with multiple parties—the artists, their managers, the labels, the agents, and industry buyers like venues and promoters—to achieve these goals. Thea Crosby: And what other kinds of strategies do you use when promoting certain artists and how do they differ between different artists? Jack LeVine: Well, every artist is different, and you know, switching gears from the touring industry back into what we're doing at Primary Wave, which is music catalog acquisition. So, you know, once we acquire a catalog, much like when a tour is confirmed and contracted, we sit down and have a meeting with the artist or the artist's team to discuss the goals in mind. On the live side of the industry, it was always about selling tickets, but also about collecting fan data, selling merch, launching a new festival, and doing X, Y, and Z. Every artist, therefore, will have different goals. On the catalog side of the business, our aims are to increase overall catalog activity, and introduce our artists to new audiences and cohorts of fans. These are the main objectives, but beyond that, each artist will have additional goals. Also, depending on the rights we purchase and the rights we agree upon in our contracts, our goals will vary. However, what makes Primary Wave unique—and I believe what we excel at—is working closely with the artists, managers, and estates to align these goals and move forward in perfect harmony with that strategy. Thea Crosby: Yeah, cool. And so about primary wave, what drew you to primary wave, and then what's your favorite part of your current work? Jack LeVine: Primary Wave is a really excellent company, and its business model is great. I love that it's a true combination of people who are passionate about music and the music industry, as well as those who are passionate and knowledgeable about business, finance, and investing. That was what initially excited me about the company, and it still keeps me motivated today. My favorite part about my current work is working on various projects. The beauty of working at Primary Wave, compared to my previous role in a service division within an agency, is that no one will tell you to stay in your lane. You have the freedom and ability to be entrepreneurial, to chase big projects and will them into existence, and we're actually encouraged to do so. Not only are we encouraged from a managerial standpoint, but we're also incentivized from a rights and revenue perspective because of how our artist deals are structured. As a company, we align ourselves at the deal level with our artists. We become partners in their lifelong work, and there's a lot of value in that and what you can gain from it. Thea Crosby: Cool. And then last question, what is your advice for young people interested in the music business? And how is music business enriching to an education? Jack LeVine: My advice to young people is to network, and it's more important than ever. I know that's not news to you or any young people listening, but you're facing a crowded job market right now. So, making connections and hustling once you're in the door is crucial. It’s important to make a good first impression, but once you're inside, you need to hustle. You have to work hard, ask questions, and be a good listener. And don't just leave your summer internship and never talk to them again—reach out, wish them happy holidays, check in now and then, and opportunities will come over time. Thea Crosby: Cool. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Jack LeVine: Of course, thank you, Thea.

THEA I'm here with Greg Scholl, who works at Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is the executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and teaches at Juilliard. So, first question: tell me a little bit about yourself. GREG What would you like to know? THEA About your work and what you do. GREG I joined Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2012. At the time, I was working at NBC as President of Local Integrated Media. Wynton Marsalis called about this opportunity. It was an easy decision: I love Wynton, I love jazz, and it is privilege to support jazz musicians. My job is to help keep things running … keep all the plates spinning. I work for Wynton to try to realize the vision he has for the music and for the potential of Jazz for our culture and civic life. THEA Yeah, that's amazing. So, first question, you began consulting and venture capital before founding or building The Orchard and later leading NBC Universal's local digital media group. So, what inspired your transition into the world of jazz, ultimately leading to your role at jazz and Lincoln Center? GREG I got interested in jazz in college. I was music-obsessed from as early as I can remember – mowing lawns all summer to buy records, that sort of thing – but didn't have any real exposure to jazz until college. A friend in college, Eric Vogel was a jazz fan and then one summer, I worked in a mail room at a law firm in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, with a guy who was obsessed with Clifford Brown. This guy would make mixtapes for everyone. Jazz started popping up everywhere. As soon as I started really to listen to it, I was hooked. As far as my career goes, I graduated from college, I needed a job, I interviewed a bunch of places, and I got a job in management consulting. There wasn’t much more to it than I wanted to move to New York, and I needed to pay the rent. I was fortunate always to work on jobs for media and technology companies, primarily at Booz Allen and then McKinsey; through a lot of luck, I connected to the technology and media and entertainment sectors early in my career. Time passed. Then, as you note, I ran a small, early-stage venture capital firm. We invested at the very top of the first dot-com bubble – which went exactly like it sounds it would: badly. I spent most of the time trying to recover whatever I could for our investor, to try to get his money out of these struggling companies into which we had invested. Through that process, I met Joe Samberg and Danny Stein, who had started an investment company