Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY EP.181 | feat. Larry Luttinger from CNY Jazz Central

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

CNY Jazz Central’s Larry Luttinger on Arts Incubation, Education, and Jazz in the City Host Noah Chrysler interviews Larry Luttinger, founder and executive director of CNY Jazz Central in Syracuse, about Jazz Central’s mobile performing-arts mission, its downtown mini-theater used as a fully equipped arts incubator (instruments, Steinway, lighting, audio/video recording) for under $200 with ticketing, marketing, and front-of-house support, and how the pandemic reduced local user groups. Luttinger outlines CNY Jazz’s education pipeline, including the Summer Jazz Workshop at Le Moyne College, in-school cultural history shows aligned to NYS standards, a paid youth orchestra partnership with the American Federation of Musicians trust fund, and the One Culture Curriculum for urban children and new Americans. He recounts CNY Jazz’s 1996 founding, the 2001 storefront grant that led to opening in 2004, and lessons learned about not over-programming and building fundraising. They preview the free Jazz in the City public health concert series (starting June 4 at Jubilee Park with Wayne Tucker & The Bad Muthas) and discuss keeping arts talent in Central New York. 00:00 Early Gig Money Talk 00:15 Meet Larry Luttinger 00:34 What Is Jazz Central 01:53 Affordable Venue Rental 03:29 Programs Beyond The Theater 04:57 Education Pipeline Breakdown 07:14 Equity And Mobile Arts 10:29 Origins And Mission Of CNY Jazz 17:06 Festivals And Jazz In The City 18:05 Advice To His Younger Self 19:15 Touring Rock Musician Days 21:08 Lifelong Drummer Roots 21:37 Teen Drummer Hustle 23:21 Syracuse Roots Story 23:55 Why Talent Leaves Town 25:05 Jazz in the City Homecoming 27:53 Building a Local Arts Incubator 29:49 Bedroom Community Explained 32:30 How to Support CNY Jazz 33:39 Summer Concerts Lineup 36:25 Swing Dancing Side Quest 37:29 Wrap Up and Sponsor Plug

This episode sponsored by Codecademy. Your job is changing, fast, new tools, new expectations, and real pressure to keep up. This isn't a someday problem. It's happening right now. That's where Codecademy comes in. Instead of just watching or reading, you learn by doing. From your very first lesson, you're writing real code directly in your browser. No setup, no guesswork. Whether it's AI tools, prompt engineering, data analysis, or cybersecurity,

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until it didn't happen anymore, yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Good News York. My name is Noah Chrysler. Today, I am sitting with Larry. Larry, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Go ahead and introduce yourself. My name is Larry Luttinger. I am the founder and executive director of CNY Jazz Central here in Syracuse. Fantastic. For those of us who might not know what Jazz Central is, can you explain what it is? Sure, sure.

Consider us a performing arts organization that programs in public and in schools for our extended region, like a symphony or an opera, because we're mobile. We do business out of a mini-theater downtown called Jazz Central, but we're not a theatrical organization. We operate that theater space in the front of our building as an arts incubator for any small organization or individual or band that would like to do a public performance. And we are latch-key and fully equipped. In other words, we have musical instruments, including a Steinway. We have a wonderful new LED lighting grid. We have wonderful audio. We have recording ability, both video and audio recording ability. And we are here to host any small organization or individual that wants to put

on a show. That is so wonderful. And I'm so glad to learn about this because I genuinely didn't know that that was a thing in this city. So that is so wonderful to have. A lot of people, whenever I'm there to do a curtain speech, I say, raise your hand. If it's the first time you've ever been in here and hands still go up. Yeah. And we've been around since like 2004. We opened our doors. Yeah. So I also run Syracuse Improv, and you know, I'm always looking for venues and stuff. And we discussed, you know, pricing and things. Do you mind? Like, I don't know. Is that something you're cool with talking about publicly? Because I was shocked at how affordable it is. Well, so not at all. I feel like Billy Fusillo here. You remember Billy Fusillo? All right. We're too old for him already. I know. I love Billy. It's huge, New York. It's less than $200 to use. To use our facility. We provide wraparound tickets. sales-oriented marketing. And we provide front-of-house, including a bartender.

