Nonprofit or For-Profit Jazz?

For the last week or so, Spotify has been pushing me to listen to Jazz at Lincoln Center's new record "Freedom, Justice, & Hope." So last night, as I did dishes, I finally did. (If you're not subscribed to any of the music streaming services there, you can watch one piece on YouTube.)

It's excellent, of course. And it follows up on some things I wrote about yesterday. In particular, Jazz at Lincoln Center is a tax-exempt jazz band. And on this record, it's doing some version of what the Tony-award-winning nonprofit theaters did. Some of the music is new. In a reversal of the theaters, though, other music was created by, well, "for-profit jazz musician" may not really be a thing, but were written by individual jazz musicians and then adapted by JLCO. And the through-line of the concert is the idea of marginalized communities in the US claiming the freedom and justice that underlie our society, but that we have deprived so many groups of.

The music is great, and the narration is important. And honestly, a jazz big band is kind of precisely the type of performing organization that you envision as being tax-exempt: it's large (19-ish people) and it's unlikely to be profitable on its own, so the federal subsidy may make the difference between its success and its disappearance.

Or maybe not. Because the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra also performs freedom-related songs. The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra is also 19-ish people. But the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra is not tax-exempt.

So how do we differentiate the two? I don't know. It's not unreasonable to do so--after all, we have non- and for-profit hospitals that do essentially the same things--but it's at least worth thinking about.

Samuel D. Brunson

Photo by Chris Bair on Unsplash