01The Concert Series
Carson Jazz Live
Year-round live jazz in Carson, with local artists on the bill and free seats for students and seniors at every show.
Explore the program →
JazzLivesHere.
Free concerts. Free instruments. Free instruction. A paid stage for the musicians who already live here. We are building the room Carson never had, and great art should not depend on who can afford a ticket.
Preserve the Legacy · Inspire the Future · Promote Jazz · Preserve the Legacy · Inspire the Future · Promote Jazz
Why this exists
Carson has never lacked for culture. It has lacked for stages.
This is a city of working families, immigrants, artists, athletes, church musicians, and entrepreneurs. The talent is already here. What has never been here is the infrastructure to hold it: a room to play in, a teacher to learn from, and someone writing any of it down.
01
No stage
No venue in Carson programs live jazz year-round. To hear it, residents drive to Long Beach, Leimert Park, or downtown Los Angeles. Most simply do not go.
02
No pipeline
A Carson teenager with real ability and no money has no local way to study this music seriously. Instruction and an instrument run to hundreds of dollars a month before anyone hears them play.
03
No record
The musicians who carried this tradition into Carson are in their seventies and eighties. Almost none have been recorded, photographed, or asked to tell it.
Every program we run closes one of those three gaps. Nothing else is on the list.
Who started this
He already ran this city. Now he is booking its bands.
Daryl Sweeney was elected to the Carson City Council in 1997 and became the youngest mayor in the city's history in 2001. For the last seven years he has been producing and promoting live jazz, filling rooms with several hundred people who came to listen.
None of it happened in Carson. That is the whole reason this foundation exists: to bring the music home and pair it with free instruction for the kids who live here.
What we do
Three commitments. One room.
Programs
The work, in four movements
Each program feeds the others. The artist on Saturday's stage teaches Monday's masterclass. The students who take that class open the next show. The elders who built this music get recorded, exhibited, and seated in the front row.
Where your money goes
Four things, in this order, every time.
Free programs do not pay for themselves. Revenue from ticketed shows subsidizes the free ones, and donors cover the rest. This is the order we spend it in.
01
Artist fees
Budgeted before anything else, including administration. Nobody plays a Carson Arts Foundation stage for exposure.
02
Free admission
Community concerts, and a complimentary seat block for students and seniors held at every performance, ticketed or not.
03
Instruments and instruction
The lending library, the teaching artists, and the scholarships that keep Next Generation Jazz free to every family.
04
The archive
Recording the elders who carried this music, while they are still here to tell it.
See how to give
Monthly giving is what turns free programming from hopeful into plannable.
Support the music
A student is waiting on an instrument that has not been bought yet.
That is not a metaphor. It is the actual state of the lending library. Donations pay working musicians, hold free seats for students and seniors, put instruments in young players' hands, and record the elders while there is still time. In that order.