On a Monday night in late September, a big band will take over a corner of The Post in Lincoln's Telegraph District, and the only thing standing between the audience and the stage is a willingness to play.
The Capital Jazz Society's 2026 Summer Concert Series brings the Monday Night Big Band, directed by Pete Madsen, to The Post at 2001 N Street on September 28 from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is free. Donations to the society are welcome. And in a tradition that has no real equivalent in most American cities, any musician in the room who brought an instrument can sit in with the band.
That open-chair policy is not a gimmick bolted onto a concert series. It is the reason the series exists.
The Capital Jazz Society was created by musicians who saw a need in Lincoln for regular live jazz opportunities, where players were allowed to play what they liked without musical restraints or constrictions. The organization received its nonprofit designation in 2002, and since then it has presented hundreds of live jazz events in the city. In 2019, the Lincoln Arts Council honored it with a Mayor's Arts Award for Outstanding Arts Organization, citing its educational outreach.
The Monday Night Big Band is the society's flagship. Its conception traces directly to a specific room and a specific night in New York City: the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, which began its long residency at the Village Vanguard in 1966 and made Monday nights synonymous with adventurous big band jazz. That tradition spread to cities across the United States, and Lincoln's version is a deliberate descendant of it. The society's own account of the band's origins names Jones and Lewis explicitly as the model.
What that inheritance looks like in practice is a band whose membership changes week to week. Players are drawn from a large pool of local musicians, and there is a different combination for every performance. The current instrumentation runs to five saxophones, four or five trumpets, four or five trombones, and a rhythm section of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Over the years the group has also folded in vibraphone, harmonica, percussion, other winds, French horns, tuba, vocalists, and even electric cello.
The age range of the regular players runs from about 17 to 60 and beyond, mixing college students with seasoned professionals. High school and college jazz ensembles are occasionally invited to perform as the featured group. The society describes the arrangement plainly: students get to learn from direct interaction with working musicians, sitting side by side with professionals on their instrument. The band's directors — among them Dean Haist and Bob Krueger — are themselves some of the state's strongest performers and educators at the high school and collegiate levels, and they select the repertoire from an extensive library of big band literature.
The audience reflects the same mix. The society notes that its crowds include jazz fans of all ages, among them University of Nebraska-Lincoln students fulfilling requirements for the school's "History of American Jazz" course — a lecture hall's worth of listeners getting their education in a bar instead.
Pete Madsen, who directs the September 28 date, is a fitting choice to lead a band built on the student-professional handoff. He has been coordinator of jazz studies and trombone teacher at the University of Nebraska Omaha since 2000. As a freelance musician he has performed with the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra, the Omaha Big Band, the Omaha Brass Ensemble, and the Omaha Symphony. He appears on the Chase Music Group label with the Jim Widner Big Band, on Albany Records with the Continental Trombone Quartet, and on Conor Oberst's "Upside Down Mountain" on Nonesuch Records. He is an artist and clinician for the Getzen Company and has presented and performed at the Midwest Clinic, the Jazz Education Network Conference, the American Trombone Workshop, the South American Trombone Festival, and the China Trombone Festival.
The society's roots run through a small circle of Lincoln musical entrepreneurs. Dean Haist, born in Lincoln, is president of Arts Incorporated, the management business that handles the Capital Jazz Society along with the Lincoln Municipal Band, the Monday Night Big Band, Nebraska Brass, the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra, the Nebraska Trumpet Ensemble, and the Lincoln Jazz Series. Haist is executive director of the Capital Jazz Society, co-founder and executive director of the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra, founder and executive director of the Nebraska Brass, and executive director and first trumpet of the Lincoln Municipal Band. He was named Nonprofit Executive of the Year by the Association of Nonprofit Executives in 1997.
The series has moved around the city over the years, and the moves track the changing geography of Lincoln's music life. In January 2017, the society shifted its jazz events from Vega in the Railyard to Cottonwood at 11th and K streets and consolidated everything onto Monday nights, opening with guest artists Andrew Janak & The Wind Armada. That run also introduced a monthly "First Monday Jazz Jam" with the Peter Bouffard Trio as house band, where local musicians could sit in — an early expression of the same open-door instinct. When the pandemic shut down live rooms in 2021, the society pivoted to livestreamed series, broadcasting sets from the Andrew Janak Quintet and others on its Facebook page rather than going dark.
Now the Monday nights happen at The Post, which opened in December 2023 and bills itself as Lincoln's first true "service bar" — a space at the northeast corner of 20th and M Streets built around community connection as much as cocktails, blending what it describes as Southern hospitality with modern sophistication. It is a room designed for people to stay awhile, which is precisely what a two-set, sit-in-friendly big band night requires.
The society's mission statement puts the educational goal first: to produce jazz events and provide opportunities where students and professionals can learn from one another. On a Monday night, that mission is not abstract. It is a teenager with a horn standing up during the second set next to a player who has been gigging in Lincoln for thirty years, reading charts off the same stand.
The September 28 performance is one date in a series that continues into the fall, with the Monday Night Big Band returning to The Post on October 5 and October 19, and the UNO Faculty Jazz Combo scheduled for October 26. But the format is the constant: free admission, two hours of live big band jazz, and an open invitation to anyone who plays.
For musicians in the audience, the practical advice is simple. Bring an instrument. The band takes sitters-in. There is no ticket, no cover, and no capacity barrier — just a donation bucket for the society that keeps the whole thing running, and a chair that is, by design, never fully occupied.