And you bring your resources to the show as well. And you basically own our theater for the time that you're there. If you want to do an audio-visual production. We have the equipment. You hire your own company or individuals or do it in-house, and you create your own production. I mean, that's absolutely, as a person who puts on improv shows at this city all the time, That is the coolest offer in the world, right? Well, thank you.

We think we've got a nice little niche in the market. Although, believe it or not, many of the groups that used us before the pandemic just never survived the pandemic. Things people decided to do other things and go other places. And so we're actually still filling our schedule with theater groups, one-off recording release parties, special events, occasionally a meeting. will take place there. The Syracuse Urbanism Club used us for their last mobile meeting. So it's just there for the community to take advantage of. But we're not a theater organization like the Red House or Syracuse Stage. Most of what we do is outside our doors.

We do a lot in the schools. We have a big array of education programs that we call our education pipeline that focuses on urban students but is open to all. and we do cabarets, we do a concert series, we do three or four dining series, indoors and outdoors and various venues around the county, including the Sherwood Inn, Bersimmons restaurant out at Timber Banks, the cavalier room of the Marriott downtown, the former hotel Syracuse, and other places. Oh, the new coffee house on East Water Street called Pausa.

and we use those as an intake mechanism to make people aware of us and also to give them discounts off food and drink in those places if they become base-level donors to our not-for-profit at a whopping $50 a year. Oh, wonderful. Oh, that's great. So if you donate $50 a year, you become a member and then you get discounts at these coffee shops.

You could donate more. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. As a matter of fact, if anyone out there has, has recently come into a seven or eight figure windfall. Call me, I'm easy to find. I want to buy you lunch. I love it. That's fantastic.

Wonderful. Cool. I want to know more about the education program that you're talking about. Can you tell me about that? We call it our education pipeline. Now you're challenging me to remember all five areas of our educational pipeline. And we follow students from intake right through graduation. Should they catch the bug?

Should they decide to pursue the arts? at the college level with the goal of becoming a professional in any walk of the arts, we're there to help them get into a good program. We have great connections to all of the music programs of the better schools in the Northeast and other places in the country as well. We call it the Summer Jazz Workshop. We used to be at the State Fair. Now it's at La Moyne College.

It is an intensive four-day, learn-to-improvise a four-day program with a finale concert, with a national guest artist who mentors the students and solos with them and gives them positive feedback. We have a lot of return graduates. Most of the students who auditioned into all county jazz ensembles are graduates of our program. And it's a developmental program, not an elite program at all. We want to develop a proficiency and awareness of the arts

and skills in the arts and young people. So that's one of the programs. We also have a very active in-school arts and education service that puts cultural history shows that are narrated and support New York State Learning Standards into schools in our city and into suburban and rural districts all over New York, not just Onondaga County. Interesting. That is very much a thing. We also have a youth orchestra that is a unique partnership with labor, local and national. It's a paying summer job for youth. They play regional concerts around the extended region.

And the American Federation of Musicians' MPTF Trust Fund provides matching grants, and then we raise money from corporations to match those grants to make the kids' payrolls. They become members of the AFM, and we consider this entire program to be a pre-professional kind of apprentice program in the arts. We also, just before the pandemic and now coming out of the pandemic, are continuing to slowly build a system of creativity courses for urban children and new Americans called the One Culture Curriculum that uses partner agencies to team up with and teach their client children about the arts in many courses, at the end of which they come to Jazz Central and they do a little bit of a show.

or a demonstration. Oh, how cool. And that's an attempt to provide equity for endangered urban youth, equity in the arts. I'm a former music department chair, and toward the very end became the last transitional executive director of a great settlement school for the arts we used to have on Montgomery Street, called the Metropolitan School for the Arts. And after that failure, as a long story that I won't go into, as a real estate development effort.

The building was no longer viable, and so some of the programs were folded into the YMCA at the time. This was almost 25 years ago. I became convinced that in order to reach urban youth and provide them with equitable programs in arts training, you had to create small satellite mobile programs that actually went to them and visited them. Instead of trying to maintain a five-story big box building that's incredibly expensive to maintain,

Syracuse isn't quite there yet in terms of having that political will. So we are continuing to grow that. We've done pilot programs at Hillside. We started at the Northside Learning Center, which was the most challenging environment. And now we're at Syracuse Community Connections, which Central New Yorkers will know as the Southwest Community Center. and we're in the middle of one of the many courses there right now. So was that five? I'm down the rabbit hole here.

