More than three years after a donor in Denmark gave up a kidney to save his life, Raleigh musician Jason Adamo is marking the occasion the way he knows best: with a concert. Adamo, a singer, songwriter and concert curator, was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease back in 2011, and the illness eventually left him needing a transplant to survive.
Adamo's path to a new kidney wound through an international donor chain rather than a single, simple surgery. As reported by CBS 17, a woman named Jenna Kovacic was undergoing the process of becoming a kidney donor at Duke, the hospital treating Adamo, and offered to donate on his behalf. Accounts of that offer differ: ABC11 reported that Kovacic was a perfect match for Adamo, while the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation described Kovacic and Adamo as not a compatible match, which set a larger chain in motion.
A Chain Stretching From Raleigh to Denmark
With a direct donation off the table, the case became a paired kidney exchange — a system that lets an unmatched donor give to another recipient whose own intended donor is also unmatched, according to the organization's account. Kovacic ultimately donated a kidney to a recipient in Colorado, and that recipient's loved one then donated a kidney to a man in Denmark named Morton Berktoft. Berktoft had his own would-be donor, Peter Wichmann, who wanted to give him a kidney but wasn't a match either.
Wichmann traveled into the chain instead of out of it: he donated his kidney to Adamo, completing a loop that the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation says stretched from the Triangle all the way to Denmark and ultimately helped three patients receive transplants from three donors. Berktoft had to travel to the United States for his own surgery as part of the arrangement. The matches were made possible by an algorithm the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation uses to build these multi-party chains — technology that organization figure Krista Sweeney has described as Nobel Prize-winning.
Life After Surgery
The recovery brought real, measurable change. Six months after the surgery, Adamo told WRAL he could keep up with his kids again, and he has said the transplant made everyday life, including playing with his two daughters, easier than it had been in years. Per the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, the donors and recipients across the chain were all doing well three months after their surgeries and took part in a virtual meeting to check in with one another. The group has stayed connected since: the chain's members remain healthy and in contact, and they reportedly meet up every November.
Adamo has turned that connection into an annual tradition. He hosts a yearly benefit concert for the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, an organization that also helps kidney donors and recipients cover costs like gas money and hotel stays during recovery. He has said he hopes the concerts inspire more people to consider donation and forge the kind of connections his own chain created — and he has recalled that his story once encouraged a woman to complete the paperwork and sign up as a donor herself.
Third Annual Strums & Slices Set for Cary
The third annual Strums & Slices concert is scheduled for Saturday, October 17, 2026, running from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. outside Di Fara Pizza Tavern at 111 E. Chatham Street in Cary. The lineup includes Rich Richards, Julie McKnight, Jack the Radio, Adamo himself and Javier Colon, who won the first season of The Voice.
The need behind the event remains significant. Almost 4,000 North Carolinians are currently waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant, and nearly 90% of them are waiting specifically for a kidney, according to Donate Life NC. The Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation says roughly one-third of willing donors turn out to be incompatible with their intended recipient, which is precisely the gap paired donation chains like Adamo's are designed to close. The nonprofit, established in 2006, says it facilitated the first non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor chain in 2007 and that its matching research has contributed to more than 15,000 additional kidney donations to date, with its longest documented chain reaching 16 transplants.
