David Lefkowitz has spent the better part of three decades on nearly every side of the live music business — as a manager for Primus and other acts, a talent buyer for AEG in San Francisco, a venue GM in Pennsylvania, and now as the West Coast talent buyer for Blue Note Entertainment Group. Since relocating back to the Bay Area in 2025, Lefkowitz has quietly built out one of the region's more ambitious independent-promoter footprints, stitching together a growing roster of non-owned rooms: the Calvin Simmons Theatre in Oakland, the Quarry at UC Santa Cruz, the historic Catalyst, and the brand-new Siesta Valley Bowl in Orinda — alongside Blue Note's flagship outdoor series in Napa. In this conversation, Lefkowitz walks through how Blue Note's licensing model actually works, what it took to land each of his new Bay Area venues, why going independent means losing the industry's most valuable booking data, and why he never went back to artist management.

Q: What is Blue Note Entertainment Group, and what's your role there?

Blue Note Entertainment Group grew out of the Blue Note Jazz Club, which opened in Greenwich Village in the early 1980s. Today the company is run by the two sons of the club's original owner. Long before I joined, Blue Note had already expanded well beyond that one room — BB King's and the Highline Ballroom in New York, the Howard Theater in DC and a network of international Blue Note clubs.

Q: How does the international club network work — does Blue Note own and operate those, or take on financial risk for them?

No risk, and no promoting. Most of the international clubs — in China, Japan, Brazil, Italy — are licensing deals: a local operator pays Blue Note for the name and branding, then separately pays the company to book the international touring artists who play there.

Q: What about the U.S. side — Napa, LA, Hawaii?

The Blue Note Hawaii club opened in 2016. Napa was the first domestic licensing deal, struck about nine or ten years ago after a friend of the company moved from New Jersey to Napa and proposed a local version of the club. That single deal snowballed into a cluster of Blue Note–controlled venues in Napa:

The Blue Note Napa club and the Jam Cellars ballroom recently closed at the beginning of 2026 with the goal of reopening the Blue Note club in San Francisco in 2027.

Beyond Napa: we opened a club in LA about a year ago that's been going really great, and our first wholly owned-and-operated international club opens in London in about three weeks.

Q: How did Blue Note Summer Sessions get started?

It launched in 2021 at Charles Krug winery in St. Helena, during the pandemic, as an outdoor way to keep doing Blue Note–style club shows — small, fully seated, two shows a night. I joined the company at the start of 2022 and pushed to strip out the chairs and try bigger general-admission shows, which I was excited about since it put me back in the Bay Area, where I'd spent most of my career (I was living in Philadelphia at the time).

From Artist Manager to Talent Buyer: The Career Arc

Q: Where did you start, and how did you end up at Blue Note?

I spent 20 years as an artist manager, including the entire run managing Primus, plus dozens of other bands across genres for shorter stretches. In 2007, AEG hired me to open its first Northern California office — Golden Voice, San Francisco — where I booked the Warfield and the Regency Ballroom for nine years, plus a long list of one-offs at third-party theaters, clubs, arenas, and a couple of festivals.

Q: What brought you to Philadelphia?

In 2017 I moved to Philly for Live Nation, then transitioned to working for SMG as it became ASM. Before, during, and after the pandemic, I was essentially GM of the Wind Creek Event Center, tied to the largest casino in Pennsylvania.

Q: Did that feel like a step down after the Bay Area?

I can agree with that framing. The move was for family — my kids were in middle school and my then-wife's family was from Philly. When I eventually left Live Nation, I said simply, "There really just wasn't enough for me to do there." I'd nominally been head of the clubs and theaters division for the market, but my bosses were in LA, I was in a separate office from the colleagues who'd helped me get the job, and initiatives I championed — like opening a Brooklyn Bowl Philly — didn't happen on my watch (a Met Opera venue and a Peter Shapiro-linked project both came together only after I left). I don't count the ASM years among my favorites.

Q: How did the move to Blue Note happen?

After ASM, I went to work for Blue Note, commuting two days a week from Philly to the company's New York offices, located above the original Greenwich Village club. There I became one of several talent buyers contributing to Sony Hall (the Times Square-area venue Blue Note opened after BB King's closed) and picked up occasional one-off bookings — Central Park SummerStage, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Town Hall, Hammerstein Ballroom, and a run of shows at Philly's Keswick Theatre (through AEG Bowery, which has its own strong in-house buyer, so that only amounted to about five shows).

