Staff Spotlight: Doug Tatum, VP of Programming
7/11/2019 12AM
A key staffer since before the opening of the Palladium, Doug Tatum oversees the year-round process of booking artists for Center Presents performances, among other responsibilities. As a fan and musician himself, he is partial to jazz and classical music.
Meet the man who books the shows
A particularly vital and challenging task at any performing arts center is the programming – coordinating the shifting schedules of touring artists, negotiating contracts with hardball agents, and somehow piecing together a puzzle that delivers quality, variety, familiar comforts and enlightening surprises to the community.
At the Center for the Performing Arts, this effort is led by industry veteran Doug Tatum, hired in 2010 as the first General Manager and soon advancing to his current title of Vice President of Programming. He previously worked as a musician and jazz DJ and served for 17 years as Executive Director of the historic Folly Theater in Kansas City, Missouri.
Tatum commutes to his Palladium office each day from Bloomington – yes, that Bloomington, 70 miles south – where his wife, Mary Ann Hart, is a classical singer and professor of music at Indiana University’s esteemed Jacobs School of Music. Doug himself is a woodwind player, a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the proud father of a son and daughter who are both professional classical musicians.
The Missouri native graciously agreed to answer a few questions for us.
In a nutshell, what do you do around here?
I am responsible for managing the booking process of the artists that the Center presents each season, which includes the classical, jazz, family and pop/rock series, as well as a varied mix of country, blues, comedy and other attractions. We have a very rigorous process for selecting artists who we feel are a good match for the Center and the Central Indiana community that we serve. I am fortunate to work with seven colleagues; together we comprise the programming team. The benefit of this approach to programming is that each individual brings their own expertise and perspective to the table for what truly is a collaborative process.
What is your favorite part of the job?
In particular, I enjoy serving in a curatorial role in the formation of each season’s classical and jazz series. It is just human nature for patrons to be drawn to those artists with whom they are already familiar. After a performance, I occasionally hear a patron in the lobby raving about an artist, followed by a statement that they had never heard of them before. Whenever this happens, I find it very rewarding to know that I had something to do with introducing that person to a new artist, whom they now love!
What do you want more people to know about the Center?
We always strive to book the very highest-quality artists. If you stop to think about it, the performers we present on the Palladium’s stage are the very same artists who perform on the stages of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a performing artist?
I started out as a musician, working professionally first in Kansas City and later in the Boston area. I began my musical studies on clarinet and piano. While in high school, I also began playing saxophone and flute. I have always straddled the classical and jazz genres, with the same degree of passion for each.
What’s something interesting that most people don’t know about you?
For eight years, I worked as a jazz DJ at a public radio station in the Boston area. Now that I think about it, that also was a programming position. What a coincidence!
