Music Taking Care of Musicians at the MONTCO Jazz Fest

Red light, a low ceiling, and chairs pulled close enough that nobody had to pretend this was a concert hall. Saturday night in Conshohocken, eight o’clock, twenty five dollars at the door. Four musicians stepped up to a bandstand at 126 Fayette Street and played the kind of set that makes you put down whatever you were holding and just listen. Ralph Bowen on saxophone. Uri Caine at the piano. Madison Rast standing behind the upright bass. Tom Cohen at the drums. Come on. Four ridiculous musicians, one hell of a band, and the proceeds from the night went to Jazz Bridge. That last part matters a lot to me, and before I say another word about why, you should know that I sit on the board of Jazz Bridge, so season my enthusiasm to taste. On a night like this one I am also just a guy in a chair.

Four Players, Four Distinct Voices, One Band

Start with the horn. Ralph Bowen has been on the jazz faculty at Rutgers since 1990, where he is a professor of saxophone and jazz studies and teaches jazz improvisation and jazz theory to players who will be filling bandstands like this one twenty years from now. He has eight albums out under his own name. What you hear live is command, the sound of somebody who decided a long time ago exactly what he wants a tenor saxophone to do and then spent decades making it do that.

Uri Caine grew up here. Born in Philadelphia in 1956, he started piano at seven, was studying with the French pianist Bernard Peiffer by twelve, and went on to the University of Pennsylvania to study composition with George Rochberg and George Crumb. That is a strange and wonderful education for a jazz pianist, and you can hear all of it. He was nominated for a Grammy for his album The Othello Syndrome. Watching him play is like watching somebody open a door in a wall you were certain was solid. The band follows him through it, and afterward you cannot remember why the tune would ever have gone any other way.

Madison Rast is one of the reasons this city sounds the way it sounds. He moved to Philadelphia in the fall of 1999, found a home at Ortlieb’s, played in Bootsie Barnes’ sextet, and has since become one of the most called bassists in the region, holding down the bottom for Mickey Roker, Orrin Evans, Sean Jones and Larry McKenna. He has been part of Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band since 2018. On Saturday he was doing what the great ones do, which is everything at once and none of it loudly.

Tom Cohen was at the kit, a Philadelphia drummer whose love of Brazilian music goes back to the Sergio Mendes and Brasil ‘66 records his parents played when he was a kid. He has six albums as a leader, most recently the bossa nova record Embraceable Brazil on Versa Records, and his list of bandmates runs through Orrin Evans, Shirley Scott, Richard Groove Holmes, Charles Fambrough and Uri Caine himself. Four completely distinct musical voices. One band. The music was freaking great.

What Jazz Bridge Actually Does

Here is the part that made the night bigger than the music. The proceeds went to Jazz Bridge, which partnered with the festival to present the show, and if you have never heard of the organization, that is because the work it does is the kind nobody posts about.

Jazz Bridge was founded in 2004 by the singers Suzanne Cloud and Wendy Simon to fix a gap nobody else was fixing. Professional jazz and blues musicians in this region had no safety net when life came for them. It incorporated in Pennsylvania in 2005 and was granted 501(c)(3) status by the IRS in 2007. The mission has not moved since. It assists jazz and blues musicians living in the Greater Philadelphia metro area who face financial, health, housing and similar crises. Pretty simple mission. Pretty damn important one.

In practice it does two things at once. The first is emergency money. Jazz Bridge has provided emergency assistance grants to more than 600 musicians, and reports more than half a million dollars in direct assistance to musicians in need since 2005. Its Musician Assistance Grants put $500 in a player’s hands for the ordinary catastrophes that end careers quietly, the housing shortfall, the instrument repair, the transportation, the utility bill. That fund started in 2020 as pandemic relief and never stopped being needed.

The second thing is work. Jazz Bridge has created more than 1,200 paid performance opportunities for jazz and blues artists, and it presents more than 48 neighborhood concerts a year across the Philadelphia metropolitan area from October through May. That is the piece I want people to sit with. An organization built to catch musicians when they fall also decided that the surest way to keep them from falling is to hire them.

The Arithmetic of a Working Musician’s Year

People assume the players on that bandstand are fine. Some of them are. The arithmetic is still brutal, and it deserves real numbers rather than sympathy.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for musicians and singers at $47.80 an hour as of May 2025. That sounds healthy right up until you notice what it measures. It is an hourly rate, not a salary, and the same page says plainly that many musicians and singers find only intermittent work. There were about 170,400 of these jobs in the country in 2025, and the projection for 2035 is essentially flat.

An hourly rate only pays when there is an hour to play. It does not pay for the decade spent learning the instrument, the drive to the gig, the strings, the reeds, the repairs, the teaching you take on to steady the month, or the weeks after a hand injury when there is no hour at all. A medical bill does not care that you sounded extraordinary on Saturday. That is the gap Jazz Bridge lives in, and it is not a narrow one.

A Festival That Turns a Whole County Into a Venue

Saturday’s show sat inside the MONTCO Jazz Fest, which ran September 15 through 20 across Montgomery County for its fifth anniversary. More than thirty concerts and events, many of them free, spread through Lansdale, Ambler, Pottstown, Jenkintown, Glenside, King of Prussia, Conshohocken and half a dozen other towns, in parks and breweries and galleries and theaters rather than in one ticketed hall.

This year the programming leaned into centennials, marking the hundredth birthdays of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tony Bennett and Jimmy Heath. I love that, and I want to be careful about it, because honoring four giants and paying a living bassist are two different acts and only one of them keeps the music alive. In the same week, the festival managed both. That is the model.

Supporting Live Music Is Not the Same as Supporting Musicians

We talk all the time about supporting live music. Somebody has to support the musicians too, and those are not the same sentence.

Culture in this region is not a luxury item bolted onto the economy. It is part of the economy. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance measured the nonprofit arts and culture sector here between May 2022 and June 2023 and found a combined economic impact of $3.3 billion, with $1.4 billion returning to Southeastern Pennsylvania residents as household income and $429 million generated in local, state and federal tax revenue.

Household income. That phrase is doing quiet work. It means rent, groceries, a kid’s shoes, paid to people in this region because somebody bought a ticket. Jazz Philadelphia has spent years making the institutional version of the same case, building mentorship, wellness and entrepreneurship programs for musicians and pressing for arts funding across the city, and I have believed that argument for as long as I have been going to these rooms. Musicians are not decoration on a civic budget. They are workers in an industry this region already counts in billions.

So a twenty five dollar ticket in Conshohocken was never charity. It is the smallest working unit of an arts economy. Multiply it by a full room and you have paid a band. Multiply it again and you have funded a grant that keeps a player housed long enough to make the next record.

The People Who Open the Room

None of it happens unless somebody decides to open a door. Paul Krassen, who serves as vice president of Jazz Bridge, hosted this one, and Joanna helped create the space for a night like it to happen at all. People underestimate what that takes. Putting musicians on a stage, getting people into the room, and then using that room to help other musicians is a pretty good use of an evening if you ask me.

Because jazz does not survive because we keep Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Monk and Miles records on our shelves. Those records are finished. Nothing any of us does can add a note to them. Jazz survives because somebody gives the next musician a stage. Because somebody buys the ticket. Because somebody hires the band. Because somebody helps the musician who is struggling. Because somebody keeps the music playing.

Saturday night in Conshohocken, we got to enjoy four extraordinary musicians while helping make sure somebody else gets a stage of their own. Jazz Bridge does that every day, for players whose names will never appear on a festival poster. Long live live jazz, long live Philadelphia musicians, and long live the people who make damn sure the music does not stop. Not bad for a night out.