May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
Sonny Rollins Passes Away at 95
Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st…
A changing of the guard, from left: Ellen Price, Darrian Douglas, Clara Winder and Mark Morganelli transition to keep Jazz Forum Arts on track.
(Photo: Courtesy Jazz Forum Arts)Mark Morganelli and Ellen Prior, the executive director and chief operating officer of Jazz Forum Arts, respectively, were on Zoom during their second day in Ferrara and third week in Italy to discuss their impending July 1 retirement from the eminent Westchester County-based not-for-profit organization that has been presenting jazz since it was inaugurated on July 28, 1985, a week after their marriage.
Morganelli announced they would begin a second 2026 Italian sojourn in July, with a third to follow in the fall, reinforcing the impression that he and Prior, both 1955 babies, are sanguine about transferring leadership to a new generation.
Morganelli’s successor, Darrian Douglas, 41, a superb drummer who founded the New Orleans-based, education-oriented nonprofit Second Line Arts Collective in 2017, assumes responsibility for guiding JFA’s artistic and educational mission and booking its Tarrytown club. Clara Winder, 31, a long-time employee who has been in charge of social media, blends general manager duties with fundraising and marketing.
They take the reins at Jazz Forum, which Morganelli opened in June 1979 in his Noho loft in New York City, launching with a weekend by the Dizzy Reece–Clifford Jordan Quintet. When his landlord emptied the premises a year later, he was presenting seven nights a week, as he did after transplanting to another loft at Broadway and Bleecker. Operating both venues on a residential lease, Morganelli established the Jazz Forum as a prominent contributor to New York’s jazz community, hosting Barry Harris’ Monday workshops for three years of Monday nights and reserving weekends for high-profile acts like the Marsalis-era Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Kenny Barron, Roy Haynes and Cedar Walton. In early 1983, his landlord enforced the commercial-use clause, forcing Morganelli to rent a second apartment. Short of cash, he missed a rent deadline. The landlord evicted him, refusing his offer of three months’ rent loaned by Marsalis and Blakey, both domiciled across the street at the time. Morganelli produced concerts at the Village Gate for two years afterward but was broke and could not reopen.
In November 1983, he met Prior, his third grade classmate in Glen Head, Long Island, at their 10-year high school reunion. Soon they were cohabiting at Prior’s Upper West Side co-op, a few blocks from the site of the Riverside Park Arts Festival, which became Morganelli’s predicate for forming Jazz Forum Arts (which ran it until 1997). For JFA’s first eight years he drew no salary; Prior served as “the health insurance and the job,” keeping the ship afloat with her salary as a management consultant along with occasional remortgages of the house they bought upon moving to Dobbs Ferry, New York, in 1991, when their first son was 2.
From fall 1992, when he presented Ahmad Jamal, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie in his last public appearance, through mid-2013, Morganelli produced 150 Jazz at the Music Hall concerts at the Tarrytown Music Hall, an acoustically pristine 843-seat, 1885 Queen Anne Theater, obtaining corporate and government funding to launch 12 other theater series and festivals, and, since 2000, as many as 53 free outdoor concerts in 13 Westchester, Rockland and Fairfield communities. By 2015, JFA’s operating budget had expanded to roughly $300,000.
Upon becoming empty-nesters, the couple decided “to open a club and have a place together.” Theny bought 1 Dixon Lane, built in 1910 as a barn, giving Morganelli his first permanent location. They moved into the apartment upstairs while developing the ground floor space for two years, investing $600,000 of personal funds and drawing on the goodwill accrued from Morganelli’s past activities to raise $160,000 from 60 charter donors. Before opening, they sought advice from Wynton Marsalis, whose answer — “make it like home” — became a guiding principle.
Seeking to expand JFA’s digital outreach, Prior hired Winder, who’d recent graduated from University of Michigan. After taking “baby steps forward in the right direction” for a year, Winder hired a digital marketing expert and “started contacting all the artists, some with huge followings, to share JFA’S social media content: If 2018 Clara saw what 2026 Jazz Forum Arts’ digital presence would be, she would be astonished.”
Morganelli met Douglas in 2009 when he hired him to play a quartet show in New Orleans. By then, Douglas had been Ellis Marsalis’ regular drummer since early 2006. In 2013, he joined Bria Skonberg, who kept him busy for the next 12 years, including the May 2025 weekend gig when Douglas reconnected with Morganelli and met Prior. Douglas told Morganelli about his own experiences with SLCA and his educational philosophy, and his desire to come off the road and spend quality time with his wife and young daughter. Both elders were impressed, and in July 2025 they brought Douglas on board part-time. By January, having fulfilled all his gig commitments, he was appointed director of programs, in charge of JFA’s educational and artistic mission, and its outdoor summer concert series.
At the time of interviewing for this article, Douglas had booked 31 of JFA’s 33 summer concerts and the last six months of the club’s 2026 calendar. “Almost everyone is 40 and under, so our audience can experience a brand-new crop of musicians,” he said. “Clara and her team will push hard on them.”
In addition to several additions to JFA’s existing educational programs, Douglas has joined Winder in raising $45,000 of a prospective $250,000 endowment for the Mark and Ellen Legacy Fund. “Many of the charter donors have continued to donate consistently,” Winder said. “They trust Mark and Ellen’s perspective on trusting us to carry their vision forward.
“It’s important to me to make this a place that’s not home or work, where folks can gather and find community. I want to reach people who say they don’t like jazz or are intimidated by jazz, and show them how amazing it is to sit next to a stranger at a live jazz performance and see the improvisation: You’re both experiencing something you’ll never experience again.” DB
Onstage, Rollins would move about restlessly, thrusting his tenor sax in the air as he blew.
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