David Rodriguez sat in his office, behind his desk, with the relaxed confidence of a man who has spent his life making space for artists to do their best work. The walls behind him held photos of legends—Quincy Jones, B.B. King, Tito Puente, James Brown, Miles Davis, and others. A bass guitar rested in a case against a wall. An upright bass stood against another wall. The room didn’t feel decorated. It felt earned.
David is retiring this year from his role as Executive Producer at NJPAC. Before we talked about producing, programming, artists, audiences, or what it means to help shape one of the country’s most dynamic performing arts institutions, I wanted to start where he started – where he was born and raised.
Newark.
I began the interview, “You were born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. And you’ve referred to coming to NJPAC as coming home, coming back home. Can we talk about how growing up in Newark influenced your relationship with music? At home, in neighborhood, in community, what was the music scene, so to speak?”
“Boy, at different times, it’s changed. Growing up in Newark was an interesting thing. I am hearkening back to a Nikki Giovanni poem. When I was playing with Max, Nikki was really close. And he would do a lot of things with various poets in particular – Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison and a bunch of other people. And Nikki did her last performance here, before she passed.
And she has a wonderful poem. It’s actually framed over there that she signed for me about living in a place in people’s perception when you’re not from that place. You know, the reality is, it was wonderful. I grew up in Seth Boyden [housing projects]. It was great. I remember good things about Seth Boyden, and people said, ‘oh, you grew up in Seth Boyden!’ I remember spending time with my sister. I remember holidays. I remember all those things that were best about Newark.
I wish I knew more about the history then. I know a lot more about it now. There wasn’t this flight to get away from Newark. The South Ward was a place where your family was. And it was a special place. It was a positive relationship with a community.
There was a guy who had a barbershop a couple blocks away, and he taught chess and guitar. So I chose guitar. And at a certain point, I wanted to read, so I figured out upright bass. I started going to Juilliard on Saturdays. I started meeting various people. I remember I went on the road when I was a teenager with Max Roach and Tito [Puente]. And they came to Mom and Dad and said, is it okay to tour? We’ll take care of your kid.
And so all those memories are really positive for me. I was pleased to spend time with Quincy. And he’s like, ‘music is what you hear when you walk three blocks from your house. It’s the rhythms. It’s the words. It’s the poetry.’ And through that there is not anything genre-specific. It’s just those rhythms and those words that form expression of what you do as a musician.
So that’s what I get from Newark, and I think coming back, there’s this joy of this evolution. There’s this sadness of some loss. When you look at people, it’s not about the smooth surfaces that you like. It’s about the rough parts. It’s about the folds. It’s about the journey. If the journey is smooth, it’s kind of a boring journey. It’s like a jazz solo. If the jazz soloist doesn’t feel like he’s going to fall off the edge of the cliff because he’s really stretching, then it’s a boring solo. It’s like owning a Lamborghini and driving at thirty miles an hour. So part of that expression is linked to establishing the balance between risk and musicality.”
I continued, “And so, as a little boy, who are you listening to? Who did you see perform?”
“Everybody. I listened to a lot of jazz. I listened to a lot of Latin music. I listened to pop music. I turned on an album by Bruce Springsteen and Journey just as much as I turned on Weather Report or Miles Davis. Miles said at one point, and I think it’s been attributed to a few other people, he goes, ‘there’s only two types of music: good music and that other shit.’ So you try and give yourself as much good music as you can.”
We move from the neighborhood to the road.
From being the kid learning music to being the artist traveling through it.
Talking about touring with Max, Tito, and others, what did being a touring artist teach you about what artists need from venues, or how an artist is well taken care of when they go on tour and they’re playing this house or that house or this stage?
“I think that being a musician has always been helpful in speaking to other musicians, poets, dancers, whatever, because you’re talking to them like you’re one of them, as opposed to the guy.
Being a bass player is an interesting thing, because your whole gig is making other people sound better. It’s not about being in front. Being a bass player is providing that net under the soloist, providing that groove, and subtly changing the music and driving the music where it should go. If someone’s playing twelve choruses and they only should have played two, there’s a way to get ’em to stop. And that’s not a whole lot different than being a producer. Your job is to make people sound better.
