A Conversation With Lonnie Davis on the Future of Jazz in Charlotte – Charlotte Magazine

Two hours before showtime at the Jazz Room, the Emmet Cohen Trio are running through a relaxed soundcheck. On the Steinway piano, Cohen plays a tune from West Side Story before improvising some riffs; his rhythm section gamely follows along. Halfway through, drummer Joe Farnsworth stops playing so he can put on his necktie.

Meanwhile, Lonnie Davis—the president and CEO of JazzArts, which presents a monthly Jazz Room concert at the Stage Door Theater—checks in with everybody else in the venue. She strides around the room with a warm smile and consults with the lighting director, the soundman, and the teenage members of the youth ensemble (sponsored by a JazzArts educational program) who will be the opening act tonight. Davis hasn’t put on her swanky evening wear yet, but even in a tank top and glittery flip-flops, she’s clearly in charge. 

“She does it all here,” Cohen says after he finishes soundcheck. He has only one complaint about Davis booking his trio for repeated gigs in the Jazz Room: “I have to learn some new songs every year.”

After the show, Davis and I sit down to talk about how she founded JazzArts 15 years ago, her plans for the future, and the state of the jazz scene in a city that often seems unaware it even has one. 

Charlotte magazine: Tell me about your personal musical history.

Lonnie Davis: I picked up the flute in fifth grade, and I knew that was my identity. I was a drum major, I was a band captain, and I could always play by ear—I thought that was normal for everyone. I would pick up my flute and watch cartoons and play along, jamming to The Smurfs or Superman. And one time, I was playing in my high school marching-band room, and one of my friends said, “You could play jazz if you can play by ear like that.” I was like, “Oh, there’s no such thing as jazz flute.” But jazz flute was totally a thing.

I auditioned for the jazz department at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and that opened my world up. Growing up in New Orleans, the music is everywhere, but I never saw myself as a jazz musician. And at NOCCA, I was around other kids who were doing it professionally. They were traveling the world playing music, and I’m like, “How did you get out of that test? You’re in Greece playing a festival and the teacher just let you off?”

CM: So you decided to go pro?

LD: I was a straight-A student; my mom wanted me to be a doctor or a pharmacist. I could have done that—I had scholarship offers—but I didn’t want to be stuck in something that I didn’t have passion for. So I went to the University of New Orleans for jazz performance. I studied for some time with Ellis Marsalis (the pianist and father of Wynton and Branford Marsalis). One day, he called me into his office. He must have been concerned about me. I was pretty much the only female instrumentalist in the program at that time—there were a lot of vocalists. He asked me, “What is it that you want to do?”

My feelings were hurt. I thought it was obvious: I wanted to play. I left his office kind of confused, and the next semester I changed my major to psychology. I don’t think he was saying, “You don’t have what it takes,” but he knew that it’s not easy. I didn’t get it back then, but he was planting the seed to let me know that I don’t have to play professionally to move the music forward.

CM: Why did you leave New Orleans?

LD: I was in the urban planning department for my master’s degree (in 2005) when Katrina hit. My (former) husband and I had our first daughter, and I was pregnant with the second one, and we had just bought our first house six or seven months prior. We picked up and fled New Orleans, not realizing we would never come back.

CM: How did you end up in Charlotte?

LD: We were displaced to Blacksburg, Virginia—my older sister had been there for 15 years—but my oldest daughter had been in a full-immersion French school and was almost fluent in French. I didn’t want that to go to waste because we were in the mountains of southwest Virginia, so we were looking to move to a bigger city. One of our neighbors suggested Charlotte because it had full-immersion language schools. We didn’t know anyone here, didn’t have jobs, but we figured there must be a jazz scene. And after we were here for a couple of months, we were surprised to not find what we thought we would find.

