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About Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares

How It Works

Based on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or farm share model where stakeholders ensure the success of the farm by pre-paying for food, our members purchase jazz shares to provide the capital needed to produce concerts with minimal institutional support.

 

A grassroots, all-volunteer organization, Jazz Shares is a community of music lovers in Western Massachusetts dedicated to the continued vitality of jazz music. By pooling resources, energy, and know-how, members create an infrastructure that is able to bring world-class improvisers to our region.

Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We make 150 jazz shares available each season. We produce between 10 and 20 concerts each year in Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin Counties. We invite you to join us.

A full share for the season is $125, which you can purchase at www.jazzshares.org or by check. Half shares are $63.

For your $125 investment, you receive 10 admissions to Jazz Shares concerts. We give you a card that we hole-punch for each admission. You can use the admissions however you choose: invite friends, give them to others, donate them to students or those in need for that season.

Our concert season usually runs September – June. Just like a farm share, a jazz share is good for one season only. You cannot apply unused admissions to next season’s concerts.

Our schedule is posted on our website and we send out Evites to all shareholders.

 

Jazz Shares sells tickets to the general public for each show, and receives generous support from the local businesses highlighted on our website.

Benefits of the Jazz Share Model

  • Artists are guaranteed an audience and a fair wage, allowing for unusually adventurous and diverse programming

  • Shareholders are guaranteed access to a series of world-class jazz performances

  • Performances benefit the local community as an economic and cultural driver

  • Shareholders build community together

History

Over two evenings in June, 2012, Priscilla Maria Page and Glenn Siegel invited 70 of their music-loving friends to their home in Northampton to discuss Glenn’s plan to bring more jazz music to western Massachusetts. Following the farm share or community-supported agriculture (CSA) model to produce jazz concerts, they would offer jazz shares to the public and use that capital to host world-class improvisers in venues throughout Franklin, Hampshire and Hamden counties. In the fall of 2012, Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares was born. Just as the community supports local farms by buying a share before the growing season, our community could support this concert series.

 

The friends at those initial meetings were people Glenn had come to know from decades of sharing creative music in the Pioneer Valley, producing the Magic Triangle Jazz Series at UMASS Amherst, A World of Piano at the Northampton Center for the Arts, and running WMUA-FM, the UMass student and community radio station. On that first night in June, after Glenn pitched the idea, David Gowler stepped to the middle of the circle, threw down his $125 and Jazz Shares was born. Ten years later, we have produced over 115 concerts in 21 venues throughout the Pioneer Valley, featuring artists such as Makaya McCraven, Dave Douglas, William Parker, Mary Halvorson, James Brandon Lewis, Ingrid Laubrock, David Murray and many other outstanding musicians.

Board of Directors

Nancy Goldstein Art has been important to me since I was a child: as a visual artist, designer, chef, musician and singer. I have served as President of the Board of the Northampton Center for the Arts, Chair of the Advisory Committee to the University Museum of Contemporary Art and now happily on the Jazz Shares Board.

Motoko Inoue had managed various aspects of the Eric Carle enterprise for over 30 years, now retired from her last position as his Creative Director. An inaugural member of Jazz Shares, she is a longtime supporter of arts in the area. 

Rebecca Neimark is a book designer and a former development professional who has lived in Northampton since 1992. She was a member of the Northampton Survival Center Board of Directors for eight years, serving as Development Chair, Vice President, and President. She served on the River Valley Co-op Outreach Committee for a decade and helped found Congregation B’nai Israel’s Darfur Action Group. She currently sits on the Advisory Board for Abundance Farm. She is proud to support Jazz Share’s pioneering model to bring innovative performances to our community.

Marta Ostapiuk is a career arts professional. Having been one of the founding members of MIFA, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, she went on to make her professional home at Hartford Stage Company & The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts before transitioning to development consultancy in 2021. A lifelong music lover, she is proud to support the exciting sonic journeys & innovative membership model of JazzShares.

Priscilla María Page is a writer, performer, dramaturg, and faculty member in the Department of Theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also directs the Multicultural Theater Certificate. Her research includes Latina/o/x Theater and Contemporary Native American Performance. She is currently writing about Latina/o/x theater history in Chicago.  She is a member of the Latinx Theater Commons, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America, and the Association of Theater in Higher Education. 

Jason Robinson A long-time resident of Hampshire and Franklin counties in western Massachusetts, Jason Robinson is an accomplished saxophonist, flutist, composer, and scholar who has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.  He has appeared on over 50 albums, including 18 as leader or co-leader.  Robinson joined the faculty at Amherst College in 2008, where he is currently Associate Professor of Music and affiliated faculty in Black Studies and Film and Media Studies.

Kathy Service is a nurse practitioner whose clinical skills have been greatly enhanced by the arts.  She routinely volunteers for a number of arts organizations and events in and around Northampton and is honoured to be on the inaugural Board of the Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares. She particularly loves welcoming and checking members into each show.

Glenn Siegel has produced hundreds of concerts throughout western Massachusetts. He founded the Magic Triangle Jazz Series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1990, which he directed until 2020, and for 12 years, he produced A World of Piano for the Northampton Center for the Arts. He served as Manager of WMUA-FM at UMass for 28 years, where he hosted Jazz in Silhouette, and was designated a Jazz Hero by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2019. He co-founded Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares in 2012 and serves as President.

Batya Sobel is an oboist and composer-improviser based in Western Massachusetts.  With a focus on experimental new music and sound, Sobel views her art as an offering of honesty and vulnerability. At Hampshire College, she studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef, who became a life-changing mentor. Batya is a lay homeopath, a marketing consultant for print music publishers, and a caretaker of older horses. As Brother Yusef said, ‘remember to express the beauty.’

Jazz Shares Thanks Its Business Sponsors for this Season
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