What an incredible story. I mean, that's awesome. So, I mean, so you were running this music organization on Montgomery Street, and basically you tried to do this real estate expansion, didn't necessarily go the way people had kind of planned, and instead throughout the course of, I don't know, 25 years or so, This episode sponsored by Codecademy.

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or cybersecurity, Codecademy shows you exactly what to learn and gives you a clear step-by-step path to get there. So you're not just keeping up with tech, you're actually getting ahead. With structured career paths and real-world projects, you'll build skills you can use immediately on the job. Join millions of people already leveling up with Codecademy. Start your free trial today at codacademy.com. Pivoted to doing these remote programs. Exactly. That's wonderful. My motivation comes from being in the middle of it and witnessing how powerful it was for kids and coming out of that failure. I was just an employee.

I was not one of the architects of the multi-building renovation effort along that street. That was supposed to be called the Avenue of the Arts. I kept that passion. And I also brought previous experience of running BOSES arts programs to CNY Jazz, because I've been in the arts for over 40 years here in central New York, and I did amass a lot of arts and education-centric skills and program building experience before I founded CNY Jazz. But actually, CNY Jazz was founded as a not-for-profit big band, the CNY Jazz Orchestra.

And our first model was to have a professional jazz orchestra, like we have a professional symphony orchestra here in central New York. Full disclosure, I'm also a member of the Cirqueuse Orchestra and was a member of the old SSO and then Symphoria. So it's what I grew up with and what I was trained to work in and around and through as an infrastructure, and it was all I knew. So I built my organization to emulate those and transferred my passion into the programming. And also, one of the important things about not-for-profits is that they are premised on the fact of meeting community need.

And so when you see community need, you meet it. And I'm guilty of saying, yes, too many times. We have a lot of different programs. Go to CNYJazz.org, and you'll see what I mean. Our bywords are perform, present, and educate. So we do an awful lot of all of those things. Wonderful. Wonderful.

You talked about your initial motivation and your passion for helping children, or, I mean, youth, I guess, of all ages, I would imagine, you know, transform as they do the arts and things. Can you speak more to that? Like, can you give me either, I don't know, could you maybe focus in on like a story, a single story potentially of like, hey, you know, this program, I don't know. Do you have any stories like that that you could share with me?

Well, I could tell you that I'm the proudest. I burst my buttons when, like any teacher does, someone 10 or 20 years later out of a clear blue sky that you have taught calls you or emails you just to say that you made an impression on them and you affected their life. that's that's what keeps me going and moments like that make me say this is why I do this

wonderful other things happen that have me saying to myself why the heck did I try to do this but those are the rewards gosh I'd like to spiel off some of our

success stories we've turned out two Brubeck fellows by the way actually three Burebeck Fellows. The Brubbeck Fellowship is the premier jazz training program in the country. You go out to the University of the Pacific and work for a month and it's absolutely free. You are chosen for this program. So we've turned out three of those young people. And I'm proud to say that we have a great relationship with college jazz studies professors around the country because per capita in central New York, we're turning out more talent,

more precocious talent and more motivated young people than markets many times bigger than us. I get that validation when I bring in a teaching artist educator from New York, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Chicago, and they tell me that there's nothing like that going on in their area, their school district, their college, their metropolitan area. I mean, that's incredible, right? Like these people coming in from these giant cities, right, coming to Syracuse and looking at your program and saying, wow, this is not in my city. I mean, that's the best compliment in the world. It is. It is.

I call that punching above your weight as a city. Yeah. Wonderful. And I'm proud to be able to, you know, the common phrases, make Central New York a better place to work, live, and raise a family. I'm serious about that. and it takes culture. We are a culture and we're an economy. What good is an economy without a culture and vice versa, of course.

