How We Started

Joe Donato has been endearing himself to jazz fans in South Florida for more decades then he would care to admit. Rick Katz is an attorney whose passion for jazz began in 1969 at the University of Rochester when the Dave Brubeck Trio including Gerry Mulligan performed at a campus concert. In the mid-1990’s, Joe and Rick were introduced and the two of them began a more than ten-year conversation about starting a jazz club in Miami. When they realized that they could don’t justify the investment to start a jazz club, they turned to the nonprofit model which is common to the performing arts. In 2010, with the encouragement of acclaimed jazz pianists and Dean of the University of Miami Frost School of Music, Shelly Berg, Joe and Rick recruited a stellar Board of Directors who, in turn, convinced a group of South Florida jazz musicians to join the nonprofit mission of the MJC as Founders. The musicians who comprise the MJC Founders are a virtual Who’s Who of South Florida Jazz and are the key to the MJC achieving it’s mission.