Jonathan Mayers, the co-founder of Superfly and original force behind the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, has died. He was 51. The cause of his death has not been announced.

Mayers grew up in Nyack, N.Y., where he met his future Superfly partner Rich Goodstone, and attended college at Tulane, remaining in the city for several years after graduation before gravitating back to New York. While in New Orleans, he immersed himself in the local music scene, working for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and as a booker at the famed club Tipitina’s.

As he told Relix a few years ago: “At the time, I was unsure of what I wanted to do. I always had different entrepreneurial ventures and businesses going on. They weren’t related to music, but I knew that I wanted to have my own business. When I was in school, I interned at New Orleans Jazz Fest, and I was really inspired by the festival and the people working there. Around graduation, I thought maybe there was an opportunity to merge my interests in live music and events with being an entrepreneur.”

He promoted his first show under the Superfly banner in 1995 and, a year later, officially formed the company to stage club-level shows at venues and Riverboats around the Crescent City. Along with his Superfly partners, fellow Tulane students Rick Farman and Kerry Black as well as Goodstone, Mayers found success staging local gigs by both touring acts and improv-minded brass and funk bands, especially during Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest.

He later recalled, “Around ‘96-‘97, there was a change in ownership at Tip’s, and I left and wound up getting a full-time position at Jazz Fest for about a year or so. During that time, I teamed up with my current partners: Rick [Farman], Rich [Goodstone] and Kerry [Black]. And we said, “While I’m working at Jazz Fest, let’s do some shows focused on Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest—kind of satellite shows.” I got permission from Jazz Fest, and we started booking.

“We were always ambitious, and we put one foot in front of the other, thinking, “How can we make this sustainable? How can we grow this?” We didn’t have a master plan except that we were excited by the work, and we wanted to do it full time. Eventually, we had to make the choice of, “Do we want to take this leap to really focus on Superfly and make this a full-time thing?” And we decided to do it. That’s when we went beyond doing special events and we started promoting throughout the rest of the year.”

Beginning with their first official Superfly show, Take Funk to Heaven: Mardi Gras ’97, in March of that year, their bills often mixture of funk, rock, groove and hip-hop acts, helping introduce a new audience to the jazz and funk scenes New Orleans has long been known for. Superfly also put together their signature SuperJam series, which led to the formation of the supergroup Oysterhead.

In 2002, Superfly partnered with AC Entertainment of Red Light founder Coran Capshaw to launch the inaugural Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn. With Phish taking the year off from touring, they brought in the band’s festival production team and ended up drawing over 70,000 fans to a farm just south of Nashville. Bonnaroo’s success both helped put the burgeoning modern jam scene on the map and set the blueprint for the modern multi-band camping festival in the U.S. Taking inspiration for the established U.K. festival circuit, Bonnaroo began expanding its stylistic scope, first to other forms of independent music and later to include a range of classic-rock and pop acts Mayers played a key role in helping book Bonnaroo, especially in its early years, often traveling to meet with potential headliners in person and explain the festival’s ethos to groups like Metallica.

In that same article, he shared an important message from this era: “You have to be open to change. You could write a business plan, and it could be well thought out and planned, but the nature of our business is the twists and turns, and you have to go in expecting that and you have to be flexible in your thinking— and also be decisive and have a point of view. We were fortunate, but one of the challenges at the beginning of Bonnaroo was that everyone wanted to play. It was hard saying no. There’s the realization that if this is something that’s true to what we want to present, then you’re going to have to say no. You’re not going to please everyone, but that’s being true to what it is you’re trying to present and [having] your own point of view.”

In 2005, Superfly and AC Entertainment brought the Bonnaroo concept to Las Vegas with the launch of Vegoose, which lasted three years, and in 2008 Mayers and his partners launched the successful Outside Lands festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with Another Planet Entertainment. Outside Lands leaned into its city vibe, offering elevated food, wine and, later, cannabis experiences that broke with perceptions of what type of amenities a music festival could offer. Along the way, Mayers and Superfly launched a number of other shorter lived festivals like The Great GoogaMooga and Project Pabst.

Mayers’ friend and fellow promoter Peter Shapiro (Brooklyn Bowl, The Capitol Theatre, Bearsville Theater), who teamed with Superfly on GoogaMooga, told The Hollywood Reporter: “People use the word visionary a lot in our business but Jonathan Mayers was the real deal when it came to imagining what something new could be. It takes courage to lean into doing something that could crash and fail. And that is how Jonathan Mayers broke down real barriers and created some next level music festivals that impacted a generation of fans, bands and promoters.”

Superfly purchased the Bonnaroo site with AC Entertainment a few years after starting the festival, eventually told their stake in Tennessee festival to Live Nation and, following the gathering’s 2019 edition, stepped away from the long-running event. Beginning with a fruitful partnership with Viacom and Comedy Central that led to the comedy festival Clusterfest in 2017, Mayers and Superfly started bringing their event expertise to a range of television and legacy brand IPs, launching interactive experiences geared toward the Instagram generation based on Friends, Seinfeld, South Park, The Office, Arrested Development and many others.

Mayers parted ways with Superfly in August 2021. The next year he brought a lawsuit against his co-founders alleging breach of contract and fraud in assessing the value of his ownership stake. In January 2023, the case was dismissed.

The New York-based Mayers, a vinyl enthusiast who dreamed big, remained active in the years since and had dedicated himself to refurbishing sections of Detroit through his Core City Detroit project. This year’s Bonnaroo is slated to kick off on Thursday.