called Dimensional Associates. Their investment thesis was to buy distressed media assets that were scattered around after the bursting of the first dot-com bubble, take control positions, and then build them. One of the businesses that they bought, Digital Club Network, was a portfolio companies in the fund I managed. It was a very cool company – one of the first companies to stream concerts over the internet. DCN wired up fifty of the greatest American rock clubs … places like the Knitting Factory, the 9:30 Club, the Metro, First Avenue, the 40-Watt, Great American Music Hall. Along with DCN subscribers being able to tune into live concerts, a person named Dan Pifer figured out how to give concertgoers the ability to buy the show on the way out and download it in real time, from a USB kiosk. It was a brilliant idea, just two decades too early. I sat on the DCN board and helped sell DCN to Dimensional. After getting to know Joe and Danny, they asked me to join them as a partner at Dimensional, to run one of the portfolio companies. (Fun fact: the DCN sale helped Michael Dorf, who was one of the co-founders of DCN along with Andrew Rasiej and Ted Werth, on the path that led to his building and running the phenomenal City Winery business!). Joe and Danny were investing in at a company called The Orchard and I thought it was a big opportunity and the one best suited for me to build. The Orchard was founded by Richard Gottehrer and Scott Cohen, along with their partner Steve Haase. They were visionaries but like with DCN, just too early. When Dimensional bought it, The Orchard was insolvent. Lots of tax and royalty problems, on the way to bankruptcy. The Orchard’s model at the time was to charge artists a fixed fee in exchange for the perpetual, exclusive, worldwide license to distribute and sell their music, charging clients $49.99 for digital distribution and $99.99 for digital and physical distribution. It was a simple, tear-sheet, take it or leave it contract whereby after paying the fee, the client got 70% of any income and The Orchard kept as its fee the other 30%. I joined as President and CEO. We changed the business model, dropping the fee and moving from “perpetuity” to a fixed term. At the time of its purchase, The Orchard had amassed a large catalog of music. Most did not have much commercial viability – it was a lot self-recorded, self-released music. The premise was, okay, we control an enormous volume of music. It might not sell much, but there is a lot of it. When these services launch, they are going to need hits but also a big-sounding number of tracks so they can say “You can get U2 and Bob Dylan” – or whatever – “along with access to over two hundred thousand songs!” We became those two hundred thousand songs. Remember, this is before iTunes existed. As the digital services started to launch, because of the size our catalog, we were to get deals in place with all of them and built out a digital retail distribution platform. With that in place, and with a more compelling value proposition to clients, we focused on courting higher-profile independent artists and labels. As we started to sign them, it then made us even more valuable to new services. Success begat success. Another important part of our strategy was to aggressively pursue and license music globally and not just from the US and Europe. The so-called “major labels” are a lot less relevant in other parts of the world and there are massive catalogues of great music available to license in those other places. When the only thing that inhibited the flow of music across borders became rights, in an industry structured around the logistics of physical product, we saw an opportunity to move quickly and license music outside the US and traditional European markets. Which we did: we had, at one point, something like 60% of the music of the country of India; 80% of the music of Turkey. It was staggering, and great. Pick a country outside of the US and Europe, and The Orchard became the “major” there when it came to digital music. That period of my career was about as much fun as it’s possible to have in business, traveling around the world, meeting interesting and talented people, explaining this new thing called digital distribution and that there’s no downside for them to give it a try with us for a couple years, signing distribution deals. We brought on new clients and very quickly surpassed a million tracks under license, then two million. While doing so, we were also successful in striking new digital retail agreements in all those countries, be it a digital retailer in Africa or a mobile carrier in China, to create a truly global digital distribution platform. Sony bought it, and The Orchard is one of the largest music distribution and marketing companies in the world. The company continues to go from success to success, led now for many years by its current CEO Brad Navin, who was one of the original members of our team. And it is a point of pride that many other of our original team members are still there, including co-founder Richard Gottehrer, strategic guru Prashant Bahadur, person-of-the-world Miki Tunis, Queen of digital Latin music Laura Tesoriero, and of course the indomitable Bullethead! But most of all, The Orchard is why I am at Jazz at Lincoln Center. When Wynton was coming out of his deal with Blue Note, someone recommended that Wynton’s manager Ed Arrendell check us out. Wynton and I first met then, in the mid-00s and connected right away. I had that feeling like Wynton was someone I had already known for a long time and apparently when they left, Wynton told Ed, “We will work with that guy someday.” The Orchard ended up signing Wynton as a client and while we never did much together back then, that connection is what led to the left turn I took into the nonprofit world, to Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has transformed my career and life in so many ways. THEA Wow, it's amazing. So, then the next question would be, when you joined Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis emphasized a more strategic and band-like