So I always say, being a bass player and being a producer – the same thing. I was never going to be the best bass player on the planet. But I could make other people sound better. And it also was just getting sick of the diesel fumes from buses and that kind of thing. Being away from family. Having a home base and that security has always been helpful to me.
And when I was out with people like Max, I was usually the person that solved problems. Brilliant, brilliant people that I would never even assume to have had the chance to interact with. I was, even when I was younger, the person to solve problems. And for that reason, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to pick the people that I want to solve problems for.
I mean, if you look at that thing back there (he point to a framed pillow case with a hand-written note) that’s from working with Michael Jackson. So I did his last concerts at Madison Square Garden, and he snuck into my hotel room and wrote that on my pillowcase. And you can do that if you’re Michael Jackson. But once people trust you, and they know that you care as much as they care, they’ll ride with you on that.
So in retirement, I look at those people I want to play with, that I want to support, that I want to hold up. I’m going to be working on the landing of the mothership by George Clinton – last show on the Essence Festival this year, on the sixth of July. Because he’s from Newark, he’s eighty-four years old. And we’re having the same people who designed Beyoncé’s tour design a brand new twenty-first-century mothership.
And having a bunch of people come out of that mothership. Savion Glover, is going to be Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. So he’s going to do that. I will not dance, I will not swim, and then he gets hit with a bop gun, and you see what is everything about Savion. We were having creative discussions of do we call Savion or Misty Copeland? How do you look at artists who look at things differently all the time. Dealing with Tony Bennett, and those duets recordings that opened up new things for him. Working with James Brown and the arbiters of funk. I once asked him, what’s your definition of funk? He said, ‘it’s a groove so righteous, you don’t tap your foot, you break your leg!’
Which is really good, because then you can talk to George and say, ‘well, my funk kind of grooves over his funk. Kind of like a smoke type of thing.’
But anyway, I’ve been really privileged to be a bass player or a producer for a lot of people. And that’s been what’s made me happy, and that’s one of the reasons I’m leaving now. I feel like I’ve done what I could do. I want to play bass more often. I’m going to be at Lincoln Center in May doing a Latino version of Miles with a trio with Gil Gutiérrez. We’ll have Cyro Baptista and Jon Faddis performing with us. Those are the things that make me happy.
Doing a couple of things with Kendrick [Lamar], same type of thing. You just meet somebody and you go… he’s ridden his bicycle to my house, because he rides a bicycle. And he said, ‘when I decide who I want to work with, I want people who operate within my same sphere of empathy, one, and I want them to be good at what they do.’ So finding those people… I said, ‘you’re kind of looking for a bass player, aren’t you?’ So, I am not playing bass on stage with him, but I am serving that same function.”
Then I asked David, “What was the bridge going from bass player/musician, to producer?”
“I was always good with numbers. I went to Mansfield, got a music business degree, and then I got a certificate from University of Pennsylvania, basically teaching people bass. Had my first internship at Carnegie Hall. Worked at the Hispanic Arts Center. Dealt with a lot of fundraising and sponsorship, because not a lot of people wanted to do that, but actually it was a good way to move up.
I started doing these programs way back when when you had a telephone and you put it in a holster to get on the internet. We figured out we could do a concert with somebody at a fifteen-hundred-seat hall and said, what if we tried charging people $2.99 to hear it on the internet. And we did something, I think it was Rod Stewart, and seven million people did that. And we split the money with the artist. And that became AOL Live.
So I got to know people like Dick Parsons, and when he became chair of the Apollo, he said, I need someone to be the CEO. Why don’t you come up. And so, I became the executive producer at the Apollo.
It’s a “following passion” thing. I feel like I was a bass player at the Apollo, and all those great people that are there, as they say, all those great ghosts. Jeff Beck came into town, he’s like, ‘no, I got to play a gig there.’ Some of the folks who could make more money at other places, because of the connection to brand… the Apollo is the second most well-known urban brand in the world right after Motown.
So when Mary J. Blige would end every tour at the Apollo, and her agent would always say, you can make more money here or there, she goes, no, I’m going home, going to the Apollo.”
That brings us to the question underneath almost everything he’s saying.
What makes a venue more than a venue?
What makes a room feel like home?
“The same thing that makes the venue a home for audiences. When John [Schreiber] and I first came here, fourteen, fifteen years ago, they had built NJPAC as a Lincoln Center for New Jersey. And they did things to reach community, don’t get me wrong, but really looking at who is without community, and when you really delve in, you have to stop using broad statements like the ‘Latino community.’ Are we talking the Mexican community, the Dominicans, the Puerto Ricans, the Portuguese, Brazilians, because of Newark and that community? And that’s what we focused on. And did the same thing with urban communities. Did the same thing with Indian communities and South Asian communities, South Korean. We were among the first people to do K-pop in the tri-state area.
Because at a certain point, people develop a sense of home. They feel like, oh well, I see myself on stage. I see myself in the ushers. I see myself on the board of directors.
And diversity isn’t just good mission. It’s good business. At the end of the day, we went from 200,000 people a year to over 700,000 people a year. We’ve gone from $20 million a year to $75 million a year. That was because we looked at those people who needed a sense of home, and the artists the same way.
To go through the theater with Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick and Chuck D and say, I want you to play here, when there are other types of venues that people are taking them to. It’s about excellence, and your presence here brings excellence to this venue, and at the same token, this venue gives excellence to you.
Your job with an artist is to give them the tools to do their job the best. Make sure there’s an audio system, a lighting system, make sure there’s a kindness as they walk backstage. It’s not like, what are you doing here. Oh, this is a classical place, or this is a dance place, or this is a whatever. This is like, we are just so honored to have you here. And that makes a difference.
And then, if you can draw a lasting picture in their mind… take someone like John Leguizamo. We had worked on a piece called Latin History for Morons. That piece was written because one of his children went to private school and was told, hey, Latinos, all they do is take from this community. They’ve never given anything. So he researched and found key people who’ve really given to our country. It’s the only play I’ve ever worked on that has a bibliography.
He came, and we taped it for HBO, and he spent hours with kids from the community, which was great for the kids, but even better for him and for the institution, because when he thinks about NJPAC, he thinks about the faces of those young people.
I remember Chick Corea doing a show with him, and he goes, ‘Ah, I got ten minutes to talk to kids.’ He ended up spending forty-five minutes talking about 6-2-5-1 turnarounds in blues progressions and tritone substitutions. And he was in it. And forever, he remembered the faces of the kids that he spoke to.
If you can make a difference when you show up, because half your world is showing up at venues, and I know this from touring, where they’ll, on your music stand, give you a little note that says Newark, New Jersey, so you sit there in your plane and you go, ‘It’s so great to be here tonight in Newark, New Jersey.’
So if you can make it an experience, people like Wayne Shorter, when they came here, talked to me forever about doing that, when we named the street after him and he got to speak to kids, and we did an electric night and we did an acoustic night. I was with John Patitucci, his bass player, just last week, and we were talking about how special that was for him.
If you can put a face in people’s minds of a venue, whether they’re an audience member or an artist, they say, I belong here. I have a sense of home. I have a sense of belonging. And that’s exciting, because then when they have a new project, they’ll say, why don’t we go to NJPAC. Why don’t we go to Newark.
Aside from the fact that Newark is half the price to develop a new piece. And now, with the building of the film studio, with new rehearsal studios that are coming up, a person can create something in Newark, they can tech it, they can tour it, they can film it, and they can do it at half the price of going across the river. So in a sense, it becomes an incubator for creativity, and while they’re here, maybe we trade some space to have them talk to young people.
We’re big-time communists… I’ll give you X if you give me Y. And that’s okay. Because it always comes back in a positive way. Make a positive experience, it grows.”
He laughs at the length of his answer. Then we keep going.
I bring up something Alan Watts said: that the essence of life is play.
That we don’t “work” music, we don’t “do” music – we play music.
And I ask him what play looks like inside producing at such a venue as NJPAC or playing bass.
“I always say nobody ever pays me to play bass. They pay me to bring my equipment there and to take my equipment home. I enjoy playing bass. You never have to pay me to play.
Part of playing is creating a safe place for risk. To be able to play, you have to create safety so you can create risk. You can’t create risk and hope they’ll come up with safety.
