Sarasota Jazz Hero
Ed Linehan is in his fifth and final year as President and Managing Director of the Jazz Club of Sarasota. His tenure at the helm of the nonprofit’s Board of Directors has been marked with the addition of new concert series, rejuvenation of its sagging membership and dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 on two concert seasons, including restoration of the Sarasota Jazz Festival.
The longtime educator and education consultant moved to Florida in 2014 from Connecticut to be near his parents. He chose Sarasota because it wasa a jazz-conscious community where his wife, Synia Carroll, could invigorate her singing career, and as he met more musicians through her, in 2016 then-president Peg Pluto recruited him to join the Jazz Club of Sarasota’s all-volunteer Board of Directors. As he became president two years later, the Board expanded its scholarship program for college-bound high school seniors and created a spirited initiative that saw the 43-year-old Club’s membership nearly double after long, slow dwindling.
In March 2020, about an hour before the first scheduled mainstage performance, with scheduled musicians already in town, Linehan and the Board pulled the plug on the 40th Sarasota Jazz Festival because of COVID-19’s rapid spread. The Jazz Club honored its contracts, paid production expenses and refunded ticket sales. It canceled the 2021 festival, too, and used the off-time to plan digging out of the pandemic-caused financial hole.
The Club was dark until a partnership with community radio station WSLR and the Fogartyville Community Media and Arts Center created a Bridge Music Series, featuring live and live-streamed jazz, followed by two other year-round performance initiatives, the Monday Night Jazz Cabaret series at the Florida Studio Theatre’s John C. Court Cabaret in downtown Sarasota, and Jazz Thursday at the SAM, a monthly outdoor concert partnership series with the Sarasota Art Museum. Finally, in March 2023 the SJC produced its Sarasota Jazz Festival under the musical direction of trumpeter Terell Stafford. It has scheduled its next fest for March 2024.
Linehan’s career was focused on education; he became a teacher in 1971. Over the next four decades, he was director of magnet schools and high schools in the New Haven Public Schools system, and spent eight years as principal of the performing arts magnet New Haven’s Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. That latter role was the most fulfilling for Ed Linehan, he’s said, because it helped students, many from low-income communities, guide their passions towards careers in music and dance. That is gratification for a Jazz Hero.
By Ken Franckling, photo © Carol LoRicco
