by Kate Seltzer

Now that area resident Robert McBride is older and can telework more, he has been able to devote time and energy to filling a gap in the Lake Anna music scene. Prior to Lake Anna Jazz’s founding a year ago, residents might have traveled to Richmond, D.C., or Charlottesville for a live jazz show. Now they don’t have to look further than venues like Cooling Pond Brewery or Callie Opie’s Orchard Restaurant. 

“I wanted to start setting something up that would create a legacy here,” said McBride, founder and president of Lake Anna Jazz. “And that’s to have a charity organization that is focused on bringing quality entertainment down here to the lake area – mainly jazz, but that’s a very wide definition, because there’s lots of pop and dance music that could be considered jazz.”

McBride is joined by longtime friend and fellow musician Ginny Carr-Goldberg, who serves as vice president of Lake Anna Jazz. Carr-Goldberg hails from D.C. but recently moved to Lake Anna, where she plans to spend her retirement.

“Robert and I decided as we approached or achieved retirement age and moved to Lake Anna that we wanted to bring a variety of world-renowned artists and local artists from the surrounding areas: Richmond, Charlottesville, D.C., and so on to our community here at the lake,” Carr-Goldberg said. “And we really want to share those unique and delicious opportunities with our fellow residents and community members at Lake Anna.”

Lake Anna Jazz is committed to making jazz accessible by both bringing entertainers to the area and by keeping tickets affordable through donations and fundraising, McBride says. The organization follows the model of public broadcasting: donors receive discounts on merchandise like C.D.s and preferred seating or access to Lake Anna Jazz events. And their donations mean that everyone can attend the events – often for free, but always for under $10.

In its first year of existence, Lake Anna Jazz has put on nearly 20 events featuring upwards of 100 artists. This summer, the organization hosted a jazz festival, which it hopes will become a yearly tradition. Over two days in June, 14 groups comprised of more than 50 players performed at Cooling Pond Brewery.

“We wanted the audience to see a wide range of styles and sound, and we got groups who are internationally known,” McBride said. “Not that there are a lot of well-known jazz names outside of jazz circles, but among people who know, it was a real catch to be able to get them to come down here.”

Stephanie Nakasian, who is recognized by the Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz as one of the leading jazz singers in the world today, headlined the event.

Lake Anna Jazz is also expanding its repertoire of international jazz artists. In July, Lake Anna Jazz brought in two well-known French jazz musicians who were touring New York and made a special trip to Lake Anna.

“I said, ‘why don’t you come out here and see something really different, something that doesn’t look like Manhattan?” McBride recalled. “And they came down here and got together with some of the local musicians and put on a great show. It was just phenomenal.”

The reception from both audiences and performers has been fantastic, McBride and Carr-Goldberg said. After the height of the pandemic all but halted in-person performances, there is a real appetite for live music.

“We recognize that a lot of musicians have been stuck recording themselves just communicating over Zoom and lacking the opportunity to be out in front of a live audience,” McBride explained. “They’ve all been just hungry to get out and perform again. I’ve heard some really wonderful things from the community, too. They really appreciate the caliber of musicians we’re able to bring in, and they can watch a show and be home in 10 minutes.”

Lake Anna Jazz has worked to build relationships with local restaurants and venues like Callie Opie’s Orchard. Historically, bands performing at the restaurant have mostly performed classic rock.

“We wanted to have a variety of offerings and choices of music for our guests,” said Callie Opie’s owner Mike Kavros. “We want to touch other genres since that’s the diverseness of the community. We’ve had bluegrass, and jazz is one of the popular ones. [McBride] has done a really good job of bringing entertainers in that genre.”

“We have some really good cooperation from the restaurants around here because we bring them really good entertainment and eliminate a lot of the risk for them,” McBride emphasized. “Because if you said, ‘I want to book a jazz group here,’ the instinct might be to go, ‘Oh, nobody’s going to want that. It’s going to be expensive if you get anybody good, otherwise it’s my nephew’s garage band or something.’ But we’re making it affordable by subsidizing it, by really paying a lot of the cost of bringing these musicians in.”

In the short term, McBride and Carr-Goldberg hope to get the word out to audiences and performers about jazz on the lake.

“People can invite their friends from out of town and not be embarrassed that it’s something amateur or hokey or hard to listen to,” McBride said. “We hope to get a following and then also hopefully get more sponsors to help out with the expenses.”

In the next year or two, they hope to grow the jazz festival into a lake-wide event.

“I’d like to see something that’s really all across the lake, where it becomes a community celebration and all the local vendors and the restaurants and everybody takes part in a lake-wide festival,” McBride said. “The goal is that everybody kind of buys into it and it becomes a destination weekend, you get bigger and bigger crowds and bigger and bigger names. That would be the dream.”

Ginny Carr-Goldberg has been playing jazz for over 50 years. She’s part of a well-known jazz group, Uptown Vocal Jazz Quartet. To new jazz fans, she has this advice: don’t knock it till you try it.

“I’ve been at this a long time, and sometimes people hear the word jazz and they are turned off by it just because they have what I think is a mistaken misperception of what jazz is, what it really means,” she said. “People sometimes think that jazz isn’t accessible, that it’s highly intellectual. They have a picture in their mind of a bunch of musicians playing long, long passages in the music and not really engaging the audience. I don’t want to invalidate their thoughts about that because we’ve all seen instances of that. But that is a very, very narrow conception of what jazz really is.”

What’s important to know, she said, is that jazz is a very broad genre of music.

“It’s just kind of a general term that encompasses a lot of different styles and performances of music that people don’t often realize they know and they like,” Carr-Goldberg said. “I like to say Lake Anna Jazz is for people who know they love jazz and people who don’t know they love jazz but are soon going to find out they do.”

For more information about Lake Anna Jazz, including a list of their upcoming concerts, visit www.LakeAnnaJazz.org.