A Conversation with ECP’s Michael Lazaroff – HuffPost 7.12.13
Mike Ragogna: Michael, I just spoke with Dane Butcher about Smooth Jazz Cruise 13, but let’s go over more of the history with you, your memories of how all this began.
Michael Lazaroff: Well, we had been doing a straight-ahead jazz cruise for a number of years. As a matter of fact, there was a straight-ahead jazz cruise as early as 1974. It was never a full-ship charter, it was on half of a ship, but it was the S.S. Norway, which is a very large ship. There were about eleven hundred or twelve hundred passengers and back in those days, they had Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams, Mel Tormé… It was a really cool cruise. Around 1999, they stopped that cruise, and one of the women who was a big seller of cabins on that cruise — in fact, she sold to five or six-hundred people — she came to me in late 1999 to say that she wanted to be the first person in the world to charter a whole ship to do a music cruise. She was seventy years old at the time, so I said, “Tell you what, let’s have lunch, we can talk about this.” About a week later, I met her for lunch and I looked across the table and I said, “Mom, do you really know what you want to do here?” It was my mother. So we began the jazz cruise, and we did a couple of fabulous sailings of that cruise as a full-ship charter. Then I was contacted by some guys that were trying to put together a smooth jazz cruise, so I became the manager and part-investor of that particular cruise. That was the year 2004, and during that sailing, I purchased the rights for the Smooth Jazz Cruise, and we’ve done eighteen smooth jazz cruises since that time.
MR: You must have at least some love of the music in addition to the good time that’s had on these cruises, right?
ML: Well, I love music, but I really, REALLY love this kind of music. It is fun, the artists are extremely skillful, they put on a great show. But they’re artists, and I just think it is a tremendous music genre, no question about it.
MR: How did you and Dane Butcher get together?
ML: It is very interesting. The first full-ship charter that we did on the Holland-America line was in 2005. I’m on the cruise the week before getting ready, and I’m working with Holland-America lines’ cruise director, Dane Butcher. During that week, we became friends, we talked, and he was indicating that he’d been looking for something to do. He was trying to figure out what he could do other than being a cruise director. I told him by the end of the cruise that I couldn’t promise him a full time job, but I could promise him he could work on the cruises and get paid and that would give him a good start towards something else. We did a handshake, and I’m not sure that he really believed me, but within a week, we were working together and that part-time arrangement lasted thirty days. He became full-time and he’s been more than full time ever since.
MR: How have the Smooth Jazz Cruises been evolving?
ML: There isn’t any question that the biggest difference is the level and sophistication of our production. It is pretty slick right now. We have all kinds of events that we didn’t have before, and we are just so comfortable producing this cruise that we can do things that we never would have done before. We are putting guys together that have not performed together previously, and we are creating a lot of interactive events with the artists that we did not do before. It just seems every year, we just move it one or two steps more sophisticated, with more layers of programming.
MR: Would it be fair to say that considering how you’re employing and interacting with the jazz artists and they amongst themselves, these cruises might be having an effect on the smooth jazz genre?
ML: Oh, there isn’t any question. Our concept of bringing all these guys together and having them mix and match on stage and having them walk on each others’ shows and having them then be interactive with the guests has become a formula for a whole bunch of activities within this genre. People have been very kind when they have been kind of unabashedly telling me that they are stealing it.
MR: [laughs] Is it possible that as the musicians are workshopping and basically woodshedding, it’s affecting their creativity and artistic vision even off ship, therefore affecting how they approach their next projects?
ML: There isn’t any question that one of the cool aspects of the cruise for the artists is that they can hang for a fairly long period of time with very sophisticated and talented fellow artists. There are very few other opportunities during the year for them to actually do that. The number of arrangements and plans and new ventures that have been hatched because these guys have been on the cruise together is countless. And they all get to watch each other perform, which is also something that they rarely get to do, so there is a lot of growth and, interestingly there’s a lot of mentoring going on.
MR: And that mentoring also will be directly with passengers who’ll be interacting more and more with the artists, even more than previous cruises?
ML: Absolutely.
MR: I heard you’re going to have contests for opening act slots for the main acts as well as filming a television show.
ML: Absolutely. Every day. Yes.
