Jonathan Mayers, the reside music supervisor who co-founded the revolutionary festivals exterior the bottom and Bonnaroo and the superfly leisure promoter, died. He was 51 years previous.
The former Superfly Mayers companions launched a press release to Billboard: “We have a damaged coronary heart with the disappearance of Jonathan. It was a beloved a part of Superfly’s story, intertwined in its historical past and within the inheritance. In addition to the position he performed in bringing pleasure to thousands and thousands, we are going to miss his acute wit, the contagious smile and the contagious snort. No one may illuminate a room like Jon.”
They didn’t give a explanation for demise.
The peak occasions of Mayers helped to inaugurate the trendy period of American music festivals. By combining a definite sensitivity in jam with wide-ray tastes in pop, digital, hip-hop and rock, these free and meticulously handled life occasions constructed on the bequests of reveals resembling Woodstock and Lollapalooza to turn into cultural fixtures within the scene of the United States Festival of the 2000s.
After attending Tulane University and falling in love with the New Orleans jazz scene, Mayers co-founded the Superfly Entertainment Promotion firm in 1996. Six years later, the corporate produced the primary episode of Bonnaroo, on an an hour’s agricultural website exterior Nashville, with headliners resembling Trey Anastasio and Phil Leth and Bob Weir of the Gratefuling.
The Festival has exhausted its first 12 months and have become a key stage on the circuit of the seasonal pageant, well-known for its collaborative “superjams” among the many greatest acts and the design of distinctive units of their form that inclined to a cautious return of D’Angelo to the reside phases and the ultimate present of The Beastie Boys. The headliners included Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, metallic and numerous others. In 2015, Live Nation acquired a management participation within the Festival.
In 2008, he labored with the native promoter one other planet to discovered lands out within the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco, one other ambitiously blended style pageant that has grown to turn into an equal of coachella in northern California. Representatives for an additional planet Billboard said That “Jonathan was an intense mild, at all times pushing new and artistic concepts into the leisure area,” they stated. “It was a visionary who was an integral a part of the inspiration and the spirit of the exterior lands. Everyone within the household of one other planet will miss him quite a bit.”
The different necessary Mayers festivals included Vegoose in Las Vegas and Clusterfest, a pageant of comedies and cinema.
The mandate of Mayers to Superfly resulted in 2021, after a controversial interval with its co-founders. At the start of 2022, Mayers prompted the executives of the corporate, accusing them of false civil declarations, violation of the contract and fraud. A decide rejected the case in 2023.
His newest venture was Core City Detroit, who tried to spend money on housing and cultural constructions within the metropolis beloved for his R&B and digital music.
