- March 24, 2025
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With so many arts organizations competing for stages, it takes flexibility and imagination to plan a season schedule or put on a festival in Sarasota. Throw in a pandemic or hurricane-related closures and the job gets even more challenging. But local arts organizations have gotten creative in recent years by moving events to theater balconies, churches and parks.
In 2023, the Sarasota Jazz Festival turned to Nathan Benderson Park and held outdoor concerts and late-night jam sessions. Some jazz fans digged the al fresco feel of shows; others not so much.
For its 45th anniversary edition running from March 17-22, the Sarasota Jazz Festival is back at the Municipal Auditorium, where it returned last year. Fortunately, the FEMA team has vacated the venue, which it occupied for two months in late 2024 for disaster recovery operations.
The festival has decided to skip outdoor performances entirely this year, according to Carlos Pagán, a board member of Jazz Club of Sarasota, which organizes the jazz festival each year. Pagán has been working closely with the club’s president, Nik Walker, and is acting as ombudsman for the festival.
A perusal of the history of the Sarasota Jazz Club, written by Nancy Roucher for its 40th anniversary, reveals that the Sarasota Jazz Festival is no stranger to improvisation when it comes to venues.
In 1999, when the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall was closed for renovation, the festival moved its concerts to the Sarasota Opera House and to a circus tent. That year’s fest built on circus theme by having headliner Dick Hyman, a jazz pianist and composer, play a calliope that was loaned by the Ringling Museum’s circus collection.
In advertising its dates for this year’s Jazz Festival, the jazz club includes its March 17 Monday Night at the Cabaret program, at Florida Studio Theatre’s Court Cabaret, in the festival lineup.
Monday Night at the Cabaret is part of the weekly schedule organized by Jazz Club of Sarasota during a longer and longer season. The club’s weekly schedule also includes Jazz @ 2 on Friday afternoons at Unitarian Universalists of Sarasota and the monthly Thursday Night Jazz outdoor concerts at Sarasota Art Museum’s Marcy and Michael Klein Plaza.
These weekly events showcase a plethora of local jazz musicians and sometimes feature performers from Tampa.
Jazz lovers certainly aren’t starved for entertainment during season, thanks to the efforts of the Jazz Club of Sarasota, which has about 1,500 members, says Pagán.
But the difference between a regular week of jazz during season and the dates of the Sarasota Jazz Festival is the headliners come from out of town and represent some of the biggest names in the business.
It’s not only the performers who visit Sarasota for the jazz festival; the event has become a draw for tourists from all over the country. They come to enjoy all kinds of jazz, from straight-ahead jazz to swing, bebop, blues, Latin and smooth jazz.
Making the trip even more appealing to some is the parallel programming of Baltimore Orioles spring training at Ed Smith Stadium. Like other arts groups that draw tourists to the area, the Sarasota Jazz Festival receives support from Sarasota County’s Tourist Development Tax.
The crowds coming to the Municipal Auditorium during March for the Sarasota Jazz Festival are a far cry from the intimate gatherings in the early days of the Jazz Club of Sarasota, when retirees Hal and Evelyn Davis welcomed friends and fans to their living room to listen to jazz.
A retired PR and marketing executive who had managed big band leader Benny Goodman’s tours around the globe, Hal Davis is given credit for founding the Jazz Club of Sarasota after noticing a gap in cultural options that included orchestra, opera and theater but not jazz.
The group eventually outgrew the Davis living room and moved to a condo complex’s meeting room and then a bank’s community room before producing its first concert in a public venue. That took place in 1980, when the Jazz Club of Sarasota hosted guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli and his then-16-year-old son, John, for a concert at Holley Hall.
After formalizing its existence and naming Hal Davis as its first president, the club later opened an office at the Sarasota Opera. This was before technology facilitated the sale of tickets and the solicitation of donations online.
Over the years, the club’s board has realized that it’s not enough to be a focus for jazz aficionados, who are often retirees; it must spread the gospel of jazz among younger generations as well.
Last year’s concert combo of jazz prodigy and saxophonist Grace Kelly and trombonist Wycliffe Gordon brought down the house and attracted some younger faces to the Municipal Auditorium, no doubt helped by educational outreach by Kelly at Booker High School’s Visual and Performing Arts program.
Pagán sees promoting jazz appreciation among the younger members of the Sarasota community as one of the main missions of the Jazz Club of Sarasota.
“Jazz is America’s original art form, but it is no longer the most popular American music. We are in the business of promoting the evolving nature of jazz and bringing younger people back to jazz,” he said during a telephone interview.
During its 45-year history, the Jazz Club of Sarasota has awarded $500,000 worth of scholarships to promising young musicians, he notes.
Under its past president, Ed Linehan, the Jazz Club of Sarasota increased the ranks of its membership from a low of about 500 members in 2018 to about 1,500 now. The high point was about 3,000 members in the 1990s.
When it comes to star power, this year’s Sarasota Jazz Festival promises not to disappoint. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a few days in sunny Sarasota during March? Not many artists would turn down that invitation.
The 2025 Sarasota Jazz Festival is programmed, as it has been in recent years, by Terell Stafford, a professional trumpet player, and director of Jazz Studies at the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Stafford also programs and performs at the long-running Village Vanguard, a bastion of jazz in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
Stafford will join the Emmet Cohen Trio during the opening night concert on Thursday, March 20, which will also feature Gabrielle Cavassa, who may be the only female headliner on this year’s schedule. (It’s possible some of the featured bands are bringing women musicians.)
Although the Jazz Club of Sarasota is excited about all the performers at the 2025 jazz festival, Pagán points to the concert by Marcus Miller as a “big finish.” Miller, who played the 2023 edition of the jazz fest, is back this year by popular demand, Pagán says.
“Marcus is a bassist, but he’s a great songwriter, record producer and band leader in his own right,” he says.
Earlier in his career, Miller was a producer for the late R&B crossover singer Luther Vandross. Miller’s also worked with Wayne Shorter and David Sanborn. “He’s a funky jazz player and one of those band leaders that seeks out promising talent,” Pagán says.
Pagán is also jazzed about the Friday mainstage concert featuring Tony Monaco, a virtuoso on the Hammond B-3 Organ who has become an internet star through his instructional videos. “He’s a real wild man on the keyboards,” he says. Bring it on!
