New York is a jazz town, always has been. And NYC Winter Jazz Fest, especially the Manhattan and Brooklyn marathon nights, is a chance to see many of the city’s best players outside of their regular grinds and typical clubs. I look at it as sort of a winter reset, after the flurry of end-of-year lists, and a chance to see what’s coming next….
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NEA Jazz Master Big Chief Donald Harrison graces the Town Hall stage with special guests Dave Holland, DJ Logic, Vernon Reid, Charles Tolliver, Joe Dyson, Arturo O’Farrill, Fred Wesley, and The Headhunters (Bill Summers & Mike Clark) will present a program of multiverse, omniverse, multi-genre groove-orientated concepts.
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Ars Nova Workshop will bring the spirit of Philadelphia to NYC’s most celebrated jazz event with the Ars Nova Workshop Stage at Winter JazzFest, presenting a stellar all-star line-up for the festival’s 20th anniversary during the WJF Manhattan Marathon, on Friday, January 12 at Nublu
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The 2024 NYC Winter Jazz Fest will celebrate The East, with a special screening of the document film “The Run Rises in the East”, and Jazz Talks session on the impact of The East, and “A Night At the East,” a re-imagining of legendary jazz performances presented at the East.
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Saxophonist Caroline Davis and flugelhorn player Milena Casado, who have both been participants in mentorship programs geared toward women and gender expansive musicians, share how mentorship has affected their growth as artists, and how they find ways to mentor other musicians, regardless of age or career status.
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Curtis Fowlkes, who recently departed this life, was a helluva trombone player. The best, really. Walk onstage at any of these venues. Ask any musician who’s heard or played with him.
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Moxy Lower East Side and Williamsburg are the official host hotels of the 2024 NYC Winter Jazzfest.
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Support our artists! Browse our silent auction supporting our 2024 Artist Fund featuring concert tickets, all access passes, signed CDs and vinyl, restaurant gift certificates, professional consultations, and more.
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2-Day NYC Winter Jazzfest Marathon + Jazz Congress Passes available for a limited time only.
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The 1st wave artist for the 2024 NYC Winter Jazzfest celebrating 20 years has been announced. Highlight include Shabaka Hutchings, Artist-in-Residence, making 6 appearances, with esperanza spalding, Saul Williams, Jason Moran, Joe Lovano and more.
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After the late trumpeter jaimie branch moved to New York in 2015, she was a regular at pretty much all Winter Jazzfests that followed. Breezy loved that, over the course of its hectic week, she could get a few different gigs in, at least one that would inevitably feature her own proj- ects — whether the jaimie branch quartet that was soon renamed Fly Or Die, or her electronic improvisation duo Anteloper…
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Before there was Revive Music Group, its Blue Note Records imprint, or a dedicated stage at Winter Jazzfest, Revive Da Live, the presenter and promoter of progressive jazz artists and events, was Meghan Stabile’s senior project at Berklee. The way she saw it, she couldn’t believe that this wealth of music existed without more fanfare from her own generation. In shows that combined the foundations of jazz with more contemporary elements of hip-hop….
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On a chilly January afternoon in 2018, WJF hosted the “Jazz and Gender: Challenging Inequality and Forging a New Legacy” panel to a room jam-packed and buzzing with energy. Angela Davis, Lara Pellegrinelli, Arnetta Johnson, Vijay Iyer, and Esperanza Spalding spoke, with Terri Lyne Carrington as moderator….
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NEA Jazz Master and spiritual beacon, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who joined the ancestors last September 24, was an honored Winter Jazzfest presence. He headlined a 2017 WJF bill opened by one of his acolytes, Afro-Brit quest-agent Shabaka Hutchings and one of his several assemblages, The Ancestors….
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As a broadcaster, DJ and record collector, Sun Ra’s LPs have always been enticing, rare, pre-discogs–limited edition works of art. I can definitely recall the buzz we experienced when Ra, complete with wolfskin fur hat, arrived at Jazz FM in the early 90s to be interviewed by Jez Nelson. We were young and Ra was out there—mysterious, like no one else we’d ever met.
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“Marshall Allen is a giant. There is no alto saxophonist I know today, or generally, hipper than Marshall. That this is not common knowledge is depressing.” Proclaimed in the early 90s by Amiri Baraka, these words still ring true in 2023, and Marshall deserves all the recognition he can get, especially during his lifetime.
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During jazz’s century, the music has seen so much peril as to be perceived as perpetually on life support. That perception is most frequently associated with aesthetic and commercial threats: the imagined harm wrought by shocking innovation, the dilution that comes with popularity, the struggle that comes without it.
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For Angel Bat Dawid, fearlessness comes naturally. She survived a brain tumor diagnosis while in college. Last year, she was hospitalized for several weeks battling COVID-19. And just hours after her own COVID diagnosis, Dawid’s younger sister, who suffered from chronic asthma, died from complications due to COVID-19. What keeps her going? Her faith and a promise she made to her sister to keep going.
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