Syncopated Media Needs Your Help

Ideas are the easy part. If we had a million dollars to promote hot jazz, ragtime, and swing we could find ways to use it. As things are, everything we do is on a total budget of roughly $60,000 a year.

I have been looking through recipients of jazz grants with envy, and sometimes bewilderment. Locally focused nonprofits, as most are, have many grant opportunities unavailable to us, including a whole class of local grants and local sponsors outside of jazz. Being national we exist nowhere. Our impact however can be everywhere.

Dollar for dollar we could have more impact on the preservation and promotion of traditional jazz than most jazz nonprofits simply by making our print newspaper, our online articles, video documentaries, and audio content like podcasts available to schools and the public. It is that bang for our buck that causes me bewilderment reading about huge grants for worthy though less impactful projects.

Many of our readers are involved in seeking grants for jazz organizations and I will be reaching out to some of you. If you have leads please contact me. We need grants tailored to what we do, which at its simplest is distribute information about our styles of jazz.

If you have a project in mind, we can help sponsor it under the nonprofit umbrella of Syncopated Media, allowing you to seek grants or donations to cover the expenses. Please reach out with your ideas. We are also seeking partnerships with jazz nonprofits, as simple as mutual promotion, or much more.

One idea of mine is Syncopated Records, which could make available, with permission, the “lost” albums of trad jazz bands. There are many self released cassette, LP, and CD albums unavailable on Spotify, YouTube, and Bandcamp. With permission, we could help the bands that made these albums, or their heirs, ensure their music is available in the digital age.

There is no money to be made re-releasing a cassette sold from a merch table in 1992. But there is wisdom in preserving it however few listens it gets. Such a project would require very little money to make hundreds of albums available. If you have the right to authorize the digital release of unavailable albums I’d like to talk.

As always cash donations beyond your subscription are welcome and needed. Our ongoing gofundme can be found on our website or at www.gofundme.com/f/syncopated-times. Reach Joe at Joe.syncopatedtimes@gmail.com.