The festivals are run by different companies in different states who mostly do not know each other. A large share of their bills comes from the same four rosters. Four rosters — fifty-four distinct people — fill 42.5% of the 1,719 artist-slots counted here. This page maps who represents whom, from the agencies’ own published rosters, and counts what share of each event’s bill each desk delivers.
Every ribbon is a supply relationship. Thickness is the share of that festival’s bill that desk delivers. Read left to right: four companies, 9 events, one pool of artists moving between them. Nobody here is coordinating with anybody else — that is what makes the pattern worth looking at.
Share of each event’s total artist-slots, all editions counted. Bold is 25% or more — one desk supplying a quarter of everything an event has ever booked.
| Event | Editions | Slots | Reliant Talent | Chapman & Co. | Mighty Music | Major Scale | Any of the four |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daytona | 7 | 79 | 49.4% | 36.7% | 10.1% | 6.3% | 74.7% |
| Rick Braun's New Year's Eve | 4 | 32 | 62.5% | 31.2% | — | 9.4% | 71.9% |
| Florida Smooth Jazz Weekend | 12 | 133 | 42.9% | 27.8% | 13.5% | 6.0% | 66.9% |
| Gulf Coast | 9 | 126 | 40.5% | 12.7% | 15.1% | 1.6% | 57.1% |
| Clearwater Smooth Jazz Jam | 4 | 32 | 40.6% | 25.0% | — | 9.4% | 56.2% |
| Yosemite | 6 | 54 | 27.8% | 29.6% | 11.1% | 1.9% | 51.9% |
| San Diego | 8 | 125 | 24.8% | 9.6% | 16.8% | 5.6% | 49.6% |
| Catalina | 38 | 915 | 21.1% | 11.8% | 8.5% | 2.5% | 34.8% |
| Newport Beach | 13 | 223 | 17.5% | 9.0% | 7.2% | 2.7% | 27.8% |
| Apaulo events (Michael Paulo) | 8 | 557 | 9.2% | 6.3% | 8.3% | 1.8% | 22.1% |
| Spaghettini, Seal Beach | 3 | 1085 | 9.1% | 6.7% | 4.0% | 3.7% | 20.2% |
The desk columns overlap and must not be added together. Six artists — Peter White, Richard Elliot, Vincent Ingala, Euge Groove, Lindsey Webster and Mindi Abair — are managed by Chapman and booked by Reliant, so they appear in both columns. The four rosters list sixty names but only fifty-four distinct people. The final column therefore counts each slot once: the share of the bill filled by anyone on any of the four rosters. Across all 1,719 slots that figure is 42.5%.
Sorted by that final column. About half of all festival slots (52.4% of 1,719) trace to any named desk — the rest go to artists with no agency identified in this study’s sources. The concentration sits at the top of the bill, not across it.
The map is not flat. Chapman & Co. is a management company; Reliant is a booking agency. Six of Chapman’s ten clients are booked by Fred Hansen at Reliant — so those six each have both a manager and a booking agent listed on Chapman’s site.
Deduplicated, the Chapman-plus-Reliant bloc is twenty-eight people. They take 28.6% of every slot in the study — and far more at the smaller events: 62.5% of Rick Braun’s New Year’s Eve, 58.2% of the Daytona Jazz Weekend, 47.4% of the Florida Smooth Jazz Weekend.
Chapman’s own site is unusually transparent: it publishes, for each client, the record label and the booking agent and the internal manager. Six of the ten are on Shanachie. Label data is recorded here but not analysed.
Most people in this map do one job. Four hold two roles at once, and in each case the description of both roles is their own, published on their own website and quoted here. What those dual roles mean is this page’s inference, and is labelled as such. No wrongdoing is alleged against anyone named below, and none should be inferred: holding two roles in a small market is common and lawful. Each person named here was sent the passage about them before publication and invited to respond; responses are printed at Corrections & Right of Reply.
Represents 13 artists (roster as retrieved August 2026). His agency’s own copy: “Along with booking in-demand artists at more than 300 events annually, Steve also produces events, buys talent, and provides logistics for festivals and concerts across the US.” The site lists eight events, including the Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival, and a “Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival Producer of the Year” award.
Rehoboth’s promoter of record is a 501(c)(3), the Delaware Celebration of Jazz. Its own site names no talent buyer, so how the two roles divide at Rehoboth cannot be determined from public sources. Booking artists and producing events are both ordinary lines of business.
