Jazz

A Superband Plays Conshohocken and Every Ticket Goes to Musicians in Crisis

Four leading jazz musicians headline Montco Jazz Fest at Cigar Republic on September 19, with every ticket benefiting Philadelphia nonprofit Jazz Bridge.

By Harry Hayman 7 min read
A Superband Plays Conshohocken and Every Ticket Goes to Musicians in Crisis

Most benefit concerts I get invited to announce the cause and hope the music holds up. This one reverses the order. On Saturday, September 19, 2026, four musicians with a combined résumé that runs through Blue Note, the Philadelphia Orchestra and four decades of Philadelphia bandstands take the stage at Cigar Republic in Conshohocken, and every dollar of the ticket price goes to Jazz Bridge, the regional nonprofit that keeps working jazz and blues musicians afloat when something in their life gives way.

The show sits inside Montco Jazz Fest, the Montgomery County festival that has grown into a six day program of more than thirty concerts and events. The Jazz Bridge night is the Saturday headline slot. Tickets are twenty five dollars, and the event listing states plainly where the money lands: proceeds from the performance benefit Jazz Bridge and its work supporting musicians in the Greater Philadelphia region.

A benefit built into the bandstand rather than bolted onto it

We have no shortage of galas for our cultural institutions in this city. What I see far less of is money that reaches the individual musician, the person whose income depends on a calendar of gigs and whose safety net is whatever the last few months happened to pay.

That is the gap the September 19 show is aimed at, and to me the structure matters as much as the lineup. Rather than staging a fundraiser and then finding a band, the organizers put a first rank quartet on a small stage and routed the gate to the fund. The result is a night that works as a concert on its own terms and does the charitable work as a byproduct rather than as a pitch from a microphone between sets.

Cigar Republic sits at 126 Fayette Street in Conshohocken, a room with a few hundred seats rather than a few thousand. To me that scale is part of the argument. A quartet of this caliber in a room this size is a different musical experience than the same four players spread across a festival main stage, and it is the kind of booking that only happens when a venue, a festival and a nonprofit decide the same night is worth their time.

Four players, and none of them are filler

The band is billed as a Jazz Bridge Superband, a phrase I usually distrust because it usually oversells. Here it does not.

Ralph Bowen plays tenor saxophone. In 1985 he won the audition to co lead Out of the Blue, the Blue Note Records all star group, and went on to record four albums for the label. Between 1986 and 1991 he completed three world tours with Horace Silver. He now teaches as an associate professor at Rutgers University, which means most of the young saxophonists coming out of New Jersey have passed through a room he was standing in.

Uri Caine plays piano. He was born in Philadelphia in 1956 and studied composition with George Rochberg as a teenager. He was nominated for a Grammy for The Othello Syndrome in 2009, and he composed The Passion of Octavius Catto for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a work with gospel choir built around the murdered nineteenth century Philadelphia civil rights leader. His discography moves between jazz trio records and reworkings of Mahler, Wagner, Verdi and Bach, which is a polite way of saying he is one of the most restless musicians the city has produced.

Madison Rast plays bass. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1999 after a master’s degree in jazz performance and became one of the region’s most called bassists, supporting Mickey Roker, Orrin Evans, Sean Jones and Larry McKenna among many others. Since 2018 he has been part of the Captain Black Big Band under Orrin Evans, and he teaches at Bucks County Community College. His name appears on Philly Jazz Scene listings most weeks of the year.

Tom Cohen plays drums. He has been a fixture of the Philadelphia scene for more than forty years and has spent nearly all of them inside Brazilian rhythm as well as straight ahead jazz, work that culminated in the album Embraceable Brazil on Versa Records. He is also a member of the Philadelphia Brazilian group Minas.

Two of the four are Philadelphia musicians by residence, one by birth, and the fourth has been teaching and touring out of the corridor for decades. This is not a package assembled by an agency. It is a snapshot of who we actually have here.

What Jazz Bridge does when a musician cannot work

Jazz Bridge was founded in 2004 by Suzanne Cloud and Wendy Simon to solve a problem nobody else was solving: a professional jazz or blues musician in the Greater Philadelphia area hits a crisis, and there is no institution whose job it is to help. The organization incorporated in Pennsylvania in 2005 and received federal tax exempt status as a 501(c)(3) public charity in 2007, according to the organization’s history.

The help is deliberately unglamorous, which is exactly why I rate it. Jazz Bridge awards microgrants for urgent needs, and the categories it names are housing, instrument repairs, transportation and utilities. It provides referrals to community resources and access to a social worker, which for a self employed artist without an employer or a human resources department can be the difference between a temporary problem and a permanent one. A local news segment on 6abc followed one of those cases and showed what the intervention actually looks like from the musician’s side.

The second half of the mission is the part I think keeps the first half honest. Since 2005 Jazz Bridge has presented neighborhood concerts across the region, in Cheltenham and Collingswood and in partnership with larger Philadelphia venues, and it pays the musicians who play them. An organization that exists to support artists in crisis and then asks those same artists to donate their labor would be undermining its own case. Jazz Bridge does not do that, and the September 19 show follows the same logic.

Where the night sits inside Montco Jazz Fest

Montco Jazz Fest runs September 15 through 20 in 2026 and marks its fifth anniversary. The program covers more than thirty concerts and events across Montgomery County, many of them free, with a new partnership placing free performances in county parks and a run of free sets at Eataly in King of Prussia. The vocalist Joanna Pascale leads the programming as artistic director for a fourth consecutive year, and the festival’s own visitor information carries the full schedule.

I read the Saturday headline slot as an editorial decision by the festival, not an afterthought. A festival that programs thirty events has thirty chances to say what it values, and it chose to give its most visible night to a fund for musicians rather than to the biggest available name. Regional coverage of the fifth anniversary program frames the festival as a live and local proposition, and the Cigar Republic show is the clearest expression of that framing on the calendar.

Why the ticket price is the argument

Twenty five dollars is not a symbolic number. It is roughly what a Philadelphia club charges for a single set on a normal weekend, which means the benefit asks nothing extra of you. Nobody is asking you to buy a table, bid on anything, or sit through a program of remarks. All you have to do is show up to a concert that would be worth attending regardless of where the money went.

I think that is a useful model for a city that talks constantly about supporting its artists. Support is easy to declare and hard to route. A gala routes money to an institution. A grant routes money to a project. A ticket to this particular Saturday routes money to a fund that will eventually pay somebody’s rent or repair somebody’s horn, and it does so without asking the audience to think of itself as charitable.

We started the Philadelphia Jazz Experience to connect the parts of this ecosystem that usually get described separately: the artists, the venues, the broadcasters, the educators and the audiences. A night like September 19 is what that connection looks like when it is working. A festival programs it, a venue hosts it, four musicians play it, and a nonprofit that has been catching this city’s players for more than twenty years gets funded by people who simply wanted to hear a good band.

Tickets for the Saturday, September 19 performance at Cigar Republic are available through Jazz Bridge. The performance is listed for 8:00 PM.

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