A recurring anchor was the Blue Note Jazz Festival, held every June — not an outdoor festival, but essentially every Blue Note-affiliated show happening across New York venues that month, including at least one Central Park SummerStage date each year. I had a strong run booking co-headlining, hand-picked pairings for that festival at Sony Hall.

Beat (the King Crimson spinoff) and the Value of Personal Taste

Q: What's the story with the band Beat?

In 2024, I got behind an all-star band called Beat — a spinoff of King Crimson featuring original members Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, joined by Steve Vai and (originally) Tool drummer Danny Carey, performing King Crimson's 1980s-era material. It was a rare case of where music I'd loved since I was young lined up with something I believed could actually sell tickets professionally.

I promoted nine markets on the debut tour, including two in Canada, drawing on the venue-cost knowledge I'd built renting more than 40 different Northern California venues during my AEG years. Most of those shows sold out quickly. On the follow-up tour launching next month, we expanded to 12 markets — the most of any promoter involved (on the first tour, the next-highest promoter did three shows; this time, six).

Building the Bay Area Footprint From Scratch

Q: How did the move back to California come together?

I waited until my youngest child left for college, then made the case to my boss, Steve Bensusan (co-owner of Blue Note with his brother), that I should relocate. My pitch rested on the Napa outdoor series I was already booking — since grown to 3,000 capacity — plus a shared goal with my boss: find more venues to book on an ongoing basis, ideally without Blue Note taking on financial risk.

Calvin Simmons Theatre, Oakland

One target I'd had my eye on for years: the Calvin Simmons Theatre in downtown Oakland, part of the historic Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts complex (home to the Kaiser Arena, where the Grateful Dead played 59 times in the late '70s/early '80s, and where Primus — under my management — headlined three of four shows). I recall once wandering backstage through a connecting door during a Primus New Year's Eve soundcheck and stumbling onto Roger Troutman and Zapp rehearsing for their own New Year's show in the theater next door.

The complex sat dark for roughly 25 years, cycled through failed redevelopment plans (including a scrapped office-complex conversion derailed by the pandemic), and eventually reopened as a performing arts center. I began booking the 1,350-seat theater on a full-risk rental basis and have now done 20 shows there since March 2025.

Q: How has it performed?

Inconsistently. By my estimate, most acts I've booked there have sold around 25% of what they'd typically draw at any other local venue — a sign, I think, of real audience unfamiliarity with a "new" downtown Oakland venue, even though it has its own secured, paid parking lot. The clear exception: two sold-out solo acoustic shows from Jason Isbell, my first bookings there, which drew fans willing to go wherever he played.

The Quarry, UC Santa Cruz

Q: What about the Santa Cruz venue?

I had wanted to work with this venue — a roughly 2,600-capacity space set in a Redwood Grove — since my Philly days, after noticing that Noise Pop had done a handful of shows there. I reached out directly to Jose Reyes-Olivas, the venue's GM and a longtime UC Santa Cruz staffer who spent years championing fundraising and upgrades for the space. Reyes-Olivas was looking for a full-time exclusive promoter partner — a role he'd hoped Noise Pop would fill, but that relationship hadn't developed further. Olivas and I struck a deal: Blue Note takes full risk but is now the venue's exclusive promoter.

Results: five shows in 2025, ten in 2026 (partial figure referenced mid-interview). Standouts have included Damian Marley and Stephen Marley (sold out) and Primus (sold out); GA shows have generally outperformed seated shows there so far. This year, three bookings connected to Santa Cruz or UC Santa Cruz alumni came together somewhat by chance: a five-act punk bill headlined by hometown band Drain that produced what I'd call maybe the venue's craziest mosh pit ever (sold out); and a stop by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, alumni of the university, performing the Grateful Dead's Reckoning live album in full — added as a third date after their two Fox Theater (Oakland) shows sold, since the Santa Cruz venue falls outside the Bay Area radius clause for most acts short of Greek Theatre-scale shows.

There's a tragic thread here too: I had booked Oliver Tree — a Santa Cruz native — at the venue before Tree's death; Olivas was later contacted directly by the family to produce the memorial there, a process I wasn't directly involved in.

The Catalyst, Santa Cruz

Q: How did Blue Note end up involved with the Catalyst?

