Mar 4, 2025 1:29 PM
Changing of the Guard at Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra
On October 23, Ted Nash – having toured the world playing alto, soprano and tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass…
Bonnie Eisele and Les DeMerle performing at the Amelia Island Jazz Festival, which they also present.
(Photo: Caroline Blochinger)Les DeMerle learned by doing. DeMerle toured around with the Harry James Big Band for more than a decade and put together groups with tenor saxophonist Don Menza, trumpeter Randy Brecker and others, but the drummer first gained some notoriety around the age of 14 with a review in this very publication. Across countless gigs over the years, DeMerle picked up a lot of hands-on experience in the lessons of jazz programming and putting on a jazz festival.
Along the way, he also tapped folks like George Wein for advice.
His most memorable conversations with the impresario happened during a cruise full of supper-time chats that turned into a master class in how to run a jazz festival.
“I took my notepad to dinner every night and was taking notice of how to do this and what not to do and what to be aware of — from George Wein!” DeMerle recalled.
“It’s a passion for me to keep jazz alive. I want to keep playing it; I want to keep presenting it; and I want to give as many musicians as I can the opportunity to work.”
DeMerle’s career worth of festival experiences crystallized in 2003 with the first Amelia Island Jazz Festival, held on Fernandina Beach. Each year, the festival is built around a major jazz headliner. For the 2025 festival, held Sept. 28 to Oct. 5, DeMerle is bringing in Monty Alexander to join the fun. (The Manhattan Transfer helped DeMerle celebrate the festival’s 20th anniversary in 2023, and Grace Kelly appeared in 2024.)
He’s still very much a working musician himself. Two years ago, the drummer even released Once In A Lifetime, a long-shelved recording of that early band with Brecker that had been “lost in the shuffle at Atlantic Records.” He was a 20-year-old jazz prodigy back then. Now, at 78, he’s still promoting and living jazz.
For each festival, DeMerle works to blend together the diverse array of music under the jazz umbrella. That means listeners might hear classic big band charts from his group one night, with a little New Orleans jazz from a small ensemble the next. He likes to highlight groups from the University of North Florida, who might bring with them some more contemporary sounds.
“It feels like the whole town is a jazz festival that week,” he said. “It feels to me kind of like New Orleans, even though it’s much smaller.” (The Les DeMerle Dance and Jazz Party Cruise, a seven-night tour of the high seas, serves as a wind-down, or perhaps a continuation, of the festival.)
DeMerle and his wife, singer Bonnie Eisele, first moved from Chicago to Amelia Island a decade before starting to dream up the festival as a non-profit event. A job as the house band at the Ritz-Carlton convinced them to head to the 18-square-mile island 45 minutes east of Jacksonville. While the island is a popular vacation destination today, DeMerle admits they arrived at a pretty rural Amelia Island. So the two would perform in the band while programming one-off concerts to increase jazz awareness and accessibility on the island. After Sept. 11, the Ritz-Carlton gig dried up, and the two decided to fully embrace DeMerle’s festival destiny.
“We started small,” he said, prioritizing bringing jazz to small venues throughout the island to create a more intimate listening experience. One of the most intimate every year is the Jazz and Wine night, which caps attendance at 120. The headlining gigs can seat around 1,000 listeners. That wine night is one of the most popular weekday concerts, he said. DeMerle works with a local sommelier to present wine pairings to go with tunes the ensemble performs.
“The band loves it,” he said, “because they get to taste, too.”
He programs a week of events, but he acknowledges the focus for most out-of-towners are the weekend headliners. Still, he’s glad to program activities that mostly cater to the locals, keeping the music present on the island.
DeMerle looks for acts that he said are “visually cool and entertaining” to get audiences that might not be familiar with the music interested in what’s going on. In the past, he said, it hasn’t taken much to get the audience in the groove.
“Once they hear the vibe and the virtuosity of what all the artists bring to the table, they’re blown away,” he said.
DeMerle also looked to other festivals when crafting what he wanted the Amelia concerts to represent. One source of inspiration: the neighboring Clearwater Jazz Holiday, now in its 46th year.
“There’s a lot of times I’ll run down there because their festival is right after ours,” he said. “That’s kind of the same audience we will get here; they want to hear good music.”
Jazz is still hard to come by on the island — there’s no jazz club, after all — but DeMerle works hard to present semi-regular concerts to keep the music front and center in the minds of locals and tourists. Community outreach is an important component of the jazz machine DeMerle has built on Amelia. Every year, the festival awards scholarships, and year-round programs include bringing jazz into area schools and nursing homes.
“We give out scholarships, thousands of dollars each year to one player, but if they stay in school and keep their grades up, they get that scholarship each year,” he said, noting that the festival currently supports past winners at Julliard, the New School and Berklee School of Music.
The association between the scholarship winners, who receive the award as 17-year-olds, and DeMerle can be even more permanent. One previous winner now plays fourth trumpet in DeMerle’s big band.
“I like to have young people in my life,” he said. “We learn from them, and they learn from us. And that’s the best feeling in the world.” DB
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