And if you can permeate the vibe of your entire community so that it has a reputation of having that type of cosmopolitan type of activity available to everyone, that's a real plus for any city. Absolutely. Larry, it's so good to meet you because I don't know. I've been running Syracuse Improv and I've been trying to build it intentionally, right? Knowing that I don't know everything that I need to know right now, you know? I'm just one or two rungs up the ladder than you. Exactly, which is so wonderful, though, because it's great to meet people who are further along so that I can learn as much as possible from them. So I guess to someone, I guess if you could talk to yourself when you just started, you said you've been there since 2001 or 2004, you said?

CNY Jazz was founded in 1996 as a program of our arts council back then. And then there was a planned spinoff. After a couple of years, we became our own not-for-profit and worked out of my home for a while until a visionary New York State Senator John D. Francisco was, I was rehearsing him for his public debut on saxophone. Oh, cool. For a big fundraiser in the Landmark Theater at the time. had him out to my home and we we rehearsed a little bit. And he looked around and he said, Larry, we've got to get you out of your basement.

So six months later, we were doing a major concert series with our big band in the Civic Center, Carl Seed Theater at the time. He came backstage and said, hey, I have a grand opportunity for you. It restricted to rescuing a vacant storefront in a central business district. and we'd like you to look around for property to turn into a center for jazz performance and education. That's how it all started. Wonderful. That was in 2001.

We looked at a lot of buildings and the deals fell through. And we were looking at this little paint and decoration store over on East Washington going, that's our fallback. Well, we fell into that one. Oh, yeah? And then it took a long time for us to raise the money to renovate it. We own the building. And so from 2001 to 2004, we really became the organization that we are now in terms of big outdoor programming in the schools and other series, concert series, cabaret series in Syracuse and Central New York. And we've just been building infrastructure ever since, including our biggest summer program, which we now focus on much more.

because for 20 years we also did a jazz and wine festival in Clinton Square called the northeast jazz and wine festival. I think I've heard about that one. Yes, that started in 2001. The Syracuse Jazz Festival had moved away from Syracuse, and there was a clamor in the public sector, the mayor's office, and a banker and downtown businesses came to us and said, fill this void. Cool. And so we didn't jump.

We hired a consultant who did a listening tour, found out that. this was real support, and we managed that for 25 years. We discontinued it last year for a number of reasons. And we have thrown all of that effort into our mobile public health concert series called Jazz in the City, which we also started up way back then in 2001. So it's been a journey. Yeah. So my question to you is if you could talk to yourself in 2001 and give you maybe like a page you should put some notes on it. Hey, Larry from 2001, do these things or lessons that you've learned since then. I don't know. What would you tell yourself? Don't overprogram. Learn how to, learn how to say no. Okay. Build a multifunctional staff earlier. And despite how much satisfaction you get out of

programming, limit that and create more of a fundraising infrastructure by developing a major gift campaign. It's difficult for an arts organization like us to do that a little tougher because we're not a year-round ticket-selling operation like a theater or a symphony or an opera or a museum or a big box like that. But that is the challenge and we're in the middle of that right now with a consulting firm and because eventually I have to get off the bus. Right. Yeah. I don't want to. But, you know, my tick. This episode sponsored by Codecademy.

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Whether it's AI tools, prompt engineering, data analysis, or cybersecurity, CodeCatomy shows you exactly what to learn and gives you a clear step-by-step path to get there. So you're not just keeping up with tech, you're actually getting ahead. With structured career paths and real-world projects, you'll build skills you can use immediately on the job. Join millions of people already leveling up with CodeCademy. Start your free trial today at codecademy.com. It's going to get validated before you. you know it. So it's been, I've been in the arts over 40 years. And that came after a youthful

career in the arts as a touring rock musician looking for a contract, which almost happened at Decker Records way back in the early 70s. I was in a group that started as a rock group, original rock and roll slash R&B group that started as a backup group to oldies reviews when they first to tour the country. So I've logged many, many, many thousands of miles in a bus and truck doing multi-group reviews behind people like Chuck Berry, Del Shannon, Gary U.S. Bonds, the Churrells, the coasters, the drifters, the for everybody's. And it was an awakening to the music business. This is back in early 1970s. And I had a compatriot that came out to the band

