NYC WINTER JAZZFEST, various venues, Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York City, USA.
Dates: Thursday, January 08, 2026 - Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Featuring: Various Artists
More details
We have received the following press release;
2026 NYC WINTER JAZZFEST, (Jan. 8-13) Announces Individual Shows and Marathon Dates.
STILL WE RISE: NYC WINTER JAZZFEST ANNOUNCES SHOWS, VENUES AND LINEUPS
NYC Winter Jazzfest 2026 — January 8-13, 2026
In Manhattan and Brooklyn
Psychic Hotline Records Showcase, Meshell Ndegeocello at Pioneer Works, Giant Step 35.5 Anniversary at Elsewhere, My Country Tis of Thee at LPR, Gilles Peterson at Roulette, Dave Harrington’s Prankster’s East Reimagine Bitches Brew
Full Festival and Marathon Passes on sale now at http://www.winterjazzfest.com
22nd season celebrates Black American Music, Community, and Joy amidst forces of Erasure
A rallying cry echoes across the season:
STILL WE RISE • STILL WE GATHER • STILL WE DANCE • STILL WE PLAY • STILL WE SING.
For its 22nd edition, NYC Winter Jazzfest (January 8-13 2026) reaffirms its commitment to nurturing community and free expression through live music. This year’s theme centers on the joy and beauty of gathering together while celebrating the tradition and future of Black American music—especially urgent during a time when external forces threaten to erase Black culture and history.
“Winter Jazzfest has always been more than a music festival—it’s a nurturing community gathering, a platform for diverse voices, a space of joy and resilience,” said the festival team. “In 2026, we double down on the power of music to resist erasure and amplify the voices at the heart of Black American music traditions.”
The 2026 festival once again brings together a kaleidoscope of voices spanning jazz, experimental, soul, electronic, and global traditions. Today, the festival is announcing the initial individual shows, venues and dates for the Manhattan and Brooklyn Marathons. The initial line-up includes:
Adam O’Farrill’s ELEPHANT
Adegoke Steve Colson
Alden Hellmuth
Alfredo Colón Quintet
Amir ElSaffar w/ Tomas Fujiwara, Ole Mathisen, and Tania Giannouli
Amirtha Kidambi Elder Ones
Amy Gadiaga
Annie & The Caldwells
Arturo O’Farrill
Arun Ramamurthy Trio
Bex Burch
Black Earth Sway w/ Nicole Mitchell, Alexis Lombre, Coco Elysses, JoVia Armstrong
Brandon Ross Phantom Menace w/ Graham Haynes, David Virelles, JT Lewis, Hardedge
Brandon Woody’s Upendo
Brittany Davis
Carmen Staaf & Sounding Line
Civil Disobedience w/ David Ambrosio, Donny McCaslin, Ingrid Jensen, Bruce Barth & Johnathan Blake
Cory Henry
Dave Harrington’s Pranksters East Reimagine Bitches Brew
David Binney Action Trio w/ Pera Krstajic and Louis Cole
David Murray Quartet
Dawn of Midi
DoYeon Kim Quintet
Ekep Nkwelle
Elena & Samora Pinderhughes
Endea Owens & The Cookout
Freedom Riders
Gabrielle Cavassa
Gilles Peterson
Hanging Hearts
Instant Alter w/ Emilio Modeste, Natasha Agrama, Brandon Rose, Miguel Russell
James Brandon Lewis Quartet
James Carter Quintet - Trane: A Centennial Supreme
Joe Westerlund
Joel Ross
John Roseboro
Joy Guidry
Julius Hemphill Stringtet
Kahil ElZabar & Isaiah Collier
Kassa Overall
Lady Blackbird
Lakecia Benjamin
Laura Anglade
Lex Korten & Canopy
LOJO Watts w/ Logan Richarson, Joe Sanders, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts
Louis Cato
Luke Stewart’s Silt Trio
Luke Titus
Mádé Kuti & The Movement
Marcus Gilmore’s Journey to the New
Mei Semones
Merope w/ Shahzad Ismaily
Meshell Ndegeocello
Mingus Dynasty
Nate Mercereau
Nels Cline: songs from Lovers conducted by Michael Leonhart
Obed Calvaire
Ohad Talmor’s Back to the Land w/ David Virelles, Joel Ross, Chris Tordini and Eric McPherson
Patricia Brennan Tentet
Pedrito Martinez
Quantum Blues Quartet w/ Tisziji Muñoz, Will Calhoun, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and Paul Shaffer
Ron Trent
Sam Gendel
Sarah Elizabeth Charles
Sasha Berliner
Shahzad Ismaily, Maria Chavez, Greg Saunier
Sylvan Esso (DJ Set)
Takuya Kuroda
The Either/Orchestra plays éthiopiques
Tia Fuller & Shamie Fuller-Royston
Tomas Fujiwara Dream Up
Tomeka Reid Quartet
Tyreek McDole
Veronica Swift
William Tyler & Yasmin Williams
Xenia Rubinos
+ More TBA
Additional artists, individual shows, keynote speakers, and panel programming will be announced in the coming weeks.
