What does music mean to you?

Music is emotion. It’s the force of the universe that immediately imparts a mood and sometimes a memory - a context of time and place. If I play classical music for you it has an immediate impact - and that immediacy and feeling is something I've always gravitated towards. I knew from an early age though, that I was not meant to have a music career.

It’s a wise man who recognizes his own strengths and weaknesses.

Developing an in-depth understanding of what I'm good at and what I'm not good at took many years. As an 18-year old entrepreneur, I definitely thought I could take on the world and I could do anything. As I progressed, I understood that I needed to surround myself with the right team and to trust people who are far more skilled than I in certain areas.

What have you found that you are good at?

I am pretty strong at visualizing and analyzing what needs to happen to get us where we want to be. I'm very analytical. I’m able to compartmentalize a whole story into small stories to make it all work as one. I think that’s why I’ve enjoyed being a producer. In a way, it’s like being the conductor who orchestrates a team to get to one moment in time - where we’ve created a spark of magic so that people can say, ‘Wow, that was special.’

How did you develop your business skills?

At a very young age my mother gave me the opportunity to interact with a lot of people. Beginning when I was 7 years old she would take me with her on business trips. I’d sit in on meetings for hours just observing people and how they interacted. As a result I have a good feel for business and people. At the same time, my mother was very into aesthetics and she always explained to me why she was using certain designers. So I was also raised with a strong sense of aesthetics, of how things needed to look and feel. All of that helped in my evolution, and I’ve taken it to my own level.

What’s the art of what you do?

I think I'm pretty unconventional in the way I do business. I always come from a place of excitement - and I get the people who work with me excited about creating something. When you start a conversation that way, everybody is immediately invested. I'm not saying ‘oh, my God, this is complicated!’ I may not always know how we're going to do a particular thing, but we are always going to have that first moment of excitement, and then we’ll look at the “how” of it. Primarily, we’re going to share in the excitement as a group of people, and we’re going to create something wonderful together - so we start with a sense of togetherness. After that, there's no shortcut. You work with different people and some relationships work out and others don’t. What happens when you do something consistently for years is that you create a group of people around you that are all good in their respective fields, so the whole environment becomes a joy because everybody has their own lane. Ultimately I create an environment where people feel safe, where they feel that they are being heard and they can deliver what they need to deliver.

How do manage when you have a project in front of you and you're absolutely clueless how you're going to pull it off?

I've learned not to force things when I am stuck. Instead, I’ll go off for a long walk. In the past when I was digging deep inside myself trying to force vision, nothing would come up. So I’ve learned to let go internally and trust my subconscious. Often you simply need time to digest and let ideas flow naturally.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced was during the building of our club Gospël. It was an impossible journey. I wanted to quit many times. Looking back at it, I really wonder how we did it. But you know what? Every day I woke up and I thought, ‘I’m going to fix one part of this.’ The fact that we succeeded is a great testament to my partners and my investors and my team. I was in a dark tunnel and kept saying to myself, ‘at some point the light is going to shine in my face.’ And that tunnel was long - years long.

Are you out of the tunnel?

Mostly. I’m feeling the sun on my face now.

What's your ‘why?’

I often refer to myself in my profession as a Formula One race car driver. What I mean by that is I love personal high performance. I love focus. I love high pressure. I’m not racing against other people, and I won’t get a gold medal. But I am in the driver’s seat and can’t make mistakes. It’s constant high pressure and you’re up against the clock. The part that is really important for me is personal drive and personal satisfaction, and continually raising the bar.

What drives me is that I have a great passion for events and for experiences. I think that in America we can raise the bar of entertainment for the deep house music culture. That scene still has tremendous growth to make and I want to be part of bringing it to the bigger table. I also think that through larger and larger scale events, we can educate people by promoting the fact that we don't use single-use plastic, that we recycle and that we have a message of being good to the environment. I try to have a message of raising consciousness in the productions that I put together.

What was your introduction to the production world?

I had my introduction when I was 17 and my mom told me to leave the house! Honestly, if my child behaved the way I was behaving at the time I would have been far less kind than my mom was to me. She was extremely generous. I thank her so much for having had that approach with me because at a very young age she forced me to become street smart. She forced me to ask myself what I wanted in life. So I became extremely creative. I wasn’t worried about becoming rich or famous - I couldn’t have cared less about that. What I cared about was finding what was going to make me happy. In a matter of weeks I was handing out party flyers. It got me into clubs and I was great at it so I thought ‘if I know how to have this whole promotion network, I think I can figure out the production side of it as well. Get a DJ, get a designer, make a flyer, get a contract with a venue.’ I was truly clueless about what I was stepping into, but my mindset was; ‘let’s go - I'm going to figure this out.’

Describe an early production.