organizational structure. What were some of the most meaningful changes or innovations you've implemented since taking the helm on July 1st, 2012? GREG Wynton has visionary ideas of management and organization behavior in the context of a jazz band. One of them relates to mapping the fundamental elements of jazz to how people work together and get things done. Improvisation is translated in the business world as how well someone does their job: one’s competence and problem-solving ability. Swing, the rhythmic foundation of jazz, relates to how well people collaborate, and how willing people are to subordinate their personal agenda and ambition for the larger objectives. And finally, the ever-present blues – persistent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary – is in the business context, about how people show up: attitude, perspective, collegiality, and so forth. Improvisation, swing, and the blues are deceptively powerful ways to think about how organizations work. The goal is to create an organization that liberates innovation from all levels and departments yet maintains structure, organization, discipline, and internal controls. The approach also puts value on the primacy of one’s expertise as a necessary precursor to being great. Staff need virtuosity over the work that they do and a relentless drive to get better, just like a great musician does. As far as how we’ll we’ve implemented it, we are better than we were, and not as good as we will become. It helps to have the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as a model. This brilliant collaborative entity is one of the best bands in history across any genre or documented period. Every member is virtuosic. And without question, there has never been a band with so many world-class arrangers and composers in it. They are an inspiration to me and should be an inspiration for anyone else at Jazz at Lincoln Center, not just because of their obvious talent but because of how they choose to apply it: their level of commitment, dedication, and sacrifice on behalf of the music. This Orchestra is at our core. The first day I was here I got the then-management team together to share two 78s with them. The first record I shared is what is considered the first jazz recording, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues.” The second record I shared was the only recording that the great trumpeter Freddy Keppard released in his own name, a Paramount issue of “Stockyard Strut” backed with “Salty Dog.” The story goes, Keppard was approached by one of the record companies to record his Original Creole Orchestra, which was one of the most popular bands of the time. Keppard could have made the first jazz record with them, but for whatever reason, he declined, be it out of a fear of others copying his style, him thinking that he was going to get ripped off, whatever the reasons. Because Keppard declined the offer, the history and mythology of jazz – the most iconic American art form – has, as its first recorded expression, an inferior band that gained a place in history simply by being first. I shared those two records as a reminder of why we need to take chances and not be afraid of new things and taking swings. The other point I made was about how I see my job. I report to Wynton, but I work for the leadership team. The leadership team works for their staff. Then ultimately, all our staff work for the Orchestra. The Orchestra is the heart of what we do – our representation in the world – and where the actual art and magic happens. THEA Great. And then third question, as a Juilliard faculty member teaching business of jazz, how do you advise young musicians to combine their artistic passion with practical career planning? GREG Good question and it’s a challenge that all young musicians face. I explain the premise of the class as, students don't need to develop command over all the material, but at a minimum, they need to gain enough of an understanding so they can evaluate the competencies of the people they will hire, whether a manager, booker, marketer, promoter, and the like. The class is part of Juilliard’s Jazz Studies program, a department that Wynton oversees and is run by Aaron Flagg and is requirement for all undergraduate and graduate Juilliard Jazz Studies students. It’s a full year class structured in two semesters. I set up the fall semester as a survey of sorts, covering the major disciplines of the music business, everything from project planning to marketing, and promotion to touring, to business and personal finance, copyright, and so on. Then in the spring semester, each student defines a project that they will spend the semester developing, drawing from what they learned in the fall. The idea is to each pick something they want to do so it’s not just an academic exercise. Students who are on the ball and have a vision for what they want to do can use the spring semester to further their career. Students have pursued everything from the things you’d expect, like recording and releasing a record or setting up a tour, to projects that range from an online business for people to commission transcriptions, to a new nonprofit to teach kids about the music. Teaching has been a great experience, and I value the relationships I’ve had the pleasure of developing with these phenomenal young artists. THEA Yeah, it sounds influential to students. Last question, how do you see education and community engagement playing a role in the future of jazz and how is jazz at Lincoln Center working to expand access to music programs for young people? GREG Taking those in reverse order, engaging and educating young people about Jazz is the key to building audiences and creating a heathier future for the art form. Our signature program, Essentially Ellington is the largest and highest-impact high school jazz program and curriculum in the world with around 2,000 schools taking part. Under our head of Education, Todd Stoll, the program has flowered with the development of over twenty regional festivals over the course of the year, all over the country. The goal was to have