So if you can kind of give people tools… one of my favorite trumpet players was Roy Hargrove. Driving with him was driving in an old Chevy that was always falling off the edge of the cliff. And sometimes he fell off the cliff. But at the end of the day, if you have a wonderful ensemble, they pick you up and they put you back on the road. But without knowing that that net exists underneath, you might not take that risk.
There’s a composer named Butch Morris who did conductions, improvisations based on conducting. Worked with Oliver Lake and a bunch of other folk. Came to me once and said, I want to make this piece based on a German libretto. And in my head, I’m thinking, this is not going to be good. But the reality was, I figured out a way for him to do it. And it wasn’t very good. But once that idea was out of his head and he said, hmm, I learned from this, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be… suddenly it opened up creativity all over the place, and suddenly five or six wonderful pieces flew out of it.
So giving people the ability to risk and to follow passion will always result in passionate work.”
We move into programming and what it means to choose with care, and not just with commerce.
When you’re developing or conceptualizing what types of pieces to bring to NJPAC, or develop at NJPAC, or offer the stage of NJPAC to… everything is obviously not because it’ll sell the house out, or because it’s a trending genre or artist. In some cases, you’re exposing people to acts they might not otherwise be exposed to. How do you determine where you want to play in terms of being more expansive in what you want to bring in, and for what?
“I think a lot of programming is putting things in the right space. I hate to say the stuff I’m most cautious about are the things that I’m most passionate about, because I will go beyond what sometimes I should. Once you start booking the things that are in your record collection, you have to talk to two or three other people and say, I’m on the right road or not? Because there’s nothing good about having three hundred people show up for something in a twenty-eight-hundred-seat hall. For the artist or anyone else.
So where do you put it with the best chance of success. That’s important. Does this belong at my venue, or should I be partnering with three other community organizations or presenters who know the Peruvian community better than I do, and how do we partner to make it successful. About forty percent of what we do here is not meant to be profitable at all. There are two P & L statements. There’s mission. And there’s dollar profit. And the best programs deal with both.
Some people will say to me, you’re doing the New Edition show at the arena, or you’re doing whatever it might be, and, well, that’s to make money for other things. I said, no, that’s part of mission. It’s just as much mission as doing Beethoven. Heck, they’re alive!
When people say, ‘who sponsors my classical season?’ I say Gilberto Santa Rosa and Snoop Dogg. Because the profits of those make sure other things go on, as they do the children’s programs that we do. So there might be a tour like The Hip Hop Nutcracker – highly profitable – but it started out in the little theater, became multiple theaters, became a tour, sold it to PBS, got an Emmy, sold it to Disney+, and redid it again.
It turned into something profitable that funded lots of arts education programs, but one of them was a touring piece called Charro’s Kitchen, which was the first bilingual touring event that I’m aware of dealing with food insecurity. And we made it so that everyone could afford it. Went to fifty-two different venues. Some people paid next to nothing. Some people paid a thousand dollars. And it toured the country.
And that was cool with my P & L, because my goal initially had nothing to do with the for-profit P & L, had everything to do with the mission P & L.
You start out with a goal. You start out with guidelines of this is what we’re trying to do. Those things may change. But certain things are certainly not meant to make a profit, and that’s why we’re a not-for-profit organization. That’s why we ask for donations.
There are shows that, if you took every single dollar that came in, it didn’t cover half of the expenses of that program.
Kwanzaa [Festival] is a big mission win. But we don’t evaluate it from a dollar point of view, because it’s meant to be a mission win.
Sounds of the City as well. They used to look at Sounds of the City and say, if we bring in these different acts, that’ll make sure they buy those similar acts when they come to NJPAC. The reality is, after like a year of looking at it, I said, it has nothing to do with that at all. It’s for people to have a space, regardless of if they ever buy a ticket to NJPAC. And it’s free, and it’s a communal thing, and you look at NJPAC as part of your home. And that’s enough. It doesn’t have to do seven things. It can do one or two things well.
Communal with your community, and realizing that NJPAC is part of the community, that alone’s a win.”
We talk briefly about North to Shore. About scale.
About whether producing at a statewide festival feels fundamentally different than producing in a room.
His answer is no, and then yes, and then something more useful than either.