January 8, 2026 - Psychic Hotline at NYC Winter Jazzfest
Mei Semones & John Roseboro, Amy Gadiaga, Sam Gendel, Joe Westerlund, William Tyler & Yasmin Williams, Sylvan Esso (DJ set)
Venue: LPR
Time: 7:00 PM Doors
Winter Jazzfest partners with Durham-based record label Psychic Hotline for a label showcase that expands the conversation around jazz and its many intersections. Founded by Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn with Martin Anderson, Psychic Hotline is an artist-run company built on radically artist-forward values: transparent deals, creative freedom, and an ever-growing community of voices. This showcase brings together adventurous music-makers across jazz, folk, and experimental traditions—Mei Semones & John Roseboro, Amy Gadiaga, Sam Gendel, Joe Westerlund, William Tyler & Yasmin Williams—plus a DJ set from Sylvan Esso. Winter Jazzfest has previously presented Psychic Hotline artists including Amaro Freitas, Sam Wilkes, and Gendel. This year’s showcase extends a warm genre-agnostic welcome to a label that celebrates our core values.
Manhattan Marathon
January 9, 2026 - Winter Jazzfest Manhattan Marathon
Venues: LPR, City Winery, City Winery Loft, Nublu, Drom, Bitter End, Zinc Bar
Time: 5:00 PM - 3:00 AM
On January 9, 2026, Winter Jazzfest’s legendary Manhattan Marathon once again transforms Lower Manhattan into a living map of sound, with music coursing through LPR, City Winery, City Winery Loft, Nublu, DROM, The Bitter End, and Zinc Bar. Audiences will be able to wander between venues and encounter strikingly different musical worlds that nevertheless speak to one another in surprising ways.
At LPR, experience lush, orchestrated textures alongside vibraphone and trumpet-driven ensembles exploring the percussive and electronic edges of contemporary improvisation. At City Winery, hear socially conscious bandleaders embodying jazz’s activist spirit, alongside a fiery tribute to John Coltrane. At Nublu, genre-benders join forces, creating exchanges where so-called “jazz” collides with ambient and electronic textures. At DROM, experience global currents flowing into contemporary jazz and the avant-garde. Late-night settings like Zinc Bar and The Bitter End keep the energy alive with cross-genre sparks originating from NYC to Paris, the Middle East and beyond. Our marathons are a kaleidoscope of rhythm, harmony, and expression—an open invitation to journey across the many shades of jazz in 2026 and beyond.
Brooklyn Marathon
January 10, 2026 - Winter Jazzfest Brooklyn Marathon
Venues: Brooklyn Bowl, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Superior Ingredients, National Sawdust, Baby’s All Right, Union Pool, Loove Annex
Time: 5:00 PM - 3:00 AM
For the fourth year in a row, on January 10, Winter Jazzfest’s signature Marathon heads to Brooklyn for its second night; a night of expansive sounds spread across Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Bowl, Superior Ingredients, Loove Labs Annex, Baby’s All Right, National Sawdust, and Union Pool. Like our Manhattan Marathon, our Brooklyn Marathon highlights artists who blur genre lines while staying rooted in jazz’s spirit of invention. At Music Hall of Williamsburg, rising stars of jazz vibraphone dovetail with folk-rooted fingerstyle guitarists and singer-songwriters whose instrumental and vocal storytelling intersect folk traditions with jazz. Brooklyn Bowl offers a global pulse, summoning trance-inducing diasporic traditions from Ethiopian jazz to Gnawa to Afrobeat and contemporary Afro-Cuban music. At Loove Labs Annex, we present a Fully Altered Artists showcase connecting multiple generations of forward-thinking jazz with radical reimaginings of improvised music. The avant-garde thrives at Baby’s All Right, with a cornucopia of cutting-edge improvisers lik. National Sawdust features exploratory voices in the Black Music continuum, while Union Pool’s Dada Strain showcase, now in its third year, offers genre-agnostic and boundary-breaking collaborations. The Brooklyn Marathon is a meeting ground for tradition, experimentation, and the global resonance of jazz today.
January 11, 2026 - Meshell Ndegeocello, Cory Henry, Annie & The Caldwells
Venue: Pioneer Works
Time: 7:00 PM Doors