I met the club's owner at a show at the Quarry and we started talking. The Catalyst's booking relationship had passed from Ineffable to Gate 52 (which had acquired Ineffable's talent-buying division) — a relationship I'd describe as "dysfunctional." Gate 52 also owns venues in Monterey and the Felton Music Hall, but not the Catalyst itself, and at one point stopped booking the Catalyst for months in an apparent standoff over a new agreement the owner wouldn't sign. The calendar thinned out, with regular Catalyst-type acts drifting to the Golden State Theatre instead. I stepped in with enthusiasm for the project, which also includes a small, 350-capacity room in the front of the building called the Atrium.

Siesta Valley Bowl, Orinda

Q: And the fourth venue?

A brand-new small amphitheater in Orinda, in the East Bay (part of the "Lamorinda" area — Lafayette, Moraga, Orinda), about seven miles from downtown Oakland, near the Orinda BART stop. The site — previously the Bruns Amphitheater, longtime home of the Shakespeare company Cal Shakes — had hosted a handful of jam-band shows (Grahame Lesh, ALO) before Cal Shakes folded and the venue's future became uncertain.

I stayed in touch with contacts there before my move back to California. Three local businessmen — including a restaurateur with a concessions background at both Live Nation and AEG — won an RFP for the site. Serious talks began in November; a booking deal was in place by roughly January, but final approval to start booking didn't come until late March, leaving a short window before the venue's October close for the season. Even so, I booked 25 shows, and I'd call the lineup diverse and mostly successful — among them Beats Antique, the Eli Young Band, Steep Canyon Rangers, Super Diamond, and Jerry's Middle Finger (a long-running, locally beloved Jerry Garcia Band tribute act). Eric Benét's show was the venue's first R&B booking and a strong seller. The goal for next year is to at least double the number of shows.

The Trade-Offs of Independence

Q: You've now worked the agency, management, corporate-venue, and independent-promoter sides of the business. Which fits you best?

I care about the "independent promoter" identity but see clear pros and cons. The biggest downside: at AEG and Live Nation, I had access to internal booking-system databases that let me track essentially every artist who might realistically tour a venue in my portfolio — sales history, early signals that an artist might even be considering an offer before a tour was public.

On the upside: as an independent, I only need sign-off from one person — my boss, Steve — for any deal that takes on meaningful financial risk, without the corporate pressure to hit EBITDA targets. Having managed dozens of people over my career, I'd say my real strength is as a talent buyer, and independence lets me put almost all my energy there. I'd call it "a streamlined existence right now, which I love."

Q: Are you looking to add more venues?

Yes — I have a couple of early-stage conversations going that may or may not pan out. I'd also note I'm something of an outlier within Blue Note for specifically chasing new venue deals the company doesn't own. That said, I’m not directly involved in other Blue Note-branded events like the Napa jazz festival that evolved from the Blue Note Napa Jazz Festival into the Robert Glasper-centered Black Radio Experience (not happening this year, status uncertain), and the Blue Note Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, the successor to the old Playboy Jazz Festival there.

Why Not Management?

Q: You started out wanting to be a manager. Any pull to go back?

I've dabbled in management occasionally — a bit on the side when I first started at Golden Voice, and a brief jazz client when I joined Blue Note — and I wouldn't rule out taking on another client someday, but I have no interest in doing it full-time again. Becoming a parent changed my appetite for what I'd describe as, in part, parenting "young, irresponsible rock musicians."

Q: How did you originally get into the business?

In my 20s, I ran a booking agency confined mostly to Northern California, representing unsigned local bands and getting them steady gigs — the classic circuit of not overplaying the same city too often (San Jose, then Sacramento, then San Francisco, and so on). Some of those acts became my management clients, including Primus. A few others landed major-label deals and moved on to national agencies, which eventually pushed me out of that local-booking niche — I could have chased a booking-agent career in LA, but that was never really the goal.

My actual goal was management. I moved to the Bay Area to work for David Rubinson, a veteran manager, record producer, and studio owner who — with concert promoter Bill Graham — ran three companies together in the early 1970s (two record labels with major distribution, plus a management company). Rubinson managed and produced Herbie Hancock for 15 years. While I was in his office, Rubinson was managing jazz legend Wayne Shorter and producer/songwriter Narada Michael Walden — who won a Grammy for Producer of the Year during that period for his work with Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin. It was an incredible introductory experience to seeing artist management done at the highest level.