a regional festival within a five-hour drive of any household in America. We just celebrated EE’s 30th anniversary. Over these three decades, a million students – and counting – have participated in and been impacted by the program. Any school can register. In return they receive, for free, a full-year curriculum along with entirely new arrangements that JALC commissions every year. This material includes full charts for every instrument (almost all of which is music that has not been in publication for decades, if ever) along with teaching materials and audio and video recordings of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performing each piece. To help students listen, watch, and learn, for years now, we have worked with an entrepreneur named Darren Hoffman. He now has a great new product called Myxstem (www.Myxstem.com) that we use as a teaching tool. Through the Myxstem portal or app, students have tremendous flexibility in how they can engage with the music. They can mute all but the track that contains their individual instrument part or select any combination of instruments to hear (for example, just the trumpet section, or just the rhythm section). There is video of the band as a while but also that corresponds to each audio track – so, for example, a pianist can listen just to the piano part, and then watch top-down, Dan Nimmer’s hands as he plays it, full speed, half speed, and so forth. And the score is always following the music, at the bottom (unless they hide it). And if students have access to an Apple Vision Pro headset (or another VR/AR product), it becomes a truly immersive educational experience. Very cool. Bands work on the material all year and some of them submit recordings of that year’s music, from which all finalist bands are chosen by a jury in a blind selection process. Each May, the top bands travel to New York to compete. In a typical year, 15 bands that make it to the finals. This past year, we had 30 bands in celebration of the 30th Anniversary and instead of Rose Theater, we held the final concerts at the Met Opera. It is hard to convey the spirit and soul of the weekend other than to urge people to attend or at least check it out online on our streaming service, Jazz Live (www.jazzlive.com). We always broadcast all the concerts for free. For top three bands, winning it a big deal. This year, after Memphis Central High School took first place, the mayor of Memphis named a day in the school’s honor, among many celebrations and recognitions across the region. Also, here’s something to ponder. When Essentially Ellington started, most of the music of Duke Ellington was out of print. Think about the absurdity of that. One of the greatest artists in history, who was central to the development of America’s greatest contribution to global culture, had by the 80s been relegated to the dustbins. Through EE, along with the Orchestra’s concerts each season, we have brought hundreds of Ellington’s compositions back into print, and available. We are teaching kids while also recovering America’s cultural heritage. As for the other part of your question, in terms of the idea of community, I believe that this is central to whether and how jazz will grow, evolve, and prosper and that success will require much more of a local focus than people appreciate. If you think about something like the state of New York or even the city of New York, it's an abstraction, an amalgamation of lots of neighborhoods. But if you talk about Morningside Heights or Inwood, those are places: communities, not just geographical designations. People live there and things happen – in parks, churches, community centers, retirement homes, peoples’ front stoops (or yards!) … living rooms for that matter. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s vision is building a more conscious, collaborative, and creative world through the art of jazz. Our mission is to entertain, enrich, and expand a global community for Jazz through performance, education, and advance. We need to find people in every community across the country who want to help realize this vision and mission. And a lot of people are out there: they are just extremely diffuse, which makes it expensive to reach them. Jazz at Lincoln Center needs to be a platform that can support people and institutions whose work is consonant with our mission. We need to help others to create new opportunities for jazz musicians to earn a living by playing more often for more money, in front of larger, ever-growing, ever-more-appreciative audiences. We need to help others to help people who want to teach how to play the music, or about its history and appreciation. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Pittsburgh. If I was still living there, I am an example of someone who would love to connect with Jazz at Lincoln Center to bring Jazz to my community. Likewise, would the person in the mailroom who was really into Clifford Brown. How can we help people to do that? How can we facilitate people who want to create a self-sustaining, weekly or monthly or quarterly jazz concerts? To put on a new Jazz festival that has Jazz on the bill? Jazz has the great benefit of being an acoustic music and in its simplest form, all a person needs is a physical space, a great combo, and an audience. We tested this idea through a program called “Jazz on the Road” which toured small combos in targeted geographies over short, two-week runs. Phill and Elizabeth Gross funded it. The leader was named a Gross Fellow and received a stipend along with financial support for the band and tour. We created a program to prepare the leader and musicians, then the bands hit the road. They played in lots of different types of venues. Along with Jazz concerts, they held public talks, master classes for musicians, outreach to local schools, and more. At each location, there was someone on point to support the work and, importantly, deliver an audience. It worked incredibly well and proved out the concept, and over two or three years with a periodic but consistent presence, there will be places where local advocates