when it got serious about writing its own material, which was kind of like rockabilly with horns 10 years before it became a thing. His name was Todd Hoban. He's become an established figure here in the arts after seven full-length albums and a lot more touring than I did. And we have a great relationship to this day. Cool. So it's a career in the arts, and you look back and you go,

wow you know yeah it's it's not the destination it's the journey and you have to go where it takes you I could never have predicted I'd be doing what I'm doing today even 20 25 years ago yeah much less when I started out in the arts yeah but I mean it seems like you've accomplished so much and it seems like you're happy you seem very passionate and like you love what you're doing am I wrong about that or I wouldn't do anything else I can't imagine doing anything else yeah I'm a percussionist and a drummer I've had sticks in my hand. My hand since I was

seven years old. I have very few memories of not playing constantly. I started by playing in groups with adults a generation before me, which is an amazing advantage. It really is. Because you're playing with your peers too,

getting to know the music of the day. And back then it was the British invasion, right? But you also gain from the experience and the repertoire that you are forced to learn when you work with artists who are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years older than you are. I was the kid drum wonder with a lot of bands full of middle-aged guys. Cool.

My first, I quit my paper route to join a country Western band called Sunny Sims and the Sodbusters. And I had to join the Union. I was working the lounge at the old Three Rivers Inn showroom, national showroom up in downtown Phoenix, New York, at 15. Cool. Get a load of this from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. to 3 a.m. Wow. We were at 3 o'clock county back then.

Wow. So, until 3 o'clock in the morning. Wow. And at 15 years old. At 15. I quit my paper route, boy. Oh, yeah? That's funny.

In a flash. Were you getting paid for my first drum set? Cool. I think scale was like $34 or something like that. I mean, back then, though, that's a good money, right? That's great. Well, if you're working four or five nights a week. Yeah, that's incredible.

Yeah. That's wonderful. Cool. At 15, you're doing four or five nights a week from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. It happened until it didn't happen anymore, yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing.

How long was that period for? Oh, I was in that band for a couple of years. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. That's very cool. Was that local or was that did you grow up here? They were from Central New York. The singer was from Canada, Sonny Sims. Cool. And he relocated and that was the end of that. Are you originally from Syracuse? Yes, uh-huh. Cool. Born on the north side, moved out to Liverpool to go through that school system. How wonderful. And, yeah, born and raised in Central New York. I think it's great that it's great to meet people like you because one thing I've noticed is that people grow up here, you know, they go through some of the school

systems here, they go through some of the arts programs here, right? But usually they move away, right? And I did the same thing. I moved away, you know? And but I came back, and I started to, like, think about that more, right? And I think that it's kind of a tragic thing, I think, in Syracus. Yeah, and, you know, you hit on another thing. I should have brought up before when you asked me about a retrospective look, we have trained several thousand young people and a good number of them, you know, the tip of the pyramid, have gone on to professional careers. But when we do that, the best and the brightest, move away and they don't come back because we're a small market and you can't make a living in this basically a niche industry,

the arts at scale in central New York. have to go to New York City. You have to go to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, other big markets to make a living. The density, the work just isn't there. Yeah. And so that's my biggest regret in terms of not adding to the vibrancy of the core of working artists in Central New York. But I understand it. If the economy says you can't do it, you cannot do it. On the other hand, these professionals who are working, in big markets are making a huge impression. As a matter of fact, I do want to talk about our urban outreach concert series.

We're bringing back one of our newest and most famous jazz legacies to start this series, which starts next Thursday, June 4th, at the new festival stage in Jubilee Park, which is just southwest of downtown off Onondaga a half, a few blocks west of the Mariana and the Steam School. His name is Wayne Tucker. He and his brother Miles were in our big band, our youth big band, for many years, and both of them went on to big things. Wayne is a trumpet player, and he's a fine singer as well. He's a keyboardist. He's a violinist as well. He really has done the work to turn himself into the talented practitioner that he is today. He's also done voiceovers for commercials. He's done modeling. He's really used his portfolio of personal skills to make a great career for himself.

