Thirty-eight years of
Catalina JazzTrax.
The man who programs it
also hosts the radio show.

Exhibit A

Thirty-eight editions of rotation

The longest continuous record in this study, and the clearest. The first bar is entirely brass because the festival did not exist before it. Within five years the dark portion takes over and it never gives the ground back.

Thirty-eight editions held, 915 artist-slots, 309 distinct artists — 2.96 bookings per artist, the highest density in the study. Excluding the first edition, 66.5% of every slot went to a returning artist; across the last ten editions, 72.1%. Only 2020 was skipped, and it was postponed rather than cancelled — the 34th edition moved intact to 2021, so there is no numbering gap. 1992 is the single unrecoverable year.

Exhibit B

Careers, drawn end to end

The fifteen most-booked artists across thirty-eight years. Each dot is one edition. Read a row as a working life: Peter White’s first dot is 1991 and his most recent is 2026 — thirty-five years on one island.

One hundred and fifty-eight artists — 51.1% of everyone ever booked — played exactly once. Nineteen have played ten times or more. The top ten take 16.1% of all slots, a far flatter distribution than Daytona’s 60.8%; a festival running three weekends a year for four decades has room for a long tail. The concentration here is at the top of the bill, not across it.

Exhibit C

Who comes back, and how many years in a row

The same 915 slots, sorted by whether the artist had been booked before. Of 309 artists ever booked, 151 came back at least once — and those 151 hold 757 of the 915 slots. Counting every edition from 1987, 606 slots — 66.2% — went to an artist who had already played an earlier JazzTrax.

Depth of return: 106 artists have played three or more editions, 62 have played five or more, 19 have played ten or more. A run counts consecutive editions held; 2020 was postponed to 2021 with no numbering gap, so 2019 and 2021 are adjacent editions. 1992 is unrecovered and is never bridged, so any run through it is cut in two. Partial years can only shorten a run, never lengthen it — every figure here is a floor.

Exhibit D

The radio show and the festival

Art Good has hosted the syndicated JazzTrax radio show since 1985. He founded this festival in 1987 and still programs it. He does not represent artists. He is the only person in this study who both programs a festival and hosts a syndicated radio show aimed at the same audience.

“I got a tour of the Casino Ballroom, and the second I went in, I thought: this is a great spot for a jazz festival. And I realized I wouldn’t need advertising because I could announce it on my syndicated show.”

As quoted by Dirk Sutro, “There’s Still Plenty of Room to Jam on Catalina,” Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1991 (wording as printed in that article). The same article quotes him on programming: “When I put the lineups together, I look for one strong, powerful name to build around… Then I go for the people with the hottest albums.” The festival’s own history page calls the event “a spin-off of the JazzTrax Syndicated Radio Show… that created the audience that comes from all over America.”

Exhibit E

What it costs, and what stopped being published

Catalina published its prices for its first fifteen years and then stopped.

For roughly twenty years every page routed to a third-party ticketing site rather than name a price. The 2026 top weekend series is 5.6 times the 1991 full-weekend price. Casino Ballroom capacity has never been published by the festival in thirty-eight years; the only precise seat count it gives is 471, for the Thursday show on the beach.

Method

Where the numbers come from

Thirty-eight editions is long enough for a room to close completely. For what fourteen seasons look like when it does not, read the control.