create a self-sustaining audience and funding mechanism. It would result in a ton of new dates in all sorts of locations across America, develop and engage new audiences, and generate work for musicians. The trick is scaling it. The idea only works if each location becomes self-sufficient. A person named Sara Horowitz is pioneering a new way of thinking called Mutualism. She started the Mutualist Society www.mutualistsociety.net and is doing really interesting, cutting-edge work bringing together people who are using DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) in pursuit of a wide range of things. I believe there is a lot to learn and apply from Sara’s work as to how we can scale what we do. In the same vein, there should be great Jazz orchestras in every city that plays a full concert season in the performance halls of America. This is starting to happen through the work of Vincent Gardner and Jazz Houston, Victor Goines and Jazz St. Louis, Kenny Rampton and the Jazz Outreach Initiative in Vegas, and Gabrielle Armand and SFJAZZ in San Francisco. These efforts will advance the music and success will beget success. We are almost out of time, but a final plea: this is the moment! There are so many phenomenal young jazz musicians right now who have integrity and are serious about their art and trying to swing and advance the music. In fact, three of them – Alexa Tarantino, Abdias Armenteros, and Chris Lewis – are in our JLCO. And another, Joe Block, I’m catching at Dizzy’s tomorrow night! This is a generational moment. Let’s not let them down. THEA Thank you very much for speaking with me today. This is very interesting. GREG Thank you for giving me the time. Good luck with your projects. Go catch live Jazz somewhere soon! THEA Thank you. THEA I'm here with Greg Scholl, who works at Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is the executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and teaches at Juilliard. So, first question: tell me a little bit about yourself. GREG What would you like to know? THEA About your work and what you do. GREG I joined Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2012. At the time, I was working at NBC as President of Local Integrated Media. Wynton Marsalis called about this opportunity. It was an easy decision: I love Wynton, I love jazz, and it is privilege to support jazz musicians. My job is to help keep things running … keep all the plates spinning. I work for Wynton to try to realize the vision he has for the music and for the potential of Jazz for our culture and civic life. THEA Yeah, that's amazing. So, first question, you began consulting and venture capital before founding or building The Orchard and later leading NBC Universal's local digital media group. So, what inspired your transition into the world of jazz, ultimately leading to your role at jazz and Lincoln Center? GREG I got interested in jazz in college. I was music-obsessed from as early as I can remember – mowing lawns all summer to buy records, that sort of thing – but didn't have any real exposure to jazz until college. A friend in college, Eric Vogel was a jazz fan and then one summer, I worked in a mail room at a law firm in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, with a guy who was obsessed with Clifford Brown. This guy would make mixtapes for everyone. Jazz started popping up everywhere. As soon as I started really to listen to it, I was hooked. As far as my career goes, I graduated from college, I needed a job, I interviewed a bunch of places, and I got a job in management consulting. There wasn’t much more to it than I wanted to move to New York, and I needed to pay the rent. I was fortunate always to work on jobs for media and technology companies, primarily at Booz Allen and then McKinsey; through a lot of luck, I connected to the technology and media and entertainment sectors early in my career. Time passed. Then, as you note, I ran a small, early-stage venture capital firm. We invested at the very top of the first dot-com bubble – which went exactly like it sounds it would: badly. I spent most of the time trying to recover whatever I could for our investor, to try to get his money out of these struggling companies into which we had invested. Through that process, I met Joe Samberg and Danny Stein, who had started an investment company called Dimensional Associates. Their investment thesis was to buy distressed media assets that were scattered around after the bursting of the first dot-com bubble, take control positions, and then build them. One of the businesses that they bought, Digital Club Network, was a portfolio companies in the fund I managed. It was a very cool company – one of the first companies to stream concerts over the internet. DCN wired up fifty of the greatest American rock clubs … places like the Knitting Factory, the 9:30 Club, the Metro, First Avenue, the 40-Watt, Great American Music Hall. Along with DCN subscribers being able to tune into live concerts, a person named Dan Pifer figured out how to give concertgoers the ability to buy the show on the way out and download it in real time, from a USB kiosk. It was a brilliant idea, just two decades too early. I sat on the DCN board and helped sell DCN to Dimensional. After getting to know Joe and Danny, they asked me to join them as a partner at Dimensional, to run one of the portfolio companies. (Fun fact: the DCN sale helped Michael Dorf, who was one of the co-founders of DCN along with Andrew Rasiej and Ted Werth, on the path that led to his building and running the phenomenal City Winery business!). Joe and Danny were investing in at a company called The Orchard and I thought it was a big opportunity and the one best suited for me to build. The Orchard was founded by Richard Gottehrer and Scott Cohen, along with their partner Steve Haase. They were visionaries but like with DCN, just too early. When Dimensional bought it, The Orchard was insolvent. Lots of tax and royalty problems, on the way to bankruptcy. The Orchard’s model at the time was to charge artists a fixed fee in exchange for the