July 7, 2020

Oakland Jazz Is Growing and Growing, With a Powerful New Livestream Series

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The family-run Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland just announced a weekly series of livestreams with some of the brightest and most innovative musicians in the Bay Area and beyond. Most recently, the Pit Orchestra playing Monk, with pianist Edward Simon, trumpeter Erik Jekabson, and bassist Peter Barshay. Down the calendar: Howard Wiley’s must-catch tribute to Sonny Rollins’ Freedom Suite. (Read my interview with Rollins about the pandemic, protests, and creative change, if you missed it.) Also in the mix: Stella Heath, Rob Reich, and Daniel Fabricant. Berkeley-born Wiley is especially energizing and inspiring. At age 12, he headlined the old Koncepts Cultural Gallery—founded by Edsel Matthews—then Festival by the Bay in Richmond, a historic cultural center, and two years later was headlining Yoshi’s.

Mark the calendar for Wiley’s spin on Thursday, July 16. More details here, and drop me a line at recharge@motherjones.com for deeper dives into the sounds of solidarity, stamina, and resilience—and send me your own tips for livestreams across the map.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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