He has a wonderful band called The Bad Mothers. So the Bad Mothers, Wayne Tucker and the Bad Mothers are going to be on stage from 7 to 9 next Thursday to do our first public health outreach program in the Jazz and the City series. And it's a homecoming. It really, really tickles me to be able to make contact with former students and bring them back for homecoming to to show our success stories off to the rest of the community. And his band, his hard, man, they do not take prisoners. Cool.

You're going to really enjoy this group. All jazz in the city concerts are absolutely free of charge. No alcohol is served. And I had a grin when I read the papers the other day, and they were talking about this blue dot fever. Have you ever heard of that expression? No. Well, the economy is tightening up, and amphitheaters around the country, including ours,

are experiencing shows that aren't selling tickets and they're canceling. Not all of them, but it's a trend. And, of course, the music industry is terribly concerned about that. So I can now say that jazz in the city is here to combat blue dot fever. Bring down your temperature. I love it, yeah. Come on to a free concert with national talent. and just bring a couple lawn chairs to cooler.

Some people bring tables and chairs and tents and make it a picnic because they're all in the street or in a big parking lot or in a city park. And all of these wonderful concerts are surrounded by a robust healthcare village of all kinds of health providers. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on. To your one point, to your one point about how talent moves away. right, especially the most talented move away to these other big markets.

I've noticed the same thing. And in one of my goals with the organization that I'm building Syracuse Improv, right, maybe this is a pipe dream that's not going to happen, and I completely recognize that, right? But I think the cool thing that I've learned during my career, I've seen the world change a lot. You know, I was born, you know, at a time where, you know, the Internet changed everything, right? And I really believe that the stage of the stage. here are very important, right? Those rooms are very important.

But I really believe that the real stage is the world stage, right? And that's why I really love this business and this company and the things that we can do here because we can create things here that could be potentially seen by people around the world. And so I think my outlook on that is like, especially with Syracuse Improv and comedy and things like that, right?

It's like, I really want to create an environment and an incubator, it's like we can do our act, we can get really good, we can make sure it's incredible on the stages around this city, but then we can also work on projects that can be pictured on the world stage, right? And so in moving back to Syracuse, that was something that was very top of mind for me. And I don't know. And so my hope is that, you know, these big talents will stay, right? Instead of, you know, hey, oh, that guy just got on SNL, that guy just got on second city. I mean, if you get on us, I'll go on SNL.

but like you know it's like could we create an environment where these people not only like want to stay but are excited to stay right and they're not compromising to stay and so that's something in the back of my mind that I'm trying to do but I don't know sorry

different tangent but no no that's that's really the long term well right yeah any healthy community has a healthy cohort of visual and performing artists that that can ply their trade can make a living that have jobs jobs that become a part of the fabric of the community.

Otherwise, we all know what a bedroom community is, right? Syracuse is just far away enough from New York City to not be an arts bedroom community. What is it? What is a bedroom community? A bedroom community is one in which out of town providers provide essential services. Got it. and many times own businesses. And it's especially prevalent in terms of the arts.

Case in point, a very dear friend of mine, relocated to Allentown, Pennsylvania, for family concerns at the time, wonderful bassist and singer, and was looking for work on the freelance market. And I asked him how it was going. Six months after he moved there, he said there's absolutely no work in Allentown, Pennsylvania,

for a musician, nearly virtually no work. Why is that? Everyone commutes from New York City in northern New Jersey to fill the slots in theater pits in the nightclubs, in the parks, in the concert halls, etc.

You're a cultural bedroom community. Syracuse is kind of one in theatrical sense because of our long history as a nearby stop on the Schubert show tour. There's nothing wrong with the conference. content, and that certainly makes a community, a robust community. But when out of town productions come through and studies have proven this, most of the money that changes hands leaves Syracuse with the production when the circus leaves town.

And homegrown arts, when people go home after the show, most of the money that change hands stays and feeds the community as an economic multiplier. Yeah. And it's a big difference for simply owning yourself instead of having people who own other things out of town come through, present, and leave. Yeah. I mean, that's a fantastic way to, I mean, that makes complete sense. And I've never, I don't think I've heard that articulated in that way before.

So it's, it's wonderful to meet you. Seriously. It's a really cool person. That's one thing that doing, reading research studies so you can write grants will do for you. Absolutely. It's an education boy. in economics and in social concerns. Absolutely.

