Bay Area jazz aficionado Jim Bennett has an Indiegogo campaign going to boost his live jazz promotion work. Bennett has been producing acclaimed jazz programs for decades. He was a long time jazz deejay at KPFA-FM in Berkeley and its general manager during some of the station’s turbulent years in the late 1990s. Then he ran Tampa, Florida community station WMNF-FM for a spell. Then Bennett returned to the Bay Area and now produces a show on San Mateo public radio station KCSM titled In the Moment.
In the course of this work, a continuous wave of music legends have come through Bennett’s studio door. These include Astor Piazzola, Gary Burton, Woody Shaw, Art Pepper, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Tom Waits, Pat Metheny, Pharoah Sanders, Jan Garbarek, The Neville Brothers, Robert Cray, Santana, Tower Of Power, Jon Hendricks, John Santos, Joe Pass, the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, and Nina Simone. His latest In the Moment live concert spotlighted Myra Melford at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland.
Bennett’s Indiegogo campaign will help raise the cash for a two CD set of In the Moment live performances. The CDs will be produced at no cost to KCSM. The station will be able to use them during fundraising periods. And these contributions will, perhaps most importantly, allow Bennett to train and mentor students at a total of six non-profits: KCSM, The Jazzschool in Berkeley, Musically Minded Academy in Oakland, The Sound Room in Oakland, The Oaktown Jazz Workshop, and The Bird and Beckett Cultural Legacy Project in San Francisco.
The campaign will also allow Bennett to keep his show going. “I believe strongly in recording live music as a way of promoting musicians and strengthening music community,” Bennett’s statement notes. “It means a lot to me to support local musicians and to insure that there are younger engineers who get the opportunity to document the music.”
The In The Moment KCSM fundraising campaign has a little less than two weeks to go. More details about it on Bennett’s Indiegogo page.
