We did not set out to build a nonprofit that spans the Pacific Northwest. We set out to keep one jazz club open in one small town. Everything since has come from working out how to do that, and then helping other towns do the same.
It Started With a Room
In 2009, jazz pianist Danny Kolke opened Boxley's in North Bend; a real jazz club, with a real bandstand, in a town of seven thousand people an hour from the nearest jazz scene. It worked. Musicians came, audiences came, and live music several nights a week became an ordinary part of life in the Snoqualmie Valley, which is not something small towns usually get to say. Boxley's would go on to be named in DownBeat magazine among the best jazz venues in the world, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a room at the foot of Mount Si.
The people who loved the room wanted to keep it open, and in working out how, they ran into the arithmetic that every listening room in America runs into. Boxley's could never sell enough cheeseburgers to pay for live jazz all the time. A restaurant's margin does not cover a professional band night after night. That is not a failure of management; it is the structure of the business, and it meant that if the music was going to be there every week, something other than the cash register had to pay for it.
So the Patrons Built Something
In 2010, we founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to do exactly that, with a name as plain as its purpose: the Boxley Music Fund. The model was just as plain. A membership program and a sponsorship program, so the people and businesses who wanted live jazz in their community could pay for it directly instead of hoping the kitchen would cover it. It worked. The Fund grew into the hundreds of member families, and by the middle of that first decade we were serving 100s of students and paying for over 750 gigs a year.
A Few Students Who Needed a Band
The other half of what we do started the same year, and started just as small. Some local students wanted to play at Boxley's, but they could not put together a whole band on their own. So we hired professionals to fill out the group and play with them. It was better than great. So we started doing it regularly, as a program called Future Jazz Heads. Then we began paying professionals to host jam sessions built for students, and it has grown from there ever since. Since then, we have hosted 1,143 student sessions. Students have never paid to play with us; student membership is free, and most shows are free for students to attend.
Let's Start a Festival
In 2012 we took the music outside of just Boxleys and started the North Bend Jazz Walk, with the Blues Walk soon after. They were built to do two things at once: promote the local businesses that make up our downtown, and generate real excitement for live music in North Bend. The format is simple. For one day the whole downtown is the venue. Every storefront is a stage, every band is paid, and the crowd walks from room to room until the last set ends. Both walks have been wildly successful, and their effect reached well past the music. They put a surge of customers through every small business on the street, and they gave Old Town North Bend a reason to be somewhere people went at night.
We Want to Do What You Are Doing
What surprised people outside North Bend was not the music. It was that a town this size could sustain a jazz club at all. Communities started reaching out to ask how it had been done, and the answer traveled better than we expected. We helped launch independent jazz nonprofits in Bellingham and Tacoma, and somewhere in that work it became clear that what we had built was more than a Jazz club. It was a model a community could run for itself. So we changed our name to JazzClubsNW and widened the mission past North Bend. The Boxley Music Fund is still our legal name, and the idea behind it has not changed since 2010.
Three Buildings, One Bandstand
Then we lost the room. The building housing Boxley's went up for sale, and our lease ended with it. We moved the music one block away and partnered with a winery to host it there. Then the winery sold, and then closed. We found a restaurant willing to take the music on, and then that building sold too, and the lease went a second time. Losing a room twice teaches you something worth knowing: the club was never the building. It was the musicians, the audience, and the members paying for it, and all three moved with us every time.
In 2019 we settled into our current home and hung the Boxley's name back on the door. We love the space. It is like the room we started with, with one difference; this time we are not a restaurant. We are a listening room.
Everything Shut Down
In March 2020, everything shut down. Rather than wait it out, we doubled down. By May, we were livestreaming from an empty club, keeping the professionals on our schedule in paid work and giving our members somewhere to gather when there was nowhere to gather. Some sessions did not return in person until the fall of 2021. It was a difficult stretch in our history, but it also gave us something we did not expect to keep. The livestream never went away. It has become a real part of what Boxley's is: members watching from home, people following the room from out of state, and all around the world, with every show going into an archive that students can access for free.
Edmonds Calls
Coming out of the pandemic, Edmonds asked and we answered by starting a chapter there in 2022 and doing what we know how to do. We launched the Edmonds Jazz Walk to put the town's music in front of the town, and we went to work alongside the team at the Jazz Colony to support what they were already building. It has gone well, and we have been helping ever since. The chapter now runs its own live music and school clinics, and an Everett Jazz Walk has followed.
What We Are Now
Snohomish and Lake Stevens are next. We are launching events there for the same reason we have launched them everywhere else: an event raises the money that pays for regular programming, week after week, which is the whole point and always has been. Years ago, when we wrote down what we hoped to do next, one line on the list was to support partners in other communities who wanted to launch membership-based nonprofit jazz clubs of their own. That line is now the organization.JazzClubsNW runs as chapters: North Bend and the Eastside, Edmonds and Everett, and Snohomish and Lake Stevens coming online now. We do not arrive to run somebody else's scene. We bring the nonprofit machinery, the membership and sponsorship model, the festival playbook, the ticketing and the fundraising, and the community brings everything that actually matters. We also partner directly with venues: rooms already hosting live music, where an audience's support can go straight to the artists on that stage.
What Comes Next?
More Jazz Everywhere! That is genuinely the plan. We are looking to support other communities that want to do what we do: put on events and build live jazz performance and education where they live. Some of them will want a chapter of JazzClubsNW. Some will want to start something of their own, the way Bellingham and Tacoma did, and use us as the example and the sounding board. Either is a good outcome.
JazzClubsNW exists to keep jazz alive in the Pacific Northwest by paying professional musicians, giving students a bandstand to grow up on, and helping communities build and sustain jazz venues and events of their own.
Why it matters this much is simple. Jazz is an American art form that does not sustain itself automatically. It needs rooms to be played in, audiences who show up, and young players who get to stand next to someone better than they are. Take those away, and it does not survive on recordings alone. Our members are the reason it does not have to.
We publish the rest, too. You can read our financial reporting, including our Form 990, and see who sits on our volunteer board, nine members, none compensated for board service.
Be Part of It
This organization exists because a group of patrons decided live music in their town was worth paying for, and that is still exactly how it works. You can become a member, the program that started all of this, or make a donation, which is tax-deductible and goes to the bandstand. You can see what's coming up, most shows are free for students. And if you are wondering whether your town could have what North Bend has, tell us about it. That question is how every chapter we have started got started.