Well, cool. How can people get involved and where can they go? What can they see? What should they sign up for? What should they know that's coming up? You can be involved by coming to one of our programs. You can be evolved by wanting to become a volunteer. You can be involved, again, by having lunch with me after your seven or eight figure

windfall comes in. and I'd love to have a conversation with anybody that wants to collaborate in any way. Or be present, let's say, as a vendor at one of our programs, or would like to donate a scholarship to our summer jazz workshop or in Dow a chair in our youth orchestra, for example. There are lots of ways to support CMI Jazz and also to become involved in our program in some way. Beautiful. What's that website one more time where people can learn? Well, our main website is cNYjazz.org.

Easy to find. And our roving public health urban concert series, Jazz in the City, here it is, ladies and gentlemen. That has its own website, CNYJazz in the city.org. And let's see if I can spiel all of our concerts. June 4th, Wayne Tucker and the Bad Mothers and Jubilee, June 4th. Yep. June 18th, Parkside Commons, 2100 East Fayette Street at the Boys and Girls Club. Mike Houston's new JSF band is going to be doing their Syracuse debut at that concert. Then two concerts in July. July 9th, we go to our international district,

where over 30 languages are spoken and presenting an international double bill, Alex Bouniaw, Swiss keyboardist, and he's becoming a good friend, Jeff Kock. marvelous saxophones. We brought him back here several times. We'll be playing to our International District in Schiller Park. Big new success story, July 3rd. We are not inaugurating but helping to shout out the turnaround at the Valley Plaza Shopping Center, which is soon to get a new grocery store and pharmacy. With the black lights, we're no longer at Dunkin Bright Furniture for that traditional concert. We're bringing the black lights to Valley Plaza.

And then two concerts in August. August 6th, we're bringing in a saxophone triple bill called the SACS summit to the parking lot behind the new Syracuse Community Health. Perfect for a community health series, right? And then we finish up shouting out a brand new mall at a kind of a success story intersection west of downtown by the gear factory and the new Syracuse Police Department headquarters. It's called Getta Street Plaza. and we're serving the interests of the Latino cultural community by bringing a 14-piece salsa band here called Alex Torres Isu Orchestra for a big dance party in that parking lot. In front of a new Buena Vista Senior Social Center that Common Council President Rita Paniaga is dwell, Rita Paniagua is developing in that strip mall.

Next to Fowler High School, near Fowler High School. Wow. So there's a lot more, in terms of moving parts to that, a huge health care village, lots of great ethnic food at all of these things. Arts and crafts, everything that you want. We call them concert fairs. They're not just a band on a stage, not just a block party. Yeah, that's awesome.

So CNYJazzandtheCity.org, and we're trying to move the needle. The arts, if I can close with anything, I want to close by saying that the arts are a powerful vehicle for social and economic change, and there's still a largely untapped resource. in every city of the country. So I'm doing my part to try to move the needle. No, and I can tell. I mean, that's incredible. What a fantastic lineup of programming.

I mean, that's wonderful. Thank you. This is a rainbow. Do you know the Syracuse swing dancing club? Oh, yeah. Of course. We've done shows for them. Wonderful, cool.

Yeah. Yeah, I just, I don't know, they're great. Mariah and Mango, I believe, their names are. Wonderful. We've got to get them on the show at some point, but... That would be great for you to do a dance, but you have the room here to do some dance. I went to two of their events, and, like, their classes were great, and they're super cool.

We collaborated with them years ago to bring the guy who invented swing dancing. Really? Frankie Manning at the... Oh, cool. At the... Not the Cotton Club. That was a segregated room.

The Savoy Ballroom in New York. He was in his 90s. Really? I believe it. At the time. Cool. And created a lot of modern American dance that became America's way of dancing during the swing era.

Yeah. I saw swing kids. Swing kids. It was great. You ever watch Swing Kids? Daddy, you know what Swing Kids is? No, I don't know. Swing Kids is a great movie.

Swing out. Okay, never mind. Cool. Thank you very, very much for the conversation. Absolutely. Cool. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for watching. My name is Noah Chrysler.

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