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There is likely no person living or dead with a wider or deeper range of experience in presenting live music to audiences in both Santa Cruz and Monterey than Tim Jackson.
For close to 50 years, Jackson has been the brains and the beating heart behind the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, a beloved Santa Cruz touchstone and cultural hub. For 33 of those years, he also ran the Monterey Jazz Festival, one of the most celebrated and historically resonant music festivals in the world. And what does this uniquely qualified man have to say about the differences between Santa Cruz and Monterey?
“After all those years at the Monterey Jazz Festival,” he said, “what I finally realized about the two communities is that Monterey, when it comes to the arts, is an event-oriented community. If you go down to Monterey on a Tuesday night in February, say, I can assure you there’s nothing happening. Whereas in Santa Cruz, [on that same Tuesday night], there could be a show at The Catalyst, a show at Kuumbwa, a show at Moe’s Alley, at Felton at the Music Hall. What Monterey does is big events — jazz festivals, blues festivals, car shows, golf tournaments. It’s an event town. Santa Cruz doesn’t have a Concours d’Elegance, or an AT&T golf classic or a Monterey Jazz Festival. But what we have [in Santa Cruz] is a day-to-day, living, breathing arts community, where almost any given night you would be able to see at least three or four quality live musical acts somewhere.”
That’s a fundamental, even profound difference between two communities that otherwise have so much in common. And it raises a question: Where did this “living, breathing” arts community that is ridiculously rich in cultural opportunities come from? Of course, there is no George Washington of the Santa Cruz performing arts community, one individual who can be credited with establishing this town’s reputation as a hotbed of great live shows. It evolved from a confluence of many people, businesses and organizations. But, if you were to devise a, say, Mount Rushmore of people who have shaped and sustained the performance scene in Santa Cruz, Tim Jackson is one of the first names in that conversation.
Kuumbwa as incubator
The Kuumbwa Jazz Center is a 200-seat downtown music venue — a nonprofit, in fact — that has for generations given local audiences intimate, up-close experiences with many of the titans of American and world music. Dizzy Gillespie played there once upon a time. So did Dexter Gordon and Chick Corea. The list of jazz greats that Kuumbwa has delivered to Santa Cruz goes on for days — Pat Metheny, Art Blakey, Wynton Marsalis, Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders, on and on. At the same time, as a rental facility, Kuumbwa has hosted hundreds of other non-jazz performances, provided a vital audience-performer connection for Bay Area and Northern California regional artists, as well as Santa Cruz musicians and performers.
And, perhaps most importantly, it has served as an incubator for a kind of audience that has become Santa Cruz’s calling card in the performing arts world outside — an audience that is adventurous, open-minded, curious, progressive, and respectful, even encouraging, of an artist’s impulse to evolve and explore a new voice or approach. That audience cultivation might, in fact, have had a ripple effect outside Kuumbwa, allowing other presenters in other genres the freedom to embrace risk and innovation in programming. Behind that ethic stands Jackson, a Kuumbwa co-founder whose programming values somehow find a harmonious tone between respect for the greats who have shaped jazz and the younger artists poised to create the genre’s new directions.
“Besides the obvious adoring and knowledgeable audiences that Kuumbwa draws, a constant throughout its history has been the consistency in programming,” said Lance Linares, himself a key Johnny Appleseed figure in Santa Cruz for his pioneering role as a radio programmer at KUSP-FM for years. “It’s not just the tried and true ‘war horses’ that one would expect and hope to see on the stage, but it has always been Tim’s keen ear for up-and-coming musicians. And not just the proclaimed ‘young lions,’ but truly musicians who are in the process of developing their voices. To do this one must have the ability to suss out unheralded talent and catch them as their star rises. This has always been a hallmark of Kuumbwa and Tim.”
Joe Hyatt, a longtime Kuumbwa board member, remembered once when the great jazz bassist Christian McBride said to a live audience during a performance, “The thing about this place is that people want to like you. No matter where you want to go, they’ll go with you.”
