# Features a musical all-star team have joined forces for a concert benefiting … Photo, Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2020/10/12/features-a-musical-all-star-team-have-joined-forces-for-a-concert-benefiting-photo-video/
- Published: 2020-10-12T00:01:45+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**More than a dozen leading jazz artists have joined forces for a concert benefiting
the presidential campaign of Joe Biden.**

Jazz For America, streaming on Oct. 15, will feature guitarist John Scofield; singer
Jazzmeia Horn; saxophonists Joe Lovano, Ravi Coltrane, Melissa Aldana and Miguel
Zenón; and bassists John Patitucci and Christian McBride, among others. Its virtual
cohosts will be Dee Dee Bridgewater, the vocalist and NEA Jazz Master, and Douglas
Emhoff, a lawyer also known as the husband of Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala 
Harris.

The all-star fundraiser is a brainchild of pianist Aaron Goldberg, who has organized
four similar events for Democratic campaigns, starting in 2004. Speaking by phone
this morning, he said that it had been a challenge to recruit musicians in some 
previous years, but not this time: “I feel my colleagues are much more politically
aware engaged precisely because the Trump Administration has been so disastrous 
for every aspect of our democracy.”

Goldberg and his artist cohort — also including his fellow pianist Fred Hersch, 
harpist Brandee Younger, and trumpeter Sean Jones — performed the concert last Sunday
at City Winery Hudson Valley, which recently opened in Montgomery, N.Y. (For what
it’s worth, Montgomery County heavily favored Biden in the Democratic primary). 
Like countless other venues, City Winery has shifted to livestreams during the coronavirus
pandemic. Unlike some, it has abundant outdoor space.

[[Jazzmeia Horn performing at City Winery Hudson Valley with Aaron Goldberg, Christian
McBride, Sean Jones, Miguel Zenon and Jeff “Tain” Watts.

So the event took place without an audience, and with hardly any observers — though
the mere fact of gathering to play music in person, even in masks, was a heartening
experience for the musicians. “It was an amazing opportunity for everybody to come
together,” Goldberg says. “Nobody has really seen each other in so long. So it was
a magical little afternoon.”

Rather than regular working bands, the concert featured a series of special groupings:
Aldana and McBride, for instance, playing a duet version of the songbook standard“
You’re My Everything,” and Lovano enlisting Zenón, Patitucci and drummer Eric Harland
for a saunter through his own “Blackwell’s Message.”

The concert’s production team included Seth Abramson from The Jazz Standard; Cat
Henry, former Vice President of Concerts & Touring with Jazz at Lincoln Center; 
and Danny Melnick, CEO of Absolutely Live Entertainment, who characterizes the concert
in terms of communion. “The energy and the positivity that was there among the musicians
reinforces the community that we have – this diverse community of people who all
came together to play,” he says.

That spirit of convocation was central to the event, Goldberg explains, and in some
ways transcended a partisan objective. “Even though there’s a political need for
this,” he says, “I just wanted it to be musically compelling, and a beautiful experience
with these musicians — because jazz is a hyper-social music, and its best examples
are when you get people together onstage that love each other.”

At the same time, each prior concert fundraiser has relied on the contributions 
of audience members in a room — a constituency that could expand greatly in a virtual
arena, without the usual limitations of geography or a venue capacity.

“I was so focused on bringing everybody together that I wasn’t really thinking about
how much money this could raise,” Goldberg says. “But it quickly dawned on all of
us, especially when I started talking to the campaign, that there was the potential
to raise a lot more money, and have many more people experience this, by having 
it online.”

**Brandee Younger with Aaron Goldberg, Ravi Coltrane and Rashaan Carter at City 
Winery Hudson Valley.**

![Brandee Younger with Aaron Goldberg, Ravi Coltrane and Rashaan Carter at City 
Winery Hudson Valley.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wbgo.org/sites/wbgo/files/styles/medium/
public/202010/brandee_crop.png?w=640&ssl=1)

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