01The Concert Series
Carson Jazz Live
Year-round live jazz in Carson, with local artists on the bill and free seats for students at every show.
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JazzLivesHere.
Live music, arts education, visual art, and a stage for the artists in Southern California.
Preserve the Legacy · Inspire the Future · Promote Jazz · Preserve the Legacy · Inspire the Future · Promote Jazz
Why this exists
Carson has never lacked for culture. It has lacked for a benefactor to promote and support its cultural events.
This is a city of working families, immigrants, artists, athletes, church musicians, and entrepreneurs. The talent is already here. What has never been here is the infrastructure to hold it: a room to play in, a teacher to learn from, and someone writing any of it down.
01
No stage
No venue in Carson programs live jazz year-round. To hear it, residents drive to Long Beach, Leimert Park, or downtown Los Angeles. Most simply do not go.
02
No pipeline
A Carson teenager with real ability and no money has no local way to study music, or any art form, seriously. Instruction and an instrument run to hundreds of dollars a month before anyone hears them play.
03
No record
The musicians and artists who carried this culture into Carson are in their seventies and eighties. Almost none have been recorded, photographed, painted, or asked to tell it.
Every program we run closes one of those three gaps. Nothing else is on the list.
Why the arts
A concert is the most visible thing we do. It is not the most important.
We produce live music because it fills a room and pays working artists. We do the rest because a city with art in it is a better place to grow up in, grow old in, and open a business on.
01
Young people get somewhere to be
A teenager holding an instrument on a Tuesday evening has somewhere to be, an adult expecting them, and something they are visibly getting better at. That is what an arts program delivers long before anyone turns professional.
02
Money stays in the city
A performance night pays musicians, sound engineers, photographers, and caterers, and fills the restaurants around it. Culture is not separate from a local economy. It is part of one.
03
A city keeps a record of itself
Murals, portraits, photographs, recorded interviews. Without them, a neighborhood's memory lasts exactly as long as the people carrying it, and not one year longer.
04
Generations end up in the same room
There are few places left where an eighty-year-old and a fifteen-year-old have a real reason to talk to each other. A rehearsal is one. So is a listening session, and so is a wall going up.
Who started this
He already served this city.
Now he is creating a premier cultural destination where jazz, visual arts, and arts education thrive.
Daryl Sweeney was elected to the Carson City Council in 1997 and became the youngest mayor in the city's history in 2001. For the last seven years he has been producing and promoting live jazz, filling rooms with several hundred people who came to listen.
None of it happened in Carson. That is the whole reason this foundation exists: to bring the music home and build the rest around it, free instruction for the kids who live here, public art on the walls, and a record of the people who got us this far.
What we do
Three commitments. One room.
Programs
The work, in four movements
Each program feeds the others. The artist on Saturday's stage teaches Monday's masterclass. The students who take that class open the next show. The elders who built this music get recorded, exhibited, and seated in the front row.
Where your money goes
Four things, in this order, every time.
Free programs do not pay for themselves. Revenue from ticketed shows subsidizes the free ones, and donors cover the rest. This is the order we spend it in.
01
Artist fees
Budgeted before anything else, including administration. Nobody plays a Carson Arts Foundation stage for exposure.
02
Free admission
Community concerts, and a complimentary seat block for students and seniors held at every performance, ticketed or not.
03
Instruments and instruction
The lending library, the teaching artists, and the scholarships that keep Next Generation Jazz free to every family.
04
The archive
Recording the elders who carried this music, while they are still here to tell it.
See how to give
Monthly giving is what turns free programming from hopeful into plannable.
Support the music
A student is waiting on an instrument that has not been bought yet.
That is not a metaphor. It is the actual state of the lending library. Donations pay working musicians, hold free seats for students and seniors, put instruments in young players' hands, and record the elders while there is still time. In that order.