I was at university in Amsterdam and these guys from the Bronx were in my class and they told me they wanted to throw Hip-Hop parties. I told them that I would organize everything so I became the man behind the scenes for this group of guys from the Bronx. The parties became wildly successful - thousands of people showed up to them, everyone paying cash. That’s one of the stories from early in my career; we produced hundreds of events in many cities in Holland. At 21 I decided I wanted to be more than a club promoter, so I became an artist manager. I managed musical artists for many years - producers and DJs, and I found a lot of success with it.

Why did you stop managing artists?

Those were good days - a rocket ship straight up. I made a really good living for myself - and then when I was 24 I made the classic mistake that a lot of people make. Nightlife and entertainment has a very dark side to it, which is the power of seduction - of intoxication and living in that energy. As you can imagine, being a successful young entrepreneur in that field I got heavily seduced by that lifestyle. I had started to believe that that was the reality of things. So I definitely needed to make adjustments. Basically I lost everything that I had through my own actions.

Sometimes that's what it takes.

100 percent. I see that period of my life as part of the medals in my closet. It made me what I am today. So I came to New York as a much more well-rounded, humble person.

Why did you come to the States?

I went on sabbatical for a year and a half, lived in the woods, a total reset. I came to New York first to manage the artist Lee Burridge and quickly realized that’s not what I wanted to do. That was when we started Babël. We took it one step at a time but it grew beyond belief - it was really unique. It was a combination of the right venues with the right idea with the right people, the right curation of the right artists. Everything was aligned for a moment in time, and you felt that magic. It was a journey - something very special and unique in New York. And a lot of what I see today seems as if they are inspired by that initial spark.

I didn’t know what I was going to do when I packed my suitcases and came to New York, but I was confident an opportunity would show up. The same is true today; I know that new opportunities will come to me. I'd like to produce in Asia and on the West Coast. I definitely want to produce outside of New York. I also want to be involved in more complicated productions. I just produced a private party with a level of production that you have never seen from me before. It was amazing - a new level from anything I’ve ever done. And I’m asking myself how I can go 10 levels up from there in the next year.

Do you have any role models?

Bob Pittman of iHEART is somebody that I really look up to. He was a radio deejay and now he is the CEO of the biggest radio company in the world. So there is an evolution, a logical path to where he started and where he is today. If I think about myself and where I am today and imagine where I’ll be in 10 years, I believe I will be doing productions on a much higher level and at a much higher speed and a much higher demand.

What do you envision for your future?

Do you know how you're gonna feel tomorrow morning? Why waste your breath on filling in how the story of your life is going to unfold. I believe that we are a beam of energy and that the universe is made out of energy. Ultimately we are all energetic beings, living in a galaxy that is made out of energy, and so whatever you put out comes back to you. If I do good for people good things will eventually come to me, and I believe in unconditional giving. By putting so much love and care and energy in my profession, my craft and the people I work with, ultimately opportunities are going to come along that I never could imagine. Who knows, maybe one day I'm going to produce the Oscars. Can I say today I want to produce the Oscars? That’s just not how I operate. When opportunity presents itself, I seize it and often opportunity has been very far beyond what I ever hoped for. I trust the force. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

If you could actually sit down with 15-year-old you and give him some advice, what would you say?

In the past, I wasn’t very nice to myself, and because of that, I allowed people in my life that were absolutely not nice to me. I’ve become aware of how poorly I treated myself and how little love I gave myself. Through learning to be kinder to myself my life has changed drastically. I wish I had learned that at a younger age - but after all, it's not about the destination. It's about enjoying the whole journey. So don’t try to fill in the journey - just take it one day at a time and see what comes to you.

Juriël Zeligman is the Co-founder of BABËL and GOSPËL, NYC. Since launching One Music in 2005, Juriël's intense passion for music, events, and community has propelled him into a successful career providing hundreds of platforms for musical artists around the world. In 2008 he founded Zeligman
Management, signing a record deal with renowned DJ Tiësto’s Black Hole Recordings, and later went on to sign deals with house music’s elite: Carl Cox (Global), John Digweed (Bedrock), Sven Väth (Cocoon) and managed Lee Burridge, alongside of that helped to incorporate his world renowned venture All Day I Dream. In 2009 Juriël developed and launched Gem Records (a 360 deal company: label, agency & production) with Secret Cinema, a platform connecting musical artists with major festivals worldwide including Awakenings festival - Amsterdam, Cocoon Amnesia - Ibiza and Wire Festival in Yokohama - Japan. Since the inception of BABËL in 2013, Juriël has produced over 100+ BABËL events at numerous high profile venues including Governors Island, United Nations, The Bowery Hotel, The William Vale, Sony Hall at The Paramount Hotel, Webster Hall, The Standard, Gurneys Montauk, The Edition Hotel in Miami, and more. Juriël's latest venture is GOSPËL: a cutting edge music venue & culture club in the heart of SoHo.

Juriël Zeligman - Conversations with Artists