The T.J. Martell Foundation has held its 51st New York Honors Gala, and the number attached to it is the largest the event has produced in more than twenty years. The sold-out night at Cipriani 42nd Street raised more than $3.2 million for cancer research.
The honouree was Coran Capshaw, the founder of Red Light Management, who was presented with the Lifetime Music Industry Award by Dave Matthews, an artist he has managed since the beginning of both their careers. Matthews, Trey Anastasio and Chris Stapleton all performed in his honour, which is a bill that explains a good deal of the room's buying power on the night.
Steve Gawley, the foundation's chair of the board of trustees and head of business and legal affairs at REPUBLIC Collective, hosted and made the connection between the honouree and the total explicit. "Coran and his artists have an incredible spirit of philanthropy," he said in his opening remarks, noting that when Capshaw was first asked to help he brought his team, his artists and his relationships rather than simply accepting the honour.
Gawley was also careful to move the focus off the figure itself, saying what the money allows is scientists taking risks, promising ideas moving forward, and people facing cancer getting better treatments and more time with the people they love.
Capshaw's own remarks turned personal. He spoke about the agent Chip Hooper, who died more than ten years ago and was close to many people in the room, and said the loss is one he still feels. He then made the case for the industry as a whole, arguing that what unites musicians and the business side is a habit of responding when something goes wrong, whether a flood, a hurricane or a fire.
He got a joke out of the anniversary as well. The 51st does not have the ring of a 50th or a 60th, he said, before recasting it as the first year of the organisation's next fifty and expressing the hope that real breakthroughs come in that chapter.
The evening is run by a committee that is effectively a cross-section of the industry's senior management, including Scott Borchetta of Big Machine, Tom Corson of Warner Music Group, John Esposito of HEY NOW Records, Daniel Glass of Glassnote, Jeffrey Harleston of Universal Music Group, Michael Huppe of SoundExchange and Marc Reiter of Metallica, with chief executive Lynn-Anne Huck. Live Nation came on as the first sponsor of the gala's red carpet reception.
The bill was known in advance: this site reported that Trey Anastasio, Dave Matthews and Chris Stapleton would play the gala before the night itself. Fundraising of this kind runs at every scale in the business, from a stadium bill down to a New York radio station raising money for a staffer's cancer treatment, and Bruce Springsteen is due to headline the Stand Up For Heroes benefit later in the season.
The facts
- The T.J. Martell Foundation's 51st New York Honors Gala raised more than $3.2 million.
- The sold-out event was held at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York.
- It is the most successful New York Honors Gala in more than two decades.
- Coran Capshaw of Red Light Management received the Lifetime Music Industry Award.
- Dave Matthews presented the award to him.
- Matthews, Trey Anastasio and Chris Stapleton performed in Capshaw's honour.
- Steve Gawley, chair of the board of trustees, hosted the evening.
- Live Nation was the inaugural sponsor of the red carpet reception.
How this checks out
Single source
Reported by a single outlet
Only one outlet has reported it so far, so it stays a single source.
Cited sources 1
Every outlet that reported this, linked to what it published. Equal credits, in alphabetical order.