When people ask me what The Encore is, my first instinct is to describe a building. That instinct is wrong. The Encore isn't a building — it's a venue defined by what happens on the stage and who it's for, not by an address.
That sounds like a marketing line. It isn't. It's an operating model. In the winter and spring, our resident series happens at Elks Lodge #339 on Pittsburgh's North Shore. In the summer, it moves to The Cascades at South Park. In between, the pop-up series brings live jazz into cafés, galleries, breweries, community halls, and outdoor courtyards across the region. Every show — every single one — also streams live, free, to anyone with an internet connection.
The reason we built it this way is simple: live music doesn't belong to people who live near a venue. It belongs to everyone. If the only way to experience live jazz is to drive to a fixed address on a fixed schedule, then by definition we've excluded the families who can't make that drive, the people who can't afford the cover charge, the folks who have never been to a jazz show because they didn't think it was for them.
So we made the venue come to the audience. And when it can't come in person, the stream is the venue.
That's it. That's the whole idea. The rest is logistics.