“It’s the same as anything else, I think. It has scale. But for a festival like that, it’s looking at your funders and seeing what they’re trying to get out of it, and looking at your audiences, seeing what they’re trying to get out of it, and finding where the intersection lies. And then, trying to co-opt the artist to say, hey, there’s a reason to do this festival.
One of the best things about the festival is the money that goes to building healthy pantries and local food banks and food insecurity. So if I can say to an artist that X amount of dollars from your show is going to help to feed people who need food, that’s a good ask.
First year we did it, we had too many causes. There was fentanyl, there was human trafficking. Every time someone came in the door, we did something else. Which is great, and I’m not saying anything is more important or less important than anything else. But it became a matter of how do we focus it. And that’s where we landed on food insecurity, food pantries, and justice as it relates to healthcare in general. Because it has that overlap, and we have a huge program at this point that we’re touring the country with on arts and well-being.
But scale is… I’ve done three Super Bowl halftime shows. But probably my best Super Bowl thing that I do is every year I’m one of the producers on the Puppy Bowl. On Animal Planet. I donate my fee, and I do the B-roll footage. When you see a puppy on the beach, “This is Scruffy on the beach with a margarita, and he’ll be playing in the second half, he needs to be adopted!” It’s the same gig. You’re still taping a television show.
After the Super Bowl, it has the best ratings that day in February. Tape it in November. If you ever want to know who’s going to win, I can help you. But all those dogs get adopted.
It’s the same values. It’s the same organization. It’s the same creating a safe place to play on all of these things. It’s keeping drama on the stage and keeping it calm otherwise. It’s fixing problems, and those problems are so varying. I did Snoop Dogg’s Tales from the Crip tour right when Suge got out of jail, and I had to negotiate with the Latin Kings, the Bloods, and the Crips in every single market. That’s a problem. You leave business school, and you don’t think, well, I’m going to have to learn to do this. But you walk in, you’re sincere, you talk through problems, you talk through issues, you listen. It’s the same skill set. And just being a bass player.”
Toward the end, I ask about hospitality.
Not customer service – the broader thing. Taking care of people.
“I think the issue is, you lead with kindness.
I remember my time at the Apollo. When you walk in the door of the Apollo, every person is greeted with, “Welcome to the Apollo Theater, where stars are born and legends are made.” So suddenly, you feel like you’re jumping into a space that has both legacy and current relevance.
How do we create that feeling for people walking into NJPAC, or walking into our plaza, or walking into our arts education programs, whatever it is? How do we create that for artists walking in the back door? Because if you can create that, you can have discussions when problems occur.
Leading with kindness, but leading with purpose, is always important.”
And what do you tell people that work with you, or your team here, as they mature through their careers, about taking the hits, taking the bumps and the scratches along the way of trying to do meaningful work?
“First and foremost, we back each other up. I couldn’t tell you the titles of most of the people who work for me or with me. If they make a mistake, we back each other up. I may bring them into my office and say, ‘Hey, you should think about what just happened there.’ But that discussion will never happen in public.
I have the same office manager, assistant, that I came here with. All of the VPs that I work with were people who were associates or directors. They’ve all moved up, and we trust each other. We have each other’s backs, and we’re trying to grow together.
If we win on a show, we all win. If we lose on a show, we all lost. And it used to be that the programming department might program something and they send it to marketing, and if it didn’t sell, they would blame marketing. Well, it might have been a bad show. So a lot of my position is new, in that it has production, touring, television, marketing, programming reporting to it, and saying whatever breaks down there, it’s a shared win, and it’s a shared loss.”
The last question is the simplest one. It is also, maybe, the only one left.
“As you move forward, what delights you? What are you delighted to step into?”
“Playing bass delights me. Spending time with family delights me. Having my golden retriever wait for me at the door, no matter how late the gig is, it’s pretty darn cool.
It’s those experiences. Seeing an artist have their vision be culminated. That makes me happy.
The interesting thing as I leave is – it took me a while to figure out – when I hear applause and I’m sitting backstage, that I’m part of that applause. And lately, I’ve started looking at shows, and I wonder, as I produce less, will I get that same feeling.
Leaving doesn’t concern me. Salaries don’t concern me. Having that special feeling when there’s a special moment and you say, I was part of that.”
“Thank you very much,” I tell him.
“Pleasure,” he says.
And that’s the conversation.
