Although the actual names are confidential, sometimes Suzanne Cloud will tell you what kind of problems her organization is helping a particular jazz or blues musician with—but when it comes to Delaware musicians, she might not even tell you that.
The Jazz Bridge Project is a nonprofit organization that helps jazz and blues musicians who are facing serious crises in their lives. The organization covers what it calls the “Greater Philadelphia” area, including parts of New Jersey and Wilmington. In Delaware, it helped one musician who was trying to avoid foreclosure. But Jazz Bridge values its clients’ privacy, and Cloud won’t even disclose the type of problem another musician was having, because in a close-knit area like Wilmington, people might figure out who she was talking about.
Watch some of vocalist Sharon Sable's April Jazz Bridge show at the Kennett Flash.
Watch some of vocalist Sharon Sable's April Jazz Bridge show at the Kennett Flash.
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Nobody enjoys having their problems talked about. And musicians have to walk on stage with an aura of specialness about them, Cloud says, so they have even more reason to keep such things confidential. But Cloud is much more forthcoming about the organization in general, and the growing number of live jazz performances it generates. It seems that as a byproduct of helping people with acute problems by organizing jazz concerts to raise funds for them, the group has begun to generate a lot more paying work for musicians who face no special crisis but simply need work, like the rest of us, so they can pay their bills.
Jazz Bridge developed because Cloud got tired of seeing underpaid musicians struggle with serious problems. When Cloud was first starting to sing jazz years ago, she was told that a respected Philadelphia pianist named Eddie Green might be a good accompanist for her. “From the time we first started playing together, we were friends and colleagues and bandmates until he died,” Cloud says.
Although Green was a well-known musician and a founder of a band called Catalyst that was famous in the 1970s, royalties from those days were meager. In 2004, when Green was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died four months later, there was no money for hospice care. Cloud had been a working musician for about 25 years at that point, and had seen similar situations over and over again. “Eddie was basically the last straw,” she says. “It was the tipping point for me.”
Traditionally, musicians would help one of their own who had a problem by holding a benefit concert, Cloud says, and they would net about $3,000 at the most. Cloud decided that wasn’t good enough. “I said we can’t let this go on, this is stupid, the community has to do something more,” she says. So Cloud called up Wendy Simon, another jazz vocalist, and they organized two concerts through which they raised a total of three thousand dollars—not to give away, this time, but as seed money for a new organization to help jazz and blues musicians in a variety of ongoing ways.
The co-founders Cloud and Simon assembled a board of directors and in other ways began filling the requirements for listing Jazz Bridge as a nonprofit organization. That took a year, but right away they were able to begin helping musicians. The first step was to gather information so they could steer musicians toward resources—government agencies, private charities and the like—that could assist them.
They also worked to see that their clients got results. “Usually musicians do not do bureaucracies well,” Cloud says. “Often they’ve never had an office job and have no experience with the complexity and inertia sometimes encountered in dealing with a large organization. So, in some cases, Jazz Bridge becomes an advocate for a musician who’s trying to get benefits like welfare or food stamps, reduced-cost heating oil, or an insurance settlement.
Cloud will attend meetings with the musician client, so the people they are dealing with will understand there’s an organization involved that cares about the outcome. One client in Philadelphia had a derelict house leaning on and damaging his own. “It took us a year, but we got the city to knock it down,” Cloud says. “That’s the power of an organization. It really, really works.”
According to Mike Boone, a respected bassist and member of the Jazz Bridge board of directors, the organization is poised to become more powerful as it increases its ability to raise funds. Part of its funding comes from government agencies and private donors, but it also raises money with a concert series organized in five different locations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, along with special fund-raising concerts. And beyond helping musicians, Boone says Jazz Bridge is promoting the music with those concerts and creating new fans. The concerts are kept short so young people can attend with their parents, and they feature a question-and-answer period with the performers so people can learn more about the music.
According to Cloud, Jazz Bridge has become the largest nonprofit presenter of jazz concerts in the region. Currently it produces more than 40 concerts a year. This creates more work for Delaware musicians, along with their counterparts in neighboring states. Bassist Rob Swanson, a Wilmingtonian, is scheduled to play in early April at a Jazz Bridge series in Cheltenham. Swanson became involved with the group two years ago, when a pianist friend died and donations to Jazz Bridge were encouraged. “It’s helped out a lot of great jazz players,” Swanson says, and adds that the extra concerts it’s providing are helpful too.
Cloud would like to see a concert series in the Wilmington area, and is looking for an appropriate venue—a nonprofit performance space that’s not too large, 150 seats or so. In the meantime, Jazz Bridge’s newest concert series, in Kennett Square’s music club The Flash, has been a boon for Delaware jazz musicians. To fill out the lineup, Cloud contacted Boone, a former New Yorker who lived in Philadelphia for a long period but has lived in northern Delaware for about six years now. So far, the Delawarean performers have included the Alfie Moss and Dexter Koonce Project, John DiGiovanni’s Kombu Combo and Boone’s own band.
Vocalist Sharon Sable is a relatively new resident of Wilmington, but she has plenty of experience performing at concerts organized by nonprofit jazz-promotion organizations. Originally from the Atlantic City area, she says some of her best singing opportunities came about because of a group called the Somers Point Jazz Society.
She learned about Jazz Bridge years ago, and became more aware of it after living in Philadelphia and, more recently, Delaware. Today she and her husband, guitarist and pianist E Shawn Qaissaunee, both live and perform in the Wilmington area. “And of course,” she says, “the more I started to play music around the area, the more I found out” about Jazz Bridge.
“I was thrilled when they contacted me,” Sable says, about performing in the Kennett Square series. She and Qaissaunee’s quartet appeared there April 4, the same night Swanson performed in the Cheltenham series. Jazz Bridge may have started to help musicians with serious problems, but for local musicians whose only problem is the common one of staying ahead of the bills, the group is providing a growing audience and another welcome payday.
“It’s a total type of thing,” Boone says. “If musicians are working, maybe they won’t be in crisis.”
