Rio Sakairi patted around inside her purse and retrieved a key that unlocks the elevator at 1158 Broadway. Exiting on the fifth floor, she glanced toward the black door leading to the performance space in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, where the Jazz Gallery has made its home since 2012. The saxophonist Ben Wendel’s four-vibraphone band was about to perform on this January night: “This one you want to hear from the beginning,” she said.
The Jazz Gallery has long had a reputation as a live music venue where artists take risks and stretch their sound. This year, the nonprofit is celebrating its 30th anniversary; Sakairi has served as its artistic director since 2000. (She received the formal title in 2009.)
“It’s really just the music that’s driving my decisions,” she said, settling her coat on a sofa in the Gallery’s board room. Sakairi, 53, has been programming the venue for about as long as she’s been working there. “When people ask me what I play, I jokingly say, ‘I play musicians.’”
Sakairi is credited with nurturing an environment that has given major artists an early boost, including Gretchen Parlato, Linda May Han Oh, Gerald Clayton, Lizz Wright, Vijay Iyer, Ambrose Akinmusire, Joel Ross, Miguel Zenón, Kris Davis and Robert Glasper. “Absolutely my first real show as a leader” was at the Gallery, Glasper said via email, adding that the venue “was always open to me exploring what was in my mind and working it out live in front of an audience.”
For as long as these artists can remember, Sakairi has been a fierce, albeit frank advocate of artistic expression and development.
“We have this saying — and I’m pretty sure she knows — ‘Keepin’ it Rio,’” the saxophonist and electronic wind instrumentalist Dayna Stephens said in a phone interview. “She doesn’t hold back.” While Sakairi’s feedback can be “very assertive and very straightforward,” he said, “there’s always advice for how to get to where you want to go.”
Founded in 1995 by the academic turned music presenter Dale Fitzgerald, the singer and WBGO on-air host Lezlie Harrison and the trumpet master Roy Hargrove, the Jazz Gallery began as a haven for creative improvisers and experimental composers, and provided a daily rehearsal space for Hargrove. (For several months, his label Verve picked up the rent.) Fitzgerald, who was Hargrove’s manager, located the original space on Hudson Street in SoHo, and the trio dreamed up a spot that could serve as an incubator for musicians and host art exhibitions related to jazz.
Sakairi grew up far from that original location — in Tsuchiura, Japan, where she began playing piano at age 4. Later, she joined her middle school’s string quartet, then served as her high school’s choir conductor. “I always had music in my life,” she said.
In Tsuchiura, her private K-12 school focused on independent thinking and problem-solving. One seventh-grade trip included a daylong hike to a campground. “They give you a map and divide you into groups of six, and then we have to get there on our own.”
Skilled in rhetoric, Sakairi used her father’s belief that people should “live for their dreams” to her advantage, convincing her “very strict, old-school” parents that she should earn a psychology degree in a foreign country. At 19, she immigrated to New York to attend the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, and soon found her way to the university’s School of Jazz and Contemporary Music.
After graduation, Sakairi took a job at the skin-care store Kiehl’s, enrolled in a music business course at Baruch College and frequented music venues and art spaces across the city, listening and learning. “Music continued to be a big part of my life,” she said. In 2000, after she presented a fund-raiser at the Gallery, she heard that Fitzgerald was looking for assistance and seized the opportunity: “I’m thinking, Oh my God, this is my foot into the music business door!” she recalled. The job paid $50 per night, and she’d head straight to the venue from her day job.
Her duties included cleaning the restroom and paying the bands. But Sakairi quickly realized she had an ear for booking. On Sundays, she’d come into the building to listen to CD and cassette submissions. “A couple months into it, I said, ‘This guy Vijay Iyer, he sounds pretty good. We should give him a gig.’”
One evening in 2001, the saxophonist T.K. Blue called to ask whether the Gallery would host Randy Weston’s 75th birthday celebration. Fitzgerald reasoned the date was too soon and hung up. Sakairi didn’t hold back. “I said, ‘Dale! What are you doing?’” she remembered. “‘Pick up the phone and call him back — we are so doing Randy’s 75th birthday!’”
Before long, Fitzgerald handed the booking role over to his protégée entirely. Sakairi’s vision was clear: When “a young musician plays here, it means something.” Since then, she has fostered artistic breakthroughs by concentrating on development, acting as a kind of career consultant with an eye on artists’ onstage presence and even their promotional plans. “I try to make a point,” she said. “There’s no there. There is a process.”
When Sakairi reviews submissions, she leans on her gut: “People ask me all the time, ‘What do you listen for?’ It’s really a feeling,” she said. Stephens, who received the Gallery’s 2024 fellowship commission for midcareer artists, noted that Sakairi also has a pulse on professional development. “She has a very innate sense of what the next move for a particular artist is at their stage,” he said.
Sakairi’s petite stature belies her commanding presence. (“For a long time people either ignored or underestimated me,” she said.) As musicians orbit around her, she greets each of them with genuine warmth: a double-palmed handshake, a twinkling sigh, a hug. Over her years at the Gallery, she’s demonstrated poise under pressure. “There’s like five eviction notices in these documents,” she said, motioning to a file cabinet. During its tumultuous move from Hudson Street, the Gallery didn’t cancel a single booking. And when Covid hit, the venue rebounded with award-winning online programming.
“I rarely ever panic,” Sakairi said. “I just say, ‘Eh, it’ll be all right.’”
The Gallery’s deputy director, Nerissa Campbell, has seen Sakairi navigate these hard times. “Rio’s philosophy, which I think has become an ethos of sorts for the Jazz Gallery, is that ‘there are no jazz emergencies,’” she wrote in an email, adding that Sakairi’s joyful disposition eclipses her frustrations.
Today, Sakairi sits on arts panels and has helped curate prominent jazz festivals, including Newport and North Sea. What she would like to see now is more young musicians taking chances. Years ago, “There was a bit more casualness about playing at the Gallery, which I think is necessary for music to develop,” she said. She’d like to fund a storefront annex where up-and-coming artists can perform and “learn to be compelling for people to want to give them a tip.”
Still, artists of all ages and stages of their careers continue to view the Gallery as a premier venue for creativity. “Rio and the Jazz Gallery are so special in the way that they just allow for art to happen,” said the singer and research artist Sirintip, who petitioned Sakairi for the Gallery to sponsor her interdisciplinary multimedia project “Mycelium” last year. “She’s just very open.”
The venue is celebrating its 30th anniversary throughout 2025 with special performances featuring Iyer, Oh, Blake, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter, Jeff Watts and Yosvany Terry, as well as a screening of a vintage Hargrove performance. (The trumpeter died at 49 in November 2018. Fitzgerald died in 2015.)
After two and a half decades at the Jazz Gallery, Sakairi’s tenure is part of the organization’s history. Recently, she uncovered a journal entry from childhood: “It said something like, ‘When I grow up, I want to open a coffee shop or restaurant where my friends who are musicians would come and play music, and this would be a place where people can hang out and have a great time,’” she said. “When I wrote that, I must have really wanted it. Because I feel like the universe heard me.”