“A lot of people say things from the stage that are very flattering about Kuumbwa,” said Hyatt. “I mean, these are some of the greatest musicians in the world. And they’re playing this small club in Santa Cruz. And the only reason they are here is a hundred percent a testament to Tim and what he’s accomplished with this club.”
The beginnings of Kuumbwa
The idea of the Kuumbwa Jazz Center was spawned in the mid-1970s. KUSP jazz programmer Rich Wills had the idea to start a nonprofit devoted to bringing live jazz performances to town. Jackson and a third partner, Sheba Burney, quickly signed on to form what was then the Kuumbwa Jazz Society. Jackson, only 20 at the time, had apprenticed alongside the well-regarded concert presenter Pete Douglas in producing jazz shows at Half Moon Bay’s Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society.
The new organization’s first show was scheduled to be a free concert in San Lorenzo Park in the spring of 1975, featuring a number of local jazz bands. Rain, however, forced a change of venues, and history records Kuumbwa’s first show to be at the Laurel School, what is today the London Nelson Community Center. By the end of that first year, Jackson and his colleagues had coaxed legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon to perform at the Capitola Theater in Capitola Village.
It was only a couple of years later, after producing shows on stages all over the county, that the Kuumbwa partners finally achieved a key goal, establishing their own venue. They found an abandoned bakery on Cedar Street which, with the help of a handful of volunteers with carpenter/designer experience, donations of lumber and a few used church pews, they transformed into what is today the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. At about that same time, Wills and Burney had withdrawn and moved on to other endeavors and Jackson assumed sole leadership of the organization.
John Livingston was there, too. The owner/operator of Logos bookstore in Santa Cruz, a devout jazz fan, had been a Kuumbwa supporter from the beginning, and served on the nonprofit’s board in the early days. He and Jackson were also both musicians who had played together from time to time. Livingston said that an early turning point at Kuumbwa, even before they had landed a venue, was a show featuring legendary post-bop jazz drummer Elvin Jones. The show’s box-office take was a big disappointment, remembered Livingston, and spurred talk in the organization that it should shy away from bringing in big-name artists. Jackson resisted such calls. “It wasn’t until Tim got the reins,” said Livingston, “that we went back to the idea of doing national names. And the rest is history.”
In the mid-1970s — the disco era, remember — the now-revered style of postwar 1950s and ’60s jazz as embodied in names such as Monk, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus etc. was out of style. One of Kuumbwa’s keys to its early success was to recognize the timelessness of that kind of music despite the current fashion of the times. Another was a brilliant innovation in scheduling. Hoping to catch name-brand musicians as they traveled back and forth between the two hot spots of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Kuumbwa offered up its stage on a Monday night, usually an off-day for most musicians. As more and more musicians took advantage to add another show in an already full week, Kuumbwa came to essentially own Monday. Now, almost 50 years later, Mondays still remain Kuumbwa’s showcase evening.
Kuumbwa’s long game
On top of bringing in big-name artists to perform on its stages, Kuumbwa developed an educational component to support young area musicians that, decades on, has produced a handful of stellar nationally recognized jazz players and created an impossible-to-measure, generational legacy of community forged in playing jazz for countless musicians, many of whom are now launched in other fields or jobs.
One of those accomplished musicians who grew up with Kuumbwa at the center of his life is saxophonist Donny McCaslin, one of the jazz world’s reigning big talents whose crossover power was confirmed with his contributions to David Bowie’s final album, “Blackstar.” As a kid in the late ’70s, McCaslin was part of the first generation to take advantage of Kuumbwa’s new educational programs. McCaslin said that much of his life as a 14-year-old was lugging his tenor sax onto the 71 Metro bus from his home to Aptos to Kuumbwa, where he would play with the club’s youth combo, then often sticking around to see up close some of the biggest names in jazz perform.
“Having access to the most elite jazz musicians in the world, on a regular basis, as a kid who was just starting to play, barely understanding the music, but could connect on an emotional level the impact of what they were doing — all of that was just invaluable,” he said. McCaslin is one of several jazz professionals who came up through the Kuumbwa education programs, including Remy and Pascal LeBoeuf, Kenny Wollesen, Jesse Scheinin and Ben Flocks.
Deidre Hamilton, a former Kuumbwa board president, first came to Santa Cruz from San Diego in 1978 to take a job. If she had not discovered Kuumbwa, she told me, she probably would have taken a job in Berkeley. One of the first shows she saw at Kuumbwa was the legendary avant-garde saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.
“Pharoah Sanders made me turn the corner,” she said. “I had always been an R&B fan, even though my grandfather was a jazz musician and I’m originally from Louisiana so jazz has always been in my blood. But [Sanders] took it to a spiritual level for me.”
Also, as a young Black woman newly relocated to a city without a large African American population, Hamilton saw Kuumbwa as a kind of cultural lifeline. “There isn’t another African American organization, right now anyway, that has had the impact that Kuumbwa has in bringing an African American art form not just to Santa Cruz, but to the world. And that was very meaningful to me. There aren’t many African Americans here in Santa Cruz, but for a community to support an organization that furthers African American culture like Kuumbwa does, that speaks volumes.”
Those close to Kuumbwa speak to Jackson’s skill not only as a programmer, but as an administrator. “The one thing Tim did so well,” said early board member John Livingston, “is that we never got overextended. There were a bunch of arts organizations in the early ’70s that kept building their infrastructure with new offices and more staff and things like that. But they eventually went broke. But [because of Jackson], we never got ahead of ourselves.”
Perhaps Jackson’s greatest superpower is his talent at relationships. A traditional for-profit jazz club can be, and is often, a kind of benign dictatorship where the owner’s tastes and preferences rule the day. But by its very nature, a nonprofit has to be a collaborative process, much like jazz itself. Whether it’s board members, audiences, staff or musicians, Jackson cultivates productive relationships with others, said those closest to him. Jackson famously considers many of the artists he has repeatedly brought to local stages as friends. But that extends to others as well. “In the organization,” said board member Joe Hyatt, “he cultivates people around him who want to collaborate and see the club succeed.”
“Tim is known for his even keel and calm nature,” said Lance Linares. “He knows what he wants and provides the artist and audience with a quality product, regardless of the sturm und drang of the performing arts. Not that many promoters can provide this. And musicians know and appreciate this kind of attitude.”
50 years and beyond
Tim Jackson officially retired as the executive director at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2023 after having transformed that organization as a showcase for a much wider and worldly view of jazz than that of his traditionalist predecessor at MJF, Jimmy Lyons. Jackson’s simultaneous leadership at Kuumbwa and MJF enhanced and revitalized both organizations. His position as the programmer behind one of the world’s most famous jazz festivals allowed him the influence to bring new names to Santa Cruz audiences at Kuumbwa. And artists who impressed audiences at Kuumbwa also had a pathway to play at Monterey.
However, Jackson is still at the helm of Kuumbwa, which has transitioned toward younger generations of leadership. Just a couple of years ago, Chanel Enriquez took over as the club’s managing director from the retiring Bobbi Todaro, a longtime Jackson confidant and partner. Bennett Jackson, Tim’s son, is the club’s creative director.
But, when I talked to Tim Jackson recently, he had just returned from New York where he was visiting some clubs and checking out new and young jazz performers. The vision at Kuumbwa has always gone beyond straight-ahead and Great-American-songbook styles into everything from Afro-Cuban to avant-garde. That wide vision is as important to him as it has ever been.
“You try to break the mold,” he said. “And you try to create an exciting enough energy so that people will come to hear the show, even if they don’t know who these artists are. [Kuumbwa] is branded by us, and that name has meaning now.”
Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
As for his approach to running the club, even now with a young leadership team in place and his own retirement not too far away, Jackson takes a one-day-at-a-time approach, balancing the many demands of running a club, booking talent, managing a budget and a staff, and chasing grants and donations.
“All I knew was that I had invested time in this,” he said of his early days at Kuumbwa. “And it seemed as useful and valuable as anything else I could be doing. And I loved music and I knew something about music. And no, we didn’t make any money. And we were all volunteers in those days. But there was a nut there. And I wasn’t willing to just walk away from it.”
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