Musicians from D’Addario & Co. will take to the Chapin Rainbow Stage at Heckscher Park on Aug. 24 in a free concert to support Long Island Cares.
The performers, most of them employees of the well-respected musical equipment maker in East Farmingdale, will include members of three generations of one family playing music from Elvis Costello and the Pretenders, a husband-wife team, another known as the Human Jukebox, and Los Dos members Greg Romano and Brian Vance.
Steve Mucciolo, director of marketing performance and analytics at D’Addario, who also sits on the board at Long Island Cares, said many employees are musicians in their own right, playing out in bands who perform around the area.
He was appointed to the board to succeed Janet D’Addario, who cofounded the company with her husband, Jim. She died in 2021.
“We put together employee-led bands for jams at Christmas parties” and other events. Mucciolo said. “We wanted to do a jam in the summer, then Covid happened, but we came back last year at Jones Beach.”
Then, he said, Jim D’Addario reached out to Huntington Supervisor Ed Smyth with the idea of a concert for Long Island Cares, and Summer Jam was born.
The jam brings music and food together in a full circle, performing on the stage named for the late Harry Chapin, the Huntington resident who founded Long Island Cares in 1980.
The event, sponsored by the Town of Huntington, will also include food trucks and raffles.
Though the concert, scheduled for 6 PM-10 PM, is free, the audience is asked to bring non-perishable food items and monetary donations.