We didn’t see a nucleus for where musicians jammed, where audiences came and loved on the musicians. That was our world: In New Orleans, musicians are superheroes, or at least they’re very admired citizens in society. And it was almost the opposite here, like people looked down on the artist, a real “get a job” kind of vibe. I saw that as weird, and I knew that something had to change.

CM: What was hardest about starting JazzArts?

LD: This is still our challenge: getting the average Charlottean to see the relevance of this American art form here in Charlotte and to remind people that there is a jazz legacy here. None of the legends were born here in Charlotte, but in the Carolinas, there’s Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie. We’re trying to change the culture and to make jazz part of the identity of the city. 

CM: When I saw Rez Abbasi play at the Jazz Room earlier this year, he made a point of mentioning that he was surprised by how jazz-savvy the Charlotte audience was.

LD: Yeah, the audience didn’t love that. We got the surveys back from the show, and a lot of the audience members, their feelings were hurt. We’re not Mayberry.

CM: Assuming that most performers who come here are tactful enough not to say, “You guys aren’t as ugly as I heard,” are they nevertheless surprised?

LD: They are. We have a sophisticated jazz audience, and we’ve worked very hard over 15 years to create that audience. After the pandemic, we’ve had to work harder to get the seats filled, but our audiences are open to new things, more so now than they were earlier.

CM: You book a lot of different acts but not musicians on the harder or more discordant edge of jazz. Are there acts that are not to your personal taste or that you think Charlotte isn’t ready for?

LD: That’s a great question. We have a brand, and we try not to be bounded by what that brand is, but I think I have a good understanding of what we can sell tickets for. That’s why we started with the low-hanging fruit. We used to do a lot of tributes: Mark Rapp plays the music of Miles Davis, or Chad Lawson plays the music of Bill Evans. And then we started pushing the limits more as time went on.

Post-pandemic, we made a very intentional shift to get artists that are internationally renowned and playing their own music, because the music is not stuck in time. But I think there are artists who are great but may not be a JazzArts production. Although our audience is very diverse, they may not come out to see these folks. And we never want these artists to come and feel like Charlotte is not supportive of the music. 

Not everyone is fitting for the Stage Door Theater. There are artists who would be better in an outdoor venue, better with beer and pretzels. That’s not our core audience. Our audience drinks wine, and they’re very particular about the wine that they drink.

CM: How much of JazzArts’ work is presenting concerts versus educational programs?

LD: It’s split. We do preschool jazz, WeBop, and we’re about to expand to adult education. With our Youth Ensembles Education program, we’re teaching kids to express themselves through improvisation, and if they stick with us for a couple of years, they’re leaving our program with college skills. We’re giving them exposure not only to learn the music but to perform to captive audiences—hundreds or thousands of people, onstage at the Knight Theater or at an earnings meeting at Bank of America. 

We also have a Latin jazz youth ensemble, Nuestro Tiempo. That’s a dynamic group of 20-plus kids. Their families are not just from one culture and country; they’re learning the clave, and they’re learning all these different rhythms and styles, but they’re playing in a Latin orchestra context with a full-blown percussion section. We give them dance lessons so they can put the music and the movement together.

CM: Tell me about a mistake you made.

LD: (long pause) It was a mistake to be extremely ambitious early on with the assumption that, in five years, we would be where we are right now. When we launched this organization, I thought, Sure, we’ll be approaching a million dollars (in the annual budget) in five years. Well, we’re at $1.3 million now, but it’s taken 15 years to get there. I thought, in 10 years, we’d have our own space. Yeah, not yet. I thought that people would throw money at us because jazz, of course, and how could you not support music education and arts education? 

We have grown our support with a full-time development director and a strategic plan. We have a lot of big, hairy, audacious ideas—we’d like to bring back the Charlotte Jazz Festival—but we need money to pay for the ideas. We’ve grown tremendously in the last three years, but we’re still the best-kept secret in Charlotte, and that’s a problem. 

GAVIN EDWARDS, a contributing editor, is the author of 14 books, including the bestselling MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios.