Every bill from the inaugural weekend in May 2021 through the seventh, on sale now for April 2027. Seventy-nine artist-slots, thirty-eight distinct artists, one nonprofit, one tent, three hundred and twenty seats. It is the smallest event in this study and the most tightly closed.
Each bar is one weekend. The dark portion is artists who had already played Daytona. The brass sliver is everyone appearing for the first time, with the headcount above it. The first bar is entirely brass because the event did not exist before it. By the fifth weekend, 81.8% of the bill was people the same audience had already watched in the same tent.
Seven editions, 79 artist-slots, 38 distinct artists — 2.08 bookings per artist, reached in only seven years. Newport Beach runs 1.63 over thirteen editions and San Diego 1.51 over eight; only Rehoboth, with twenty-nine recovered editions, is denser. Excluding the inaugural year, 56.2% of every Daytona slot went to a returning artist; across the last five editions, 60.7%. The 2027 bill looks like a break in the pattern until you read Exhibit F.
This is the distribution of the entire thirty-eight-person roster: how many artists have played one edition, two, three, and so on. It is the single strangest chart in this study, and it is strange in a way that no amount of taste or programming philosophy explains.
Twenty-five artists have played exactly once. Six have played twice. Then nothing. No one has played three times. No one has played four times. And then seven people have played five, six or seven — a group that absorbs 48 of the 79 slots on offer between them — 42 of 79, or 53.2%, for seven people. Widen it to the top ten and the figure is 60.8%. For comparison, the top ten artists at Newport Beach take 21.5% of that festival's slots; at San Diego, 29.6%.
You are either furniture or you are a guest. There is no third condition, and no route from one to the other.
A festival genuinely auditioning talent would produce a smooth curve — a few one-timers, a broad middle of artists earning their third and fourth invitation, a handful of anchors. Daytona produces a barbell. Sixty-six percent of everyone it has ever booked was booked once and never again, while the people who work there work there permanently. The middle is where careers are supposed to be built. This festival does not have one.
The seven artists who have played five or more of the seven editions. A filled circle is an appearance. Keiko Matsui, Vincent Ingala and Peter White have not missed a single weekend in the event's entire history. No other festival in this study has produced three simultaneous perfect attendance records — San Diego has one, Eric Darius, and he is the host.
| Artist | Editions | Rate | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keiko Matsui | 7 / 7 | 100.0% | hosted the inaugural 2021 edition |
| Peter White | 7 / 7 | 100.0% | played five editions, then became the host and kept playing |
| Vincent Ingala | 7 / 7 | 100.0% | billed as a “special guest” in 2026, his sixth appearance |
| Paul Taylor | 6 / 7 | 85.7% | hosts the Friday golf outing as well — 2021, 2025 and 2027 |
| Mindi Abair | 5 / 7 | 71.4% | hosted 2022–2025. Not on the 2026 or 2027 bill |
| Randy Jacobs | 5 / 7 | 71.4% | arrived in 2022 as a sideman, promoted to the bill in 2023 |
| Rick Braun | 5 / 7 | 71.4% | returns in 2027 to play the music of Chuck Mangione |
For scale: across the ten largest smooth jazz events in the United States, a 100% appearance rate is almost always a job rather than a booking — the host, or the house band. Daytona has three of them, and only one, Peter White, is the host.
Keiko Matsui hosted the inaugural weekend in 2021 and played it. Mindi Abair hosted 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 — and played all four, plus the Saturday brunch set in the Rolex 24 Lounge, plus the optional wine tasting with her name on it. Peter White took over as host for 2026 and 2027, and plays both.
Mindi Abair has not been booked at Daytona since she stopped hosting it. Five straight editions, 2021 through 2025, then nothing in 2026 and nothing in 2027. She remains in the foundation's world — she is on the Clearwater bill for 2026 — but the run at the event she fronted ended the moment the fronting did.
Peter White ran the other experiment. He played five editions as an artist, then took the host's chair — and his booking continued without interruption. The two runs track the hosting contract more closely than they track anything audible from the stage.
Named in the promoter's own copy, in each of the six years it published a rhythm section: Ron Reinhardt (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2027) · Dave Reinhardt (all six published years) · Tim George (all six) · Rico Belled (2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, 2027) · Third Richardson (2021, 2024, 2025, 2027).
Three men have backed every single Daytona Jazz Weekend whose rhythm section has ever been published. They are not counted anywhere in this document's seventy-nine slots, because they were never on the bill. They were being paid as players, not booked as attractions.
Three men have made the crossing from the band to the bill, all of them onto the same 2023 poster: Tom Braxton and Ilya Serov, who backed the inaugural weekend in 2021, and Randy Jacobs, who arrived inside the band in 2022. Braxton and Serov have not been billed since. Jacobs has been on all five bills after it.
The Daytona Jazz Weekend is not a festival with a booking problem. It is one product line inside a four-product company. The Florida Smooth Jazz Foundation also runs the Florida Smooth Jazz Weekend, now each November (twelve editions since January 2015), Rick Braun's New Year's Eve in Orlando (four), and co-produces the Clearwater Smooth Jazz Jam at Ruth Eckerd Hall (four). Twenty-seven editions in total, 276 artist-slots, 83 distinct artists.
Peter White has been on 24 of the 27. Rick Braun on 22. Five artists — Peter White, Rick Braun, Richard Elliot, Gerald Albright and Boney James — have played all four events. Ten people take 47.1% of everything the foundation books. Forty-seven percent of the artists it has ever hired were hired once.
In 2024 and again in 2025, buying a ticket to all four Florida Smooth Jazz Foundation events meant watching Peter White four times.
And the loop does not stop at the state line. Twenty-four of Daytona's thirty-eight artists — 63.2% — have also played Newport Beach, a continent away and booked by a completely unrelated company, and that is a floor: open Newport's package billings and Jeff Kashiwa and Randy Jacobs join them, taking it to 68.4%. Twenty, or 52.6%, have played San Diego. Nobody is coordinating this. There is one pool, and everyone fishes it.
On paper, 2027 is the most open bill since 2022: eight of the fourteen names have never played Daytona. Read the eight names and the opening closes again.
Jeffrey Osborne played the foundation's November weekend in 2024 and its Clearwater jam in 2024. Julian Vaughn has played the November weekend twice and the New Year's Eve. Nicholas Cole has played the November weekend three times. Evan Taylor played Clearwater last year. Four of the eight “new” artists are simply being moved between the same owner's four venues.
That leaves four people — Jenny Langer, Kyle Schroeder, Adrian Crutchfield and Darnell Taylor — who have never been booked by this organisation before. Four genuinely new names, out of fourteen slots, in year seven.
Meanwhile the returning six are the same six: White, Matsui, Ingala, Taylor, Braun, Jacobs. And the marquee attraction of the 2027 weekend is Rick Braun Plays Chuck Mangione — a 2027 concert built on a 1977 album, performed by a man already on five of the seven bills, for an audience that bought Feels So Good new. The other marquee name, Jeffrey Osborne, had his first major hit with L.T.D. in 1976 and released his first solo album in 1982.
2021 · cheapest package $2,298 per person double occupancy · 180 seats
2025 · cheapest $2,998 · 320 seats
2027 · cheapest $3,098 · top suite $4,598 · 320 seats
A couple in the best room at the 2027 weekend pays $9,196. The cheapest way in has risen 34.8% since the inaugural year. Over the same period the three artists at the top of the bill have not changed once.
Extras are separate: the Friday golf outing with Paul Taylor has gone from $120 to $150 (non-playing riders $55), and 2021 offered hot laps at the Daytona International Speedway for $80.
The foundation calls the format a “Cruise on Land,” a concept BMG Concerts attributes to its owner, Roland Guilarte, in 1998, later revived with Cathy Powers. It is a 320-seat covered tent at ONE DAYTONA, across the road from the Daytona International Speedway.
