Every January, New York is filled with music. Winter Jazzfest turns the city into a maze of lines, wristbands, late nights, and impossible choices.
Behind every set is an ecosystem of people most fans never know—the ones working the margins, shaping the context, carrying the culture forward without ever stepping into the spotlight.
Publicists. Producers. Presenters. Strategists. Advisors. Connectors. People like Matt Merewitz.
I talked to Matt last year in the thick of Winter Jazzfest, catching him on almost no sleep. And it felt like the right moment, because Matt lives where the real conversations are always happening.
Matt came up as a musician playing saxophone and doing college radio. Over time his role became harder to define.
“I just consider myself an overall music consultant,” he told me. “A kind of media strategist. But also just an all-around music obsessive.”
That obsession is the point. Because jazz—whatever else it may be—isn’t just a style of music. It’s a community.
And in that community, the real conversations never stop. Conversations about race. About equity. About access. About commercial pressure. About what gets lost when music is separated from the context that created it.
As Matt puts it, “How do we fit a square and a round peg? How do we fit jazz in a music industry that’s not built for it?"
That question sits quietly behind every festival, every release, every tour. Matt talks about jazz as an ecosystem where everyone matters: Listeners, venue staff, engineers, booking agents, record store clerks. even the waitstaff at the Village Vanguard.
“If one of those pieces disappeared,” he said, “the whole system wouldn’t exactly fall apart—but it kind of would.”
That idea eventually became the name of his Substack and podcast, The Side People—interviewing all the people who make the music world go round. It’s not about celebrities. It’s about infrastructure. And it’s about the story.
“Obviously everyone has a story,” Matt told me. “If you walked outside today—if you got out of bed and did something—you have a story. But how interesting is your story? Did you just doomscroll when you got up, or did you actually do something?”
That question applies to artists, presenters, and listeners alike. We’re living in a moment when jazz feels unusually visible, when artists like Kamasi Washington and Makaya McCraven are reaching beyond traditional audiences. But visibility doesn’t automatically equal sustainability.
“Jazz is Black music,” Matt said. “And yet in the present tense, it doesn’t always feel like that.”
Those are complicated truths. And they rarely live onstage. They live backstage. In late-night conversations. In hotel lobbies. In text threads and half-finished coffees. They live with the side people.
So when you’re standing in line at Winter Jazzfest this January, bundled up against the cold, ticket in hand, remember that the music didn’t just appear. It was carried there by a community.
Matt and his company Fully Altered will be hosting a stage at Winter Jazzfest this Saturday, January 10 at Love Annex in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
