Back when I wrote for a daily newspaper (kids, ask your parents what those were), the page-turn from August to September always called for a big roundup of the coming seasons of the performing arts organizations I covered. In those days that meant classical music presenters. Dependent on a subscription model, they typically planned a season well in advance and publicized it relentlessly. That model doesn’t work for the way we live anymore and for jazz, my beat, never worked at all. Still, a few jazz orgs plan a full season. You’ll find three of them below, each in their different way giving us a wish to dream on. Open your calendar app and let’s go.
Cleveland Jazz Orchestra
Arts presenters love big anniversaries, which come with a ready-made marketing hook–and with a dilemma. What do you do after the big anniversary season is over?
For the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra the answer is to move onward.
Onward! From the Night Club to the Night Sky is the title of the 2025-26 season, one that is more conceptual than thematic, more capacious than specific. “Coming out of a big anniversary, you need to look forward instead of backwards,” explained Scott Garlock, the CJO’s executive director.
The Night Club in question is a space/time warp mashup of Harlem’s Cotton Club and the Hot Club of France that is the theoretical locus of a March 20 concert dedicated to the music of Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt. That collab actually happened in Cleveland in 1946, Reinhardt’s American debut.
Boomer nostalgia never dies, and the Woodstock-themed season closer with vocalist Mary Bridget Davies promises to update material by bands that performed at the long-ago festival. The recent history of inviting the Musical Theater Project to survey songbook standards continues with Hoagy Carmichael as the subject.
Yet the concert closes to the mainstream is the season opener with Philly-bred trumpeter Terell Stafford, one that Garlock is especially stoked about. “A real good dude and just an amazing freak of nature trumpet player,” he said.
But perhaps the biggest event on the CJO calendar is the one that’s not there: the annual holiday concerts. Normally such events are milk cows for presenters, a sure-fire way to pack the house, but all good things have to come to an end–even a temporary one.
But don’t expect season programming to go away at the CJO. “A great deal of our audience are rather comfortable with that model,” Garlock said. If you’re one of them, you can get your season subscription here.
| September 27, 2025 | Totally Trumpet (with Terell Stafford) |
| January 24, 2026 | Star Dust: The Songs of Hoagy Carmichael (with The Musical Theater Project) |
| March 20, 2026 | “Clubbin’ Unchained” – Django and the Duke |
| May 1, 2026 | Woodstock ‘26 – Sly, Santana, & Janis |
Cleveland Museum of Art
Even when he was in the catch-as-catch-can jazz club game as director of BOP STOP, Gabe Pollack was a man with a plan. His budgets there were tighter than my old dress pants, but bigger budgets often come with even larger expectations. As director of performing arts at Cleveland Museum of Art, Gabe has it all mapped out.
“First, I need to have a certain number of shows that relate to art that’s on display at any given time. So that’s guiding principle number one. Number two is over my years at the museum, I’ve been building co-presenting partnerships with local and regional presenting organizations,” he said. “Once I’ve locked in shows related to art and shows that I’m co-presenting with other organizations, the void that is left happens to be jazz and jazz-adjacent music, which is personally, the music that resonates with me.”
If you’re a fan of jazz at its highest level of accomplishment, some of the events on CMA’s 2025-26 season will likely resonate with you, too. Brad Mehldau and Tigran Hamasyan, both commanding pianists in their own very different ways, don’t play small venues. Only a presenter with the reputation and resources of CMA have access to them. As for commanding pianists, Omar Sosa, heir to the powerful, orchestral Cuban piano tradition, is in the discussion. And don’t sleep on bassist Stephan Crump’s rare, live recreation of his gorgeous and moving 2024 recording Slow Water.
But what the heck is Country GongBang, a Korean quintet that improbably blends bluegrass and K-pop, doing on this list? I’ll let Pollack tell you.
“I’m really into it and it also took a lot of patience to get them here. It’s a really fun show, and they’re really good.”
