Meet Jonathan Solari – Director of Development at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation
The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival –known far and wide as JazzFest— is one of the best-known music and cultural events in the country. Make that the world.
The first JazzFest in 1970 attracted 350 attendees. Last year, half-a-million people showed up. For comparison, the population of the city of New Orleans is less than four-hundred-thousand.
What’s less well-known is JazzFest’s charitable foundation, the Jazz & Heritage Foundation. We’re wholeheartedly supportive of the Foundation’s mission. To explain more about it, we brought the Foundation’s Director of Development, Jonathan Solari, onto our 2025 Big Easy Cruise. For anyone who missed his panel and for all those who’d like to know some more, we reconnected with him.
The Foundation is one of the recipients of The Big Easy Cruise’s charitable donations. Their mission aligns with our support of the music, those who make the music, and the unique culture that birthed it.
We chatted with Jonathan right before Jazz Fest this year, so he was understandably very busy.
You’re anticipating another giant crowd this year?
I don’t know the numbers, but the moment we announced the line-up, my phone made a lot of noise. For so many people, it’s the highlight of their year.
For those who don’t know, the Foundation is as old as JazzFest itself, right?
Yes. We developed concurrently. The Foundation does year-round programming. Year-round work. We channel the funds generated by JazzFest back to the community that makes the music, the arts, the crafts, and the food. That was the vision from the start, back when the first JazzFest was held at what was then called Beauregard Square [now Congo Square] and it didn’t make any money. These days, you can feel the impact of our programs everywhere across the city.
Tell us how you do that.
We support the musicians and creators at every stage of their lives. We put instruments into kids’ hands. We offer tuition-free scholarships: three hundred students, four days a week. We have four free festivals a year to showcase everyone’s work. We support artists as they’re going up and when they’re on the other side of their careers. We offer health care and housing. We even pay for funerals.
We also own radio station WWOZ to showcase local talent twenty-four hours a day. That’s WWOZ-FM if you’re in the city or WWOZ.org if you listen online. It brings New Orleans to the world. And then we support our archive, the George and Joyce Wein Jazz and Heritage Center. For those who don’t know, George Wein launched the festival. It was his vision to make it more than just a music festival that lasted a few days. The archive captures all the artists’ interactions with us.
We know it’s like picking your favorite child, but is there one of the Foundation’s programs that resonates more deeply with you than the others?
I guess it would be the Class Got Brass program. I wish everyone could see this. We fund thirty middle and high-school band programs. Bands are limited to twelve members and they all have to present a funeral dirge, a celebratory number, and so on. You see the bands competing hard at the events, but you also see them working with each other, sharing notes, and so on.
You’re originally from the New York area, right?
Yes. I was brought up by a single mother who took me out to concerts and got me interested in the music of New Orleans and music in general. She’d taken me to Dr. John and Buckwheat Zydeco concerts before I was ten. And then in 2020, COVID happened. Everything shut down. I was living in Wisconsin then, listening to WWOZ online and watching Les Blank’s great documentary about New Orleans musicians. I just asked myself, “Why am I here instead of there?” I got this job and became an ambassador for the culture I love.
What was your experience of The Big Easy Cruise?
I have to admit, I was skeptical going in. On top of that, I’d never been on a cruise. But I was won over pretty quickly. What struck me most was the sense of community that built up over a week. A little world based on love of the same music. It felt very special being there. For another thing, I was sharing space with the guests and the artists. I see many of these artists on our stages throughout the year, but I never get to share a meal with them. On the cruise, we’re all traveling together. Artists and guests are literally in adjoining cabins.
On the panel, I was with Erica Falls, The Soul Rebels, and Cole Williams from WWOZ. What better ambassadors for our culture could you have? They were all talking about how the Foundation had been there for them. And Erica is a culinary artist, too, so she talked about that. On the panel, you saw her as more than a musician. You saw the whole person.
So you’ll be back?
I hope so! I feel good about The Big Easy Cruise programming our music and culture, and I like the way they work with us. They give back. We need more people to do good work, and I really feel like the cruise does that. So yeah, I hope to be back.