Kennedy Center demands $1M from jazz musician who pulled out of annual New Year’s concert in protest at Trump renaming

President Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center head is demanding $1 million from a musician who refused to play at the Washington, D.C. arts venue after its recent name change.

Drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd, 67, has been the longtime host for the Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Jam, but he canceled the event shorty after the venue’s board announced it would rename the iconic venue to include the president’s name. The venue’s new, currently unofficial, name is the “Donald Trump and the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Now, Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell — who also served in Trump’s first administration and was appointed in February after the president most of the board — is threatening to sue the musician for backing out of the performance.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” Grenell reportedly wrote in a letter to Redd, which was obtained by the Washington Post.

Grenell wrote that the letter was Redd’s “official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”

Redd — who has shared the stage with jazz greats like Charlie Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, and Barney Kessel — confirmed that he pulled out of the event because he opposed the name change.

“I did choose to cancel our Kennedy Center Christmas Eve Jazz Jam when I saw the name change happening last Friday,” Redd told CNN in a statement. “I’ve been performing at the Kennedy Center since the beginning of my career and I was saddened to see this name change.”

Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, complained in an email to the Washington Post that artists who refuse to perform at the venue over political differences lacked principles.

“Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled — they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people,” Daravi said.

Grenell said in an X post that he “will not let” artists cancel Kennedy Center shows “without consequences.”

“The left is boycotting the Arts because Trump is supporting the Arts. But we will not let them cancel shows without consequences,” Grenell wrote. “The Arts are for everyone – and the Left is mad about it.”

The Kennedy Center was established by Congress to be both the nation’s cultural arts center, and was later made a memorial when it was given Kennedy’s name in 1964.

Trump hosted the center’s annual honors event last week. That event is typically televised, but this year’s show saw a 35 percent drop in viewership with Trump at the helm, according to a report.

The center’s new, Trump-selected board of trustees voted last week to rename it, adding Trump’s name before Kennedy’s, but the move has already been challenged by Congresswoman Joyce Beatty. She filed a lawsuit on Monday claiming that an act of Congress is needed to officially change the center’s name.

Members of the Kennedy family — including the former president’s niece, Maria Shriver, and former Democratic congressman Joe Kennedy — were critical of Trump tacking his own name onto their relative’s memorial.

“It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable,” Shriver wrote on Instagram. “It is not.”

It’s not just musicians and Kennedy relatives who oppose Trump’s meddling in the Kennedy Center. Ticket sales for events have plummeted since Trump replaced the previous board with loyalists, according to the Washington Post.

The report found that orchestra, theater, and dance performance tickets are lower this year than since before the coronavirus pandemic.

At least 20 productions cancelled or postponed their shows in response to Trump’s board shakeup in February.