When the man talks, you gotta listen. Game recognizes game.
| September 10, 2025 | Omar Sosa Trio: Outside the Box featuring Yosvany Terry and Julian Miltenberger |
| October 8, 2025 | Country GongBang |
| November 12, 2025 | Becca Stevens |
| February 18, 2026 | Makaya McCraven |
| March 11, 2026 | Tigran Hamasyan |
| April 24,2026 | Stephan Crump: Slow Water |
| May 13, 2026 | The Brad Mehldau Trio with Felix Moseholm and Jorge Rossy |
New Ghosts
New Ghosts is the quintessential guerilla DIY arts presenter: no permanent facility, no 501(c)3, no grant funding. So why on earth do Head Haunter Matt Laferty cling to a notion as old fashioned and stuffy as a season?
“Look, I’m an English teacher,” he told me, slightly embarrassed at the thought. “I think in terms of the syllabus. I think in terms of chapters. I live by a fall and spring schedule as an academic. It’s a version of a presentation of ideas over the course of time. It’s just rooted in my essence to think that way.”
Word to Matt: go ahead and think that way. Please! Just as long as you present artists as provocative and compelling as the ones on the Fall 2025 season (in a small concession to rebellion, Laferty only announced this year’s model).
Consider the sheer, head-spinning luxury of being able to take in Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis and Anna Webber’s Simple Trio just two days apart. Friends, make those sensory deprivation tank reservations now. It’s going to get crowded in there.
That’s just part of a September to remember with four must-see shows in a 12-day span, including the Beachland show with Lewis, perhaps the most talked-about living tenor saxophonist, and the rhythm section from the seminal post-punk band Fugazi. Yet to the low-key Laferty, it’s all in a day’s–or season’s–work. Yet the thread of this fall’s season extends years in time and miles in space to a concert that Laferty will never forget.
“Growing up in rural Virginia, we drove to Harrisonburg, Virginia to see Fugazi,” Laferty said. “It was a college gig with a couple hundred people, and one of the most bracing musical experiences of my life.”
Like the CJO, New Ghosts is coming off an anniversary year, the tenth. Anyone looking at a log of those ten years of shows will see the Venn diagram of improvised music from jazz, concert and free music traditions pulled toward a converging center by a centripetal force that is creating some of today’s most interesting music.
And it all started in that sweaty room in Harrisonburg.
Laferty: “It’s the moment I learned about DIY culture, where I realized, oh, all of this is happening because of like seven people deciding to make it happen. So to be helping make that show happen for those guys is, you know, I feel like that’s a full circle kind of thing.
“The goal of the series is first and foremost, I want the people with beautiful, enormous, open ears to have music to go see live in Cleveland. I want that for Clevelanders,” Laferty said. “The second thing that I want is for these touring musicians who are making art that I respect and love to have a port in the storm. And the third thing I want is for the shows to be beneficial to small independent owner-operators like Waterloo Arts or The Treelawn or Beachland, I want them to thrive.”
| August 22 Treelawn Social Club | Chris Corsano/Dana Jessen/Aaron Dilloway Jayson Gerycz |
| September 12, 2025 Beachland Tavern | Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis Well Dan Wenninger, saxophone; Evan Moran, guitar; Max Hyde-Perry, bass; Mat Weisman, drums |
| September 14, 2025 BOP STOP | Anna Webber’s Simple Trio with Matt Mitchell, keyboards and John Hollenbeck, percussion |
| September 20, 2025 Waterloo Arts | Glenn Jones/KBD/Liam Grant |
| September 24, 2025 BOP STOP | Filament Alex Carter, saxophone; Tobe Tsuchiya, piano; Danilo Randjic-Coleman, bass |
| October 22, 2025 BOP STOP | Surge Quartet gabby fluke-mogul, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Keefe Jackson and “Chris Bré” |
| December 8, 2025 Treelawn Social Club | Friends and Neighbors André Roligheten, saxophones/clarinets/flute; Thomas Johansson, trumpet; Oscar Grönberg, piano; Jon Rune Strøm, double bass; Tollef Østvang, drums |
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
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