DC Jazz Festival Founder Charlie Fishman, 1942-2024
By • November 14, 2024 0 29
The DC Jazz Festival announced the Nov. 12 death of Charles Fishman, the annual festival’s founder and longtime executive producer, at the age of 82. “Charlie’s leadership, passion and tireless dedication to jazz transformed not only our community here in Washington, D.C., but also the global jazz landscape,” said festival officials in a statement, adding that a memorial service is planned.
Born in Brooklyn on Feb. 23, 1942, Fishman spent his later teens in Ardsley, New York. Through his involvement in the Zionist youth movement Young Judaea, he visited Israel over the summer between high school and his enrollment at New York University, where he majored in business management. Oddly enough, it was his bond with Israel that led to his storied career as a music producer.
After working for Young Judaea in New York and Houston, Fishman returned to Israel for two and a half years, opening a jazz club in Jerusalem called Django, named for Belgian-born Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt. In 1977, he arranged to bring tenor saxophonist Stan Getz to Israel and, as he recounted in a 2017 oral history interview: “I convinced the Israeli government to give me money to make a documentary on it, which I called ‘Stan Getz Israel Odyssey.’” [Available as “Stan Getz: A Musical Odyssey.”]
Back in Houston, he began programming the Jewish Community Center’s Kaplan Theatre with jazz, opera and dance performances and speakers like Elie Wiesel and Isaac Bashevis Singer. He moved to D.C. in 1976 to work on Israeli cultural diplomacy.
Fishman’s next brainstorm: Why not put together a television special celebrating the State of Israel’s 30th birthday in May of 1978? This became “The Stars Salute Israel at 30!” on ABC, headlined by Barbra Streisand, accompanied by Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Some other participants: Pat and Debby Boone, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Barry Manilow, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Bernadette Peters, Ben Vereen and Flip Wilson.
Soon after, Fishman sent Paul Simon to Israel. The following year, after arranging appearances there for jazz pianist Chick Corea, Fishman “sort of felt, [it was] sort of embarrassing [that] a country that invented the music, didn’t have a jazz festival in the capital, so that’s what I did.”
But it took years, and he was a busy guy. With the proceeds from the TV special, Fishman started the Kinneret Foundation. In a Washington Post story of 1981, Michael Kernan noted Kinneret’s “support of Moshe Efrati’s Kol Demama, a Tel Aviv dance troupe with both hearing and deaf dancers” and quoted Fishman about the foundation’s other activities: “We don’t generally give out scholarships per se but create programs. There’s an elementary school music program, and another one we do with the city of Jerusalem and another with the Israel Museum. We also fund services like the children’s library at the museum and the Arab Youth Orchestra and the children’s puppet theater.”
Israel was also part of Fishman’s close relationship with Dizzy Gillespie, whom he met in 1972 when the legendary jazz trumpeter was appearing in Jerusalem. Gillespie’s connection to Israel was strengthened by his membership in the Baháʼí faith, centered in Acre and Haifa. After spending time together in New York, Fishman, who represented other artists through his production company, Charismic — notably Latin jazz musicians like alto saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera, pianist Danilo Pérez and trombonist Steve Turre — sent Gillespie to Israel in 1985 and became his manager for other international tours, often under State Department auspices.
In 1987, for Gillespie’s 70th birthday, Fishman organized a celebration at Carnegie Hall. He then launched the United Nation [sic] Orchestra — leader Gillespie believed that humanity was all one “nation” — which toured for several years. Gillespie was not well enough to attend another Carnegie Hall concert, in November of 1992, for his 75th birthday; he died of pancreatic cancer less than two months later.
Originally the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, the DC Jazz Festival began with a gala sneak preview concert at the Lincoln Theatre on U Street NW in the fall of 2004. The first festival — five days of shows at 18 venues, from neighborhood clubs to the Lincoln, the Kennedy Center and the Sylvan Amphitheatre on the National Mall — opened on Sept. 28, 2005. The headliners were pianist Dave Brubeck and tenor and soprano saxophonist Wayne Shorter, both NEA Jazz Masters.
Fishman co-founded the festival with his second wife, attorney Stephanie Peters, commenting in the oral history interview: “She always jokes that on our first date [in 2000] we went out to dinner and I was making all these notes on the napkin for the festival.” Supported by the Cafritz Foundation, the launch received backing from District officials Robert Bobb and Stanley Jackson, Fishman says in the interview.
In 2010, The Georgetowner’s Gary Tischler spoke with Fishman in his Adams Morgan basement office, writing: “Fishman talks like an enthusiast, a traveling salesman, the guy you meet on a train who pulls out pictures of the wife and kids he loves madly, proudly. You sense that Fishman’s big loves — wife, family, jazz, city, with the order changing depending on who’s around or what he’s doing — are all-encompassing. He thrives that way. The office is as cluttered as an improvisational sax riff from out of the clear blue something: there’s a Grammy he won with Dizzy on a wall, there are stacks of New Yorkers, a poster of a big-cheeked Gillespie and, right in the middle of the floor, a shiny set of blue drums that belong to his precocious five-year-old son Moses.”
Returning for a second interview in 2012, Tischler wrote of Fishman: “He’s living a life that seems to get richer — in terms of meaning if not necessarily, money — with the passage of time, a development that seems to surprise him still. Fishman talks about his family— wife Stephanie Peters, an executive with Microsoft, and their son, Moses. ‘It’s our 10th anniversary this year,’ he said. ‘She was a surprise to me. I was divorced. I’d been single for 19 years and I have three grown children. I just thought that was it, and I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. Then, I met Stephanie, and that was it.’”
In 2019, Fishman’s family donated hundreds of 33 1/3 rpm records to the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives at the University of the District of Columbia. The gift became the Fishman-Peters Collection for the Study of Jazz and World Music.
Last Labor Day weekend, the DC Jazz Festival, under President and CEO Sunny Sumter, marked its 20th anniversary. Named honorary life chairman, Fishman was also recognized in the Charles Fishman Embassy Series, which began in 2012, and at the festival’s 2013 gala, when Rep. John Conyers Jr. presented Fishman with the Jazz Advocacy Award named for Conyers.
In the oral history interview, Fishman recalled a birthday cruise for Gillespie with two special guests: his mother and father: “But that really, for my parents, was the first time that my father had seen what his son had accomplished because he wanted me to go into the business, work with him, the usual yada, yada, yada, become a lawyer. … That made me feel very proud, especially being an only child.”