Thirteen clients, a roster page headed “now booking for the 2027 | 2028 festival season” — and, per its own site and social media, a 2026 West Coast Jazz Cruise. The site does not name a principal.
It also lists seven artist packages: fixed pairings and trios offered as units.
Represents no artists. He founded the Catalina Island JazzTrax Festival in 1987, programs it, and has hosted the syndicated JazzTrax radio show since 1985.
As quoted by Dirk Sutro in the Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1991: “I realized I wouldn’t need advertising because I could announce it on my syndicated show.” His site rates new records on a one-to-five-star JazzTrax airplay key. Three of his 2025 award recipients appear on the 2026 festival bill (see the Catalina volume).
One quoted fact, and only what it supports. The station’s own copy says its Radar Chart “features our current roster of artist clients exclusively.” On that wording the chart is a listing of the station’s own clients rather than a survey of the format, which is what limits its use as independent evidence of demand.
Nothing further is asserted here. SmoothJazz.com is an internet station, not a broadcast licensee, so the sponsorship-identification rules at 47 U.S.C. §317 do not apply to it, and no violation of any kind is alleged or implied. Earlier drafts of this page described a longer chain of roles on a single source; that chain has been removed as insufficiently documented.
A promoter, an agent and a radio programmer are usually three different jobs. This exhibit records the four cases in this study where one person holds two.
Several producers in this study represent no artists — Omega Events (with Hyatt Concerts) at Newport Beach, the Berks Jazz Fest organisation (artistic director John Ernesto through 2024), Rainbow Promotions in San Diego, and Dr Cathy Powers’ Florida Smooth Jazz Foundation. Dual roles occur in this study but are not universal.
The concentration in Exhibit B is not a fact about the music. It is a fact about festivals. Put the same measurement on an artist-run concert series and on a high-frequency club, and the four desks’ share falls by roughly half.
| Kind of room | Slots counted | Filled from the four rosters |
|---|---|---|
| Promoter-run festivals — the 9 events in this study | 1,719 | 42.5% |
| Artist-run events — everything Apaulo Productions books | 557 | 22.1% |
| A high-frequency club — Spaghettini, Seal Beach, 2024–26 | 1,085 | 20.2% |
The four-desk share at the festivals (42.5%) is about twice the share at the artist-run events (22.1%) and at the high-frequency club (20.2%).
Spaghettini is the sharpest counter-example in the whole study. It is the highest-frequency contemporary jazz room in this study — 1,085 shows across 899 nights in three years, pulled from the venue’s own event database rather than reconstructed. And 79.8% of those bookings trace to no named agency at all. The room runs on house residencies and direct-booked local acts: one band, DW3, plays 299 of the 1,085 nights.
Its site names no talent buyer; the only named staff member responsible for artists is an Artist Relations Manager. No outside booking company is credited on the venue’s site. What the calendar actually shows is that the recurring nights are curated by artists — Eric Marienthal hosts 36 Music Mondays, Michael Lington presents seven Sax to Soul nights — and between them those two men have brought Rick Braun, Peter White, Lee Ritenour, Marcus Miller, Boney James, Keiko Matsui, Candy Dulfer, Peabo Bryson and Kenny Lattimore through the door.
One correction the raw table hides: Chapman & Co. shows 6.7% of this room, but 36 of its 39 exclusive shows are Eric Marienthal, whose own contact page lists a family member, not an agency, as booking contact. As a booking desk Chapman’s share of Spaghettini is about 0.3%. The 6.7% is a management footprint. Nine of the seventeen Independent Artist Group shows are “Dave Koz Cruise Presents” showcases where Koz is not on the bill.
Michael Paulo is a saxophonist of nearly thirty-five years’ standing — his longest touring association was with Al Jarreau — and he also runs Apaulo Music Productions, which books roughly sixteen concert nights a year. He is on both sides of the table, and he is the cleanest case in the study for asking what that actually does.
A common question is reciprocity: artist-producers hiring each other. Measured directly across 557 slots he has booked and 54 parties who have booked him, it mostly is not there.
Of the roughly 200 artists Paulo has booked, ten have ever booked him — 5.0%. Read the other way it looks different: of the eleven individual artists who have hired him, he has hired ten. But that slice is small. Forty-three of his fifty-four buyers are institutions that structurally cannot reciprocate — a Jakarta festival company, a Pennsylvania arts council, a Catalina promoter, universities, resorts, clubs. That is where his career actually lives.