perpetual, exclusive, worldwide license to distribute and sell their music, charging clients $49.99 for digital distribution and $99.99 for digital and physical distribution. It was a simple, tear-sheet, take it or leave it contract whereby after paying the fee, the client got 70% of any income and The Orchard kept as its fee the other 30%. I joined as President and CEO. We changed the business model, dropping the fee and moving from “perpetuity” to a fixed term. At the time of its purchase, The Orchard had amassed a large catalog of music. Most did not have much commercial viability – it was a lot self-recorded, self-released music. The premise was, okay, we control an enormous volume of music. It might not sell much, but there is a lot of it. When these services launch, they are going to need hits but also a big-sounding number of tracks so they can say “You can get U2 and Bob Dylan” – or whatever – “along with access to over two hundred thousand songs!” We became those two hundred thousand songs. Remember, this is before iTunes existed. As the digital services started to launch, because of the size our catalog, we were to get deals in place with all of them and built out a digital retail distribution platform. With that in place, and with a more compelling value proposition to clients, we focused on courting higher-profile independent artists and labels. As we started to sign them, it then made us even more valuable to new services. Success begat success. Another important part of our strategy was to aggressively pursue and license music globally and not just from the US and Europe. The so-called “major labels” are a lot less relevant in other parts of the world and there are massive catalogues of great music available to license in those other places. When the only thing that inhibited the flow of music across borders became rights, in an industry structured around the logistics of physical product, we saw an opportunity to move quickly and license music outside the US and traditional European markets. Which we did: we had, at one point, something like 60% of the music of the country of India; 80% of the music of Turkey. It was staggering, and great. Pick a country outside of the US and Europe, and The Orchard became the “major” there when it came to digital music. That period of my career was about as much fun as it’s possible to have in business, traveling around the world, meeting interesting and talented people, explaining this new thing called digital distribution and that there’s no downside for them to give it a try with us for a couple years, signing distribution deals. We brought on new clients and very quickly surpassed a million tracks under license, then two million. While doing so, we were also successful in striking new digital retail agreements in all those countries, be it a digital retailer in Africa or a mobile carrier in China, to create a truly global digital distribution platform. Sony bought it, and The Orchard is one of the largest music distribution and marketing companies in the world. The company continues to go from success to success, led now for many years by its current CEO Brad Navin, who was one of the original members of our team. And it is a point of pride that many other of our original team members are still there, including co-founder Richard Gottehrer, strategic guru Prashant Bahadur, person-of-the-world Miki Tunis, Queen of digital Latin music Laura Tesoriero, and of course the indomitable Bullethead! But most of all, The Orchard is why I am at Jazz at Lincoln Center. When Wynton was coming out of his deal with Blue Note, someone recommended that Wynton’s manager Ed Arrendell check us out. Wynton and I first met then, in the mid-00s and connected right away. I had that feeling like Wynton was someone I had already known for a long time and apparently when they left, Wynton told Ed, “We will work with that guy someday.” The Orchard ended up signing Wynton as a client and while we never did much together back then, that connection is what led to the left turn I took into the nonprofit world, to Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has transformed my career and life in so many ways. THEA Wow, it's amazing. So, then the next question would be, when you joined Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis emphasized a more strategic and band-like organizational structure. What were some of the most meaningful changes or innovations you've implemented since taking the helm on July 1st, 2012? GREG Wynton has visionary ideas of management and organization behavior in the context of a jazz band. One of them relates to mapping the fundamental elements of jazz to how people work together and get things done. Improvisation is translated in the business world as how well someone does their job: one’s competence and problem-solving ability. Swing, the rhythmic foundation of jazz, relates to how well people collaborate, and how willing people are to subordinate their personal agenda and ambition for the larger objectives. And finally, the ever-present blues – persistent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary – is in the business context, about how people show up: attitude, perspective, collegiality, and so forth. Improvisation, swing, and the blues are deceptively powerful ways to think about how organizations work. The goal is to create an organization that liberates innovation from all levels and departments yet maintains structure, organization, discipline, and internal controls. The approach also puts value on the primacy of one’s expertise as a necessary precursor to being great. Staff need virtuosity over the work that they do and a relentless drive to get better, just like a great musician does. As far as how we’ll we’ve implemented it, we are better than we were, and not as good as we will become. It helps to have the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as a model. This brilliant collaborative entity is one of the best bands in history across any genre or documented period. Every member is virtuosic. And without question, there has never been a band with so many