MR: Can you go into the mechanics of how that’s going to work?
ML: We’re going to let lots of people try out. We’re going to have a committee that is going to narrow it down to maybe five or six spectacular artists and performers from our guests and then Boney James and Brian Culbertson, the hosts of the cruise, will actually be the guy that picks the person to be the opening act. They will perform with them before the first and before the second show on our all-star night which I think is the sixth night of the cruise.
MR: It’s lasting seven days and nights, and where will this cruise visit?
ML: We’re going to leave from San Diego, going to Cabo San Lucas. We’re going to stop a whole day in Puerta Vallarta where we have a large number of artist-hosted, off-the-ship excursions. We have a golf tournament, we have a tennis tournament, we have swimming with the dolphins, we have SCUBA diving, all hosted by artists, and then we go to Cabo San Lucas and tour the Bahia Magdalena strait, which is an absolutely gorgeous part of Mexico. We’ll be going up and down the Mexican Riviera, so for those folks who have not sailed before, this is a really good opportunity to do your first cruise because we are never at open sea. We are always hugging the coast and nine out of ten times, this means that the cruise itself is very calm and very easy on folks.
MR: You also host other kinds of cruises, not just smooth jazz.
ML: Absolutely. A straight ahead Jazz Cruise that we’ve been doing forever; we have a Malt Shop Memories Cruise, which is sort of a ’50s cruise, and we’ve got Neil Sedaka, Lesley Gore, Petula Clark, Four Tops, and Bobby Rydell; we have a Country Music Cruise, and we have Vince Gill, Kenny Rodgers, Ronnie Milsap and a whole host of other people; we have a Celtic Thunder Cruise with the fabulous lads from the group Celtic Thunder, which is PBS’ number one show; they will be running the cruise. And we have several Soul Train cruises. The one on the West Coast only has Gladys Knight and Earth, Wind, & Fire heading it up, which is just amazing, and then we have another sailing of that cruise in the winter. I also wanted to say that we have two sailings of Smooth Jazz Cruise, one is in October and another is in January, but that one’s completely sold out. So if you want to join us, it’s the October cruise that you’ll need to sign up for.
MR: All right, I’m going to ask you to pick out your favorite child from all your themed cruises. Which is your favorite?
ML: My father, who is deceased, taught me to love music, and he told that there are only two kinds of music in the world — good and bad. I can point to aspects of each and every cruise that I love and I can point to aspects of each and every cruise that I’m not that fond of, but for me, the important thing about our cruises are the guests. I love watching the guests have a great time. Nothing in the world makes us happier than when guests come up to us and thank us for doing this and they say, “We’re going to come back,” or they say, “This has been the best vacation ever.” That is what this is all about. Music is what gets us there, but the real purpose of all of these cruises is to build camaraderie. That’s why we do full-ship charters, to encourage brotherhood. We have tremendous diversity on all of our cruise programs, and to just have a really good time.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
ML: Oh, lord. Smooth jazz artists?
MR: If you’d like, but artists in general, since you’ve been exposed to so much music, genres and artists.
ML: I think that if I was a new artist, I would dedicate myself to performing anywhere at any time for any money, just to build up that volume of people that know you, places that you’ve played, and gaining that kind of experience. I sometimes see new artists trying to mimic what the more established guys get or do, and they say, “Well he didn’t do this,” or “He got that” and stuff. In this day and age, it’s all about live music. Back in the old days, it was recording, and then you would do live music to support the recordings. Now it’s the other way around. You have to get out there. Nobody’s going to buy your CD until they’ve seen you play. That’s just the way it works. So I would perform anywhere that I could at any time.
MR: Excellent advice. What’s going to be the October Surprise with October’s Smooth Jazz Cruise in October? Should guests be expecting anything additionally interesting?
ML: We are working on one right now, and I think that there’ll be one amazing surprise and I will know soon and I will be able to hint at it. We don’t have it locked up yet, but boy, we are getting really, really close.
MR: Anything else we need to know?
ML: It’s Brian and Boney’s first time ever hosting the cruise, and they’re just raring to go. They’re going to do a great job.
MR: Michael, sounds terrific. I really appreciate your time, thanks.
ML: Thank you, Mike.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne