Sausalito trumpet player gives up career on Wall Street for a life in jazz

Here’s the scenario: A young man from a privileged background with a talent for playing the trumpet is faced with the choice between a lucrative career on Wall Street or the uncertain life of a jazz musician.

If that sounds like a script for a movie, that’s because it is. It’s the plot of a short film, “Goodbye Jonathan’s Soul,” that’s based on the true story of 30-year-old Sausalito jazz trumpeter and bandleader Jonathan Dely (pronounced Day-lee).

Dely, whose attorney father was a senior corporate executive and mother a legal secretary, was raised in the country club culture of Long Island with all the advantages that lifestyle implies. He was 8 years old when he started playing trumpet in elementary school. Showing extraordinary promise as a musician, he won spots on local and state all-star bands in high school, eventually earning finalist honors in the National Trumpet Competition, the International Trumpet Guild Jazz Competition and the Yamaha Young Performing Artists Competition.

But in the achievement-oriented social milieu that Dely comes from, music was something you did on the side, as a hobby, as part of becoming a well-rounded person. It was not something you took seriously as a vocation. You certainly didn’t build wealth playing jazz.

So, after graduating with a degree in English from Williams College, a private liberal arts school in Massachusetts, he won a coveted position on Wall Street with a prestigious real estate investment bank, one of the largest in the world.

“Part of the culture I was raised in was on display at Williams,” he says on a Zoom call from his apartment in Sausalito, a view of the blue waters of Richardson Bay sparkling behind him. “You don’t go to Williams to become a musician. You go to Williams to work on Wall Street, or to become a doctor or an academic, a scholar or a federal judge. The notion of a performing artist as a viable career path for somebody at Williams was not at all a consideration.”

Boyishly handsome with tousled hair and a fashionably trimmed stubble, Dely looks ready to step on stage. He has on a sport coat and a white, open-collared shirt revealing a gold chain. On one wall is a poster of one of his childhood idols, the trumpet icon Wynton Marsalis. His trumpet, which he lovingly describes as “a hunk of metal,” is by his side.

In the 18-minute film, which features Dely playing himself in his debut as an actor, he’s shamed by the bass player in his band, who accuses him of selling his soul to the corporate world. The tipping point comes when the young Wall Streeter, on his way to his first day on the job, encounters a street musician playing his heart out for the pure joy of it. After that, he chooses bebop over the briefcase.

Dely did indeed leave the corporate world behind, but that isn’t exactly the way it came about. Director Bob Giraldi, best known for directing the video for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” took certain artistic liberties in telling the story on film.

“The way it happened for me,” Dely says, “isn’t as dramatic in real life.”

I beg to differ. As a longtime reporter, I’ve always found the real story more compelling than anything I or anyone else could have imagined, and this one is no exception. As it happens, Dely worked 10 weeks on Wall Street as an intern, a job “I worked my ass off to get,” he says, before the firm offered him a six-figure, two-year contract. That’s when he turned the position down, coming to the deflating realization that it wasn’t the dream job he originally thought it would be. He found himself working around the clock, practically living at the office, keeping a fresh suit there for the many times he never went home.

“My dream, which represented total success in my eyes, was to get the best paying job that you could at the most reputable, prestigious firm that you could, which I did,” he says. “It wasn’t until I found myself in that position that the dream I had constructed for myself as what represented success in the abstract was not what Jonathan Dely (the artist) was going to interpret as success. Therein was born the most important decision of my life.”

That decision was hastened by the fact that such long hours in the dry business of real estate investing left no time for his true passion: playing music.

“It was the first time in my whole life that I had to put down the trumpet because I was working 18 hours a day,” he says. “I wasn’t practicing at all and it drilled a hole in my identity. I realized how essential that part of me was because it had never been taken away before. I didn’t realize how important it was until I lost it.”

Rather than being disappointed in his son’s decision, Dely’s dad actually helped him make it.

“He asked the question: ‘Can you see yourself at this company for two years, working those 18-hour days?’” he recalls. “’Can you actually imagine that as your life?’ Ultimately, the answer was no.”

Unsure of his talent, he applied to the prestigious Manhattan School of Music (MSM) for more training.

“I considered the folks who went to MSM and Juilliard to be in another dimension of talent,” he says. “I truly had imposter syndrome.”

His insecurity turned out to be brief, though, evaporating when he was not only accepted into the school, but given a scholarship.

“That changed my understanding of my place within the music community,” he says. “Music wasn’t just a hobby that I did on the side to impress my parents’ friends. I realized I was among some of the leading young people in New York City trying to become jazz performing artists.”

During his two years at the Manhattan School of Music, he put together a band with some of the top students from the school’s master class. He started a jazz series at the Princeton Club in Manhattan, playing 13 consecutive sold-out shows. He began to attract wider attention in the music business with a 2019 concert at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) convention in Los Angeles.

And then one night, when he was sitting in with trumpeter Brian Newman, bandleader for Lady Gaga, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, a famed celebrity haunt in New York City, a booker for Lincoln Center, John Znidarsic, happened to be in the audience. Believing he had discovered “the next Chris Botti,” the Grammy-winning trumpet star, Znidersic booked Dely for a series of showcase gigs at Lincoln Center, a huge break in his ascending career.

His last concert was on March 9, 2020, the day before the pandemic shut down New York City and most of the country.

“COVID was terrible,” Dely says. “I’m not trying to claim extra victimhood, but I found it to be incredibly emotionally difficult. My whole band scattered around the world. It was a super dark time for artists.”

With many musicians and artists leaving New York, Dely joined the exodus, moving to Marin to be near his parents, who relocated to Marin after Dely’s father retired. They live in Novato. Dely’s mother was raised in Marin, and he had often visited his grandmother here, so the county feels familiar and like home to him.

Adapting to the restrictions of the pandemic, he learned the computer program Logic and recorded the soundtrack for “Goodbye Jonathan’s Soul” at his home computer, working with his band remotely. The film is being entered in festivals around the world in the hope that it will be released to the public, perhaps even expanded into a full-length feature or a series on one of the streaming services.

“The movie was and remains the most special opportunity I’ve ever had artistically,” he says. “It was the most incredible experience of my life.”

Meanwhile, he’s put together a new band and is in the process of rebuilding his stalled career, modeling it after that of Chris Botti, the onetime boy wonder jazz-pop trumpet virtuoso who’s now 61. He’s off to a good start, making his Bay Area debut with two sold-out shows Dec. 14 in the intimate Joe Henderson Lab at SFJAZZ Center. And he’s launched a fundraising campaign to help pay for his debut album, which he plans to release next year. Go to fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/jonathan-dely.

“I want to be the next Chris Botti, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to do it,” he says. “If it doesn’t work out, I’ll die happy knowing I tried. If it does, which it will, I’ll be happy I suffered through all this pain to get there. When the baton does get passed, I want it.”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net