world-class arrangers and composers in it. They are an inspiration to me and should be an inspiration for anyone else at Jazz at Lincoln Center, not just because of their obvious talent but because of how they choose to apply it: their level of commitment, dedication, and sacrifice on behalf of the music. This Orchestra is at our core. The first day I was here I got the then-management team together to share two 78s with them. The first record I shared is what is considered the first jazz recording, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues.” The second record I shared was the only recording that the great trumpeter Freddy Keppard released in his own name, a Paramount issue of “Stockyard Strut” backed with “Salty Dog.” The story goes, Keppard was approached by one of the record companies to record his Original Creole Orchestra, which was one of the most popular bands of the time. Keppard could have made the first jazz record with them, but for whatever reason, he declined, be it out of a fear of others copying his style, him thinking that he was going to get ripped off, whatever the reasons. Because Keppard declined the offer, the history and mythology of jazz – the most iconic American art form – has, as its first recorded expression, an inferior band that gained a place in history simply by being first. I shared those two records as a reminder of why we need to take chances and not be afraid of new things and taking swings. The other point I made was about how I see my job. I report to Wynton, but I work for the leadership team. The leadership team works for their staff. Then ultimately, all our staff work for the Orchestra. The Orchestra is the heart of what we do – our representation in the world – and where the actual art and magic happens. THEA Great. And then third question, as a Juilliard faculty member teaching business of jazz, how do you advise young musicians to combine their artistic passion with practical career planning? GREG Good question and it’s a challenge that all young musicians face. I explain the premise of the class as, students don't need to develop command over all the material, but at a minimum, they need to gain enough of an understanding so they can evaluate the competencies of the people they will hire, whether a manager, booker, marketer, promoter, and the like. The class is part of Juilliard’s Jazz Studies program, a department that Wynton oversees and is run by Aaron Flagg and is requirement for all undergraduate and graduate Juilliard Jazz Studies students. It’s a full year class structured in two semesters. I set up the fall semester as a survey of sorts, covering the major disciplines of the music business, everything from project planning to marketing, and promotion to touring, to business and personal finance, copyright, and so on. Then in the spring semester, each student defines a project that they will spend the semester developing, drawing from what they learned in the fall. The idea is to each pick something they want to do so it’s not just an academic exercise. Students who are on the ball and have a vision for what they want to do can use the spring semester to further their career. Students have pursued everything from the things you’d expect, like recording and releasing a record or setting up a tour, to projects that range from an online business for people to commission transcriptions, to a new nonprofit to teach kids about the music. Teaching has been a great experience, and I value the relationships I’ve had the pleasure of developing with these phenomenal young artists. THEA Yeah, it sounds influential to students. Last question, how do you see education and community engagement playing a role in the future of jazz and how is jazz at Lincoln Center working to expand access to music programs for young people? GREG Taking those in reverse order, engaging and educating young people about Jazz is the key to building audiences and creating a heathier future for the art form. Our signature program, Essentially Ellington is the largest and highest-impact high school jazz program and curriculum in the world with around 2,000 schools taking part. Under our head of Education, Todd Stoll, the program has flowered with the development of over twenty regional festivals over the course of the year, all over the country. The goal was to have a regional festival within a five-hour drive of any household in America. We just celebrated EE’s 30th anniversary. Over these three decades, a million students – and counting – have participated in and been impacted by the program. Any school can register. In return they receive, for free, a full-year curriculum along with entirely new arrangements that JALC commissions every year. This material includes full charts for every instrument (almost all of which is music that has not been in publication for decades, if ever) along with teaching materials and audio and video recordings of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performing each piece. To help students listen, watch, and learn, for years now, we have worked with an entrepreneur named Darren Hoffman. He now has a great new product called Myxstem (www.Myxstem.com) that we use as a teaching tool. Through the Myxstem portal or app, students have tremendous flexibility in how they can engage with the music. They can mute all but the track that contains their individual instrument part or select any combination of instruments to hear (for example, just the trumpet section, or just the rhythm section). There is video of the band as a while but also that corresponds to each audio track – so, for example, a pianist can listen just to the piano part, and then watch top-down, Dan Nimmer’s hands as he plays it, full speed, half speed, and so forth. And the score is always following the music, at the bottom (unless they hide it). And if students have access to an Apple Vision Pro headset (or another VR/AR product), it becomes a truly immersive educational experience. Very cool. Bands work on the material all year and some of them submit recordings of that year’s music, from which all finalist