Never underestimate the Midwest jazz scene. Kyle Knoke, a mild-mannered guy from Waupacka, Wisconsin by day and emerging jazz mogul by night, proves the point.
Knoke started two organizations that have caught on. Five years ago, he started a group called the Jazz Coterie, which books pop-up jazz concerts in six venues, in cities large and small, in places with names like Oshkosh, Menasha, Appleton and Stevens Point, Wisconsin. In this context he’s booked national names like Champian Fulton, Veronica Swift and Samara Joy into the Jazz Coterie venues, sometimes before they became famous.
The Midwest Jazz Collective
The story would be cool enough if it stopped there; however, Knoke had the vision and the stubborn drive to forge something new and something old, creating the Midwest Jazz Collective (MJC).
Something old: From the early days of jazz, a Territory Band would travel a circuit, performing each day in a different venue within a given geographic area. The band would get on a bus or train in the morning and arrive for their gig later in the day. Something new: Knoke has revived the concept behind the Territory band aimed at bringing national jazz acts into the heart of America.
He’s forged a Midwestern circuit of cooperating, dedicated jazz venues for performances; plus, he’s worked in stops at universities along the way to help newcomers learn the American art form called jazz. But how in the world would one cover this bill?
Enter the MJC. The group is comprised of 14 clubs that, as Knoke said, “all line up for the sake of the cause…celebrating the intimate experience in our jazz club setting, celebrating the art form.”
The Midwest tour
Covering the cost of lodging, travel and salaries for several musicians and a headliner is beyond the capability of one medium-sized club, but 14 clubs standing together reduce the cost to a manageable size.
Knoke knew it was important to network and establish ties with venue managers and owners, saying, “I took the tour with the band, on the road for three weeks…because I wanted to meet these club owners face-to-face.”
Like a tour manager from the old days, Knoke wanted to utilize a personal touch to cement a relationship. Benny Benack III, noted jazz trumpeter and vocalist who was the first performer to headline the MJC tour, said of the experience, “in no small part due to Kyle’s efforts…it really was successful, we had great houses almost everywhere we went.” Benack is well known to jazz aficionados and has a rising profile. He was voted the #1 Rising Jazz Vocalist in 2024 in DownBeat magazine’s critics’ poll.
Benack and his group flew into Detroit, picked up a big van, and for three weeks, as Benack said, “We drove the whole time. We didn’t have to keep going to airports, that’s one of the main expenses.”
He continued, “The fact that we could sleep in until the hotel checkout at 10 or 11am, that’s pretty darn good. We had it pretty good on the Midwest [tour].”
Knoke, Benack and band began the day with a morning lobby-call at the hotel where they overnighted. Boarding a van, they headed out to the next location on the tour, just like a Territory band in the 1930s.
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Benack observed of the experience for the band, “You really start to see how Miles’ band [a call out to Miles Davis] and all these great bands that would go out on the road for months on end, playing every night, how the music gets to such a high level.”
Over the weeks, the tour rolled through Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois, with Ohio garnering the most stops on the tour with five locations visited.
One of the stops in Ohio was for a Monday night gig at Cleveland’s Bop Stop, an elegant jazz venue with great music and views of Lake Erie.
Benack said of that gig and its importance for the tour, “It was early on, and we kind of knew, hey, maybe this is going to work out; they aren’t normally open that night and it ended up having a really full, great room there.”
The author managed to catch Benny Benack III at the hippest jazz joint in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Blue Llama Jazz Club and there’s no doubt audiences love his show. Benack presents jazz with a fun, swinging styling reminiscent of Sinatra at the Sands. Benack belts out standards, breathing life into the room, and then hits the listener with blazing trumpet technique and the audience is all in from the outset.
Looking ahead
Ahead, there are big plans for the MJC. Benack indicated, “As we were doing the tour, Jazz at Lincoln Center reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re hearing all these great things about the Midwest Jazz Collective; can we get them on the panel for the Jazz Congress next year?’”
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Jazz Congress is perhaps the premiere gathering of agents, artists, presenters, and media groups related to all things jazz in the world. Knoke confirmed that the Jazz Congress has been added to the MJC schedule for 2026, which is a big deal for a new organization, demonstrating the combined clout that Midwest venues have at the national level when they work together.
The MJC is also moving toward a tax-exempt status, with Knoke describing the move this way, speaking of the venues and the need to get big names into Midwestern clubs: “These are still small rooms, 100 to 200 seats; financially, to bring in national acts, touring acts…we could do better if we were subsidized or sponsored some way.”
MJC member venues just participated in a Zoom call, and the group agreed to seek future tours, with some agreeing to help with time-consuming, day-to-day organizing tasks. Knoke indicated that expansion to other Midwest jazz clubs is possible, saying, “there’s nothing exclusive about the group…there’s more opportunity to add more people, more clubs to this group of 14.”
The MJC’s future plans include quarterly tours at venues throughout the Midwest in 2026. The MJC’s headliner for the 2025 tour, jazzman Benack, said of the man behind the scenes, tour organizer Kyle Knoke, “Kyle is a great presenter. He’s got some of the big agencies reaching out to him.”
Knoke, didn’t boast when asked about the success of the MJC, and in a distinctly Midwestern way, he described its first tour this way: “We wound up with a three-week tour, with Benny Benack III, 14 clubs, perfectly routed in a row, another four-university workshop master class stops, and that was the Midwest Jazz Collective’s first inaugural routed tour.”
Allow the author to state: You can’t beat that level of achievement; it’s a major success. Keep an eye open for the next Midwest Jazz Collective tour, this is one you do not want to miss.