Tested on the relationship people would most expect to be a trade: Paulo booked Rick Braun into Paulo-produced events at least nine times between October 2010 and January 2026. The first clear booking in the other direction, into a property Braun owns, is December 2026 — a sixteen-year lag. On that chronology the bookings do not form a reciprocal pattern. And the trade a reciprocity thesis would most predict — Paulo and Warren Hill, two men who each own festivals, Hill booked twice by Paulo — never reversed at all.
22.1% of the 557 slots he has booked went to the four desks — roughly half the festival rate.
But the trend inside his own business runs the other way. His three festivals, none with an edition found after 2024, were the widest: Temecula 8.1% across fourteen editions, Asian Heritage 6.2%. His surviving resort series are the narrowest: Grooves at The Westin 42.7%, Grooves in the Grove 35.7%, Rhythm on the Vine 31.5%.
As the festivals ended and the resort series continued, the four-desk share of his bills rose.
No later editions of his three named festivals were found in this study’s sources — Pacific Rim after 2013, Asian Heritage after 2017, Temecula after July 2024. What remains is two small resort series he owns and one he produces for a winery that owns the trademark.
By the ledger he is a hired player who also produces, not a producer who also plays: eight years at Java Jazz (per artist bio), five at Berks, eight at Catalina, plus clubs and resorts on four continents — a deeper and more institutionally varied body of work than his production business, which is now three series in two California resort markets.
Two working musicians who each produce events and hire each other is common in small markets. The reason to measure it is that the question is often asked; in this case the measured reciprocity is low.
Everything in one count: eighteen event series — the nine festivals, the Apaulo events, and every edition of each — 2,844 artist-slots, 532 distinct artists. This is the list the individual volumes cannot show you, because each of them only sees its own stage.
| # | Artist | Slots | Event series | Desk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peter White | 70 | 11 | Reliant + Chapman |
| 2 | Rick Braun | 56 | 12 | Reliant |
| 3 | Mindi Abair | 42 | 11 | Reliant + Chapman |
| 4 | Brian Simpson | 40 | 13 | Mighty Music |
| 5 | Eric Darius | 39 | 8 | Mighty Music |
| 6 | Vincent Ingala | 39 | 8 | Reliant + Chapman |
| 7 | Richard Elliot | 33 | 9 | Reliant + Chapman |
| 8 | Steve Oliver | 32 | 9 | Ent. Creative Concepts |
| 9 | Keiko Matsui | 32 | 10 | Chapman + MPI |
| 10 | Gerald Albright | 30 | 9 | Reliant |
| 11 | Gregg Karukas | 30 | 7 | Booking contact: Al Evers (A-Train) |
| 12 | Brian Culbertson | 29 | 5 | Wasserman |
| 13 | Paul Taylor | 28 | 6 | Reliant |
| 14 | Paul Brown | 28 | 9 | WBA Entertainment |
| 15 | Boney James | 24 | 9 | Independent Artist Grp |
| 16 | Euge Groove | 24 | 6 | Reliant + Chapman |
| 17 | David Benoit | 24 | 10 | Chapman + Universal Attractions |
| 18 | Marc Antoine | 22 | 7 | no agent identified |
| 19 | Adam Hawley | 22 | 9 | Reliant |
| 20 | Hiroshima | 22 | 8 | MPI |
Two things stand out that no single festival reveals. Steve Oliver is eighth overall and appears across 9 different series, yet he barely touches the Florida cluster — his work is concentrated in California, at Catalina, Newport Beach, San Diego, Yosemite and the artist-run rooms. A study of the Florida festivals alone would almost miss him. Adam Hawley is nineteenth, also across 9 series, on the Reliant roster, and spread thin rather than anchored — with one exception. He has played Gulf Coast four times in nine counted editions, his strongest single relationship anywhere in the study.
Thirteen of the twenty are on at least one of the four rosters; seven are not. Of those seven, five use other agencies (Entertainment Creative Concepts, Wasserman, WBA Entertainment, Independent Artist Group, MPI), Gregg Karukas lists an individual booking contact, and no booking agent was identified for Marc Antoine. The four desks account for much of the top of the festival bill, not the whole circuit.
One slot = one artist on one edition of one series. An artist billed twice in a single edition counts once for that edition. Rankings shift if the Apaulo events are excluded; they are included here because the question is who works this circuit, not who works its festivals.
An artist is attributed to a desk only where that agency’s own roster page says so, or the artist’s own booking page names the agent. Representation is never inferred from a shared festival billing — two artists on one stage tells you nothing about who sold them. Where an agency and an artist contradict each other, both are recorded and the artist is counted for both desks, so the columns can sum to slightly more than 100%. That overlap is reported rather than hidden.
Seven artists are claimed by more than one desk, and they are flagged in the source file rather than assigned. Sources are the agencies’ published rosters (Reliant’s 2026 roster PDF, mightymusiccorp.com, majorscalemanagement.com, chapmanmanagement.com) cross-checked against each artist’s own contact page, retrieved August 2026. Roster pages go stale; every figure here is a snapshot with a date on it. One agency’s PDF contains a typo that invents a person who does not exist — it is noted in the data file and excluded. Mighty Music’s live roster page in September 2026 listed eleven artists and one group; the thirteen-artist count is the August 2026 snapshot.
All 18 counted series, sorted by the share of slots going to an artist on one of the four desks. Rows in bold are the series with 200 or more slots. “Repeat” is the share of slots that went to an act which had already appeared in an earlier season of that same series. Every figure recomputed from all-appearances.csv.
| Series | Type | Slots | Seasons | Acts | Four desks | Repeat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daytona Jazz Weekend | Promoter-run festival | 79 | 7 | 38 | 74.7% | 51.9% |
| Rick Braun’s New Year’s Eve | Promoter-run festival | 32 | 4 | 23 | 71.9% | 28.1% |
| Florida Smooth Jazz Weekend | Promoter-run festival | 133 | 12 | 57 | 66.9% | 57.1% |
| Gulf Coast Summer Fest Jazz Edition | Promoter-run festival | 126 | 9 | 66 | 57.1% | 47.6% |
| Clearwater Smooth Jazz Jam | Promoter-run festival | 32 | 4 | 24 | 56.2% | 25.0% |
| Yosemite Jazz Train | Promoter-run festival | 54 | 6 | 27 | 51.9% | 50.0% |
| San Diego Smooth Jazz Festival | Promoter-run festival | 125 | 8 | 83 | 49.6% | 33.6% |
| Apaulo: Grooves At The Westin | Artist-run | 110 | 10 | 60 | 42.7% | 45.5% |
| Apaulo: Grooves In The Grove | Artist-run | 28 | 3 | 23 | 35.7% | 17.9% |
| Catalina Island JazzTrax | Promoter-run festival | 915 | 38 | 309 | 34.8% | 66.2% |
| Apaulo: Rhythm On The Vine | Artist-run | 89 | 7 | 51 | 31.5% | 42.7% |
| Apaulo: Live From La Costa | Artist-run | 30 | 5 | 25 | 30.0% | 16.7% |
| BMG Concerts | Promoter-run concert series | 568 | 34 | 259 | 28.7% | 52.5% |
| Newport Beach Jazz Festival | Promoter-run festival | 223 | 13 | 137 | 27.8% | 38.6% |
| Apaulo: Pacific Rim Jazz Festival | Artist-run | 52 | 4 | 38 | 19.2% | 26.9% |
| Apaulo: Temecula Wine & Music Festival | Artist-run | 198 | 14 | 105 | 8.1% | 47.0% |
| Apaulo: Asian Heritage Jazz Festival | Artist-run | 48 | 3 | 37 | 6.2% | 22.9% |
| Apaulo: Grooves Jazz Festival | Artist-run | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0.0% | 0.0% |
Bucket averages, slot-weighted: Promoter-run festival 42.5% (9 series, 1,719 slots) · Promoter-run concert series 28.7% (1 series, 568 slots) · Artist-run 22.1% (8 series, 557 slots). Buckets must be quoted with their label — the promoter-run festival figure is not “the circuit”. Two further buckets are measured but sit outside this file and so outside the table above: a high-frequency club (Spaghettini, Seal Beach, 1,085 shows) at 20.2%, and the control (Jazz at the Oxford, 115 slots) at 3.5%. Across everything in the master file itself the figure is 35.8%.
The four desks supply 42.5% of the promoter-run festivals here, 22.1% of the artist-run ones and 3.5% of the control. Those three numbers are the whole argument.