bands are chosen by a jury in a blind selection process. Each May, the top bands travel to New York to compete. In a typical year, 15 bands that make it to the finals. This past year, we had 30 bands in celebration of the 30th Anniversary and instead of Rose Theater, we held the final concerts at the Met Opera. It is hard to convey the spirit and soul of the weekend other than to urge people to attend or at least check it out online on our streaming service, Jazz Live (www.jazzlive.com). We always broadcast all the concerts for free. For top three bands, winning it a big deal. This year, after Memphis Central High School took first place, the mayor of Memphis named a day in the school’s honor, among many celebrations and recognitions across the region. Also, here’s something to ponder. When Essentially Ellington started, most of the music of Duke Ellington was out of print. Think about the absurdity of that. One of the greatest artists in history, who was central to the development of America’s greatest contribution to global culture, had by the 80s been relegated to the dustbins. Through EE, along with the Orchestra’s concerts each season, we have brought hundreds of Ellington’s compositions back into print, and available. We are teaching kids while also recovering America’s cultural heritage. As for the other part of your question, in terms of the idea of community, I believe that this is central to whether and how jazz will grow, evolve, and prosper and that success will require much more of a local focus than people appreciate. If you think about something like the state of New York or even the city of New York, it's an abstraction, an amalgamation of lots of neighborhoods. But if you talk about Morningside Heights or Inwood, those are places: communities, not just geographical designations. People live there and things happen – in parks, churches, community centers, retirement homes, peoples’ front stoops (or yards!) … living rooms for that matter. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s vision is building a more conscious, collaborative, and creative world through the art of jazz. Our mission is to entertain, enrich, and expand a global community for Jazz through performance, education, and advance. We need to find people in every community across the country who want to help realize this vision and mission. And a lot of people are out there: they are just extremely diffuse, which makes it expensive to reach them. Jazz at Lincoln Center needs to be a platform that can support people and institutions whose work is consonant with our mission. We need to help others to create new opportunities for jazz musicians to earn a living by playing more often for more money, in front of larger, ever-growing, ever-more-appreciative audiences. We need to help others to help people who want to teach how to play the music, or about its history and appreciation. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Pittsburgh. If I was still living there, I am an example of someone who would love to connect with Jazz at Lincoln Center to bring Jazz to my community. Likewise, would the person in the mailroom who was really into Clifford Brown. How can we help people to do that? How can we facilitate people who want to create a self-sustaining, weekly or monthly or quarterly jazz concerts? To put on a new Jazz festival that has Jazz on the bill? Jazz has the great benefit of being an acoustic music and in its simplest form, all a person needs is a physical space, a great combo, and an audience. We tested this idea through a program called “Jazz on the Road” which toured small combos in targeted geographies over short, two-week runs. Phill and Elizabeth Gross funded it. The leader was named a Gross Fellow and received a stipend along with financial support for the band and tour. We created a program to prepare the leader and musicians, then the bands hit the road. They played in lots of different types of venues. Along with Jazz concerts, they held public talks, master classes for musicians, outreach to local schools, and more. At each location, there was someone on point to support the work and, importantly, deliver an audience. It worked incredibly well and proved out the concept, and over two or three years with a periodic but consistent presence, there will be places where local advocates create a self-sustaining audience and funding mechanism. It would result in a ton of new dates in all sorts of locations across America, develop and engage new audiences, and generate work for musicians. The trick is scaling it. The idea only works if each location becomes self-sufficient. A person named Sara Horowitz is pioneering a new way of thinking called Mutualism. She started the Mutualist Society www.mutualistsociety.net and is doing really interesting, cutting-edge work bringing together people who are using DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) in pursuit of a wide range of things. I believe there is a lot to learn and apply from Sara’s work as to how we can scale what we do. In the same vein, there should be great Jazz orchestras in every city that plays a full concert season in the performance halls of America. This is starting to happen through the work of Vincent Gardner and Jazz Houston, Victor Goines and Jazz St. Louis, Kenny Rampton and the Jazz Outreach Initiative in Vegas, and Gabrielle Armand and SFJAZZ in San Francisco. These efforts will advance the music and success will beget success. We are almost out of time, but a final plea: this is the moment! There are so many phenomenal young jazz musicians right now who have integrity and are serious about their art and trying to swing and advance the music. In fact, three of them – Alexa Tarantino, Abdias Armenteros, and Chris Lewis – are in our JLCO. And another, Joe Block, I’m catching at Dizzy’s tomorrow night! This is a generational moment. Let’s not let them down. THEA Thank you very much for speaking with me today. This is very interesting. GREG Thank you for giving me the time. Good luck with your projects. Go catch live Jazz somewhere soon! THEA Thank you.