The Florida Smooth Jazz Foundation Inc. is a Florida 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 56-2517811, with Forms 990 on file from 2005 and IRS recognition dated March 2006; its president is Cathryn (Cathy) Powers. A Form 990 is a self-reported information return, not an audit. These filings are among the few public financial records for any promoter in this study, and they are read here in both directions.
| Fiscal year | Total revenue | Total expenses | Net assets | Grants paid out | Officer pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $1,136,723 | $1,011,979 | $106,270 | $2,500 | $0 |
| 2020 · no events | $361,455 | $96,076 | $371,649 | $5,000 | $0 |
| 2021 · first Daytona | $806,903 | $755,347 | $423,205 | $0 | $0 |
| 2022 | $1,617,478 | $1,332,121 | $708,562 | $27,500 | $0 |
| 2023 | $2,977,400 | $2,120,119 | $1,565,843 | $34,500 | $0 |
| 2024 | $3,253,275 | $2,732,445 | $2,086,673 | $100,000 | $0 |
The part that deserves credit, stated plainly: nobody is taking a dollar. Cathy Powers is listed at forty hours a week for zero compensation, every year, in every column. Total salaries and wages: $0 in each return with extracted data (FY2019–2022); no employee wage expense is reported. Total professional fundraising fees: $0. That is unusual and it is real, and any fair reading of these filings has to start there.
Grants have risen. Schedule I of the FY2024 return itemises $90,000 to six organisations: the Clearwater Jazz Holiday Foundation ($25,000), the Marcus Anderson Foundation ($20,000), HAPCO Music ($20,000), Closing the Gap in Health Care ($10,000), the Daytona State College Foundation ($7,500) and Marshall University ($7,500). Schedule I grants across FY2022–2024 total about $140,000 in eleven grants.
The part worth noticing: in FY2024 the foundation took in $3,253,275, of which $3,109,877 was program service revenue — ticket and package sales — and $0 was contributions. Revenue came from package sales rather than donations. Of that $3.25m, $100,000, or 3.1%, went out as grants, while net assets grew by $520,830 in a single year to $2.09m.
The board is three people and has been the same three people throughout: Cathryn Powers, president; Mark Powers, secretary; Eric Sosinski, director. Schedule O discloses that Cathryn and Mark Powers are married and that Cathryn Powers and Eric Sosinski are siblings. The FY2024 return answers yes to family relationships among officers and directors. A $3.25m tax-exempt entity is governed by related parties, and the organisation discloses that itself on the face of the return. Related-party boards are lawful and common among founder-led charities; the disclosure is the compliance, and this one made it.
Nothing here is a scandal, and none of it suggests the foundation’s exempt status is improper. A charity may lawfully fund itself almost entirely from program revenue, and many do. The point is narrower: the economics of an exempt entity and a commercial promoter differ, and that difference shows up in the booking.
A commercial promoter with the same lineup would pay tax on the $520,830 it retained. Because the surplus is exempt and the deficit risk is therefore lower, the incentive to gamble on an unknown artist is lower too. The booking pattern in Exhibits A through C is not a mystery once you have read the balance sheet: this organisation has no financial reason to run an experiment, and with 320 seats it has limited commercial reason either.
Lineups were assembled from the foundation's own pages at floridasmoothjazz.com — live for 2027, and via Internet Archive captures of /homedjw21, /packages-djw-2021, /daytona-jazz-weekend-22-home, /daytona-jazz-weekend-25 and /packages-djw25 for the earlier years — supplemented by Paul Taylor's and Jeff Kashiwa's own gig archives, Songkick, the SmoothJazz.com JazzBlast for 2026, and local listings. All seven editions are accounted for. Financials are from the organisation's filed Forms 990 as published by ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.
One appearance = one artist on one edition's bill, solo or inside a package billing; "RnR feat. Rick Braun & Richard Elliot" counts as two people, "Rick Braun Plays Chuck Mangione" as one. Named special guests count. The contracted house rhythm section is excluded from all slot counts and discussed separately in Exhibit D. Package prices for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2026 could not be recovered — those pages were deleted and never archived — so the price card quotes only the three years with primary documentation. Every figure here is a floor, never an estimate.
The highest four-desk share in the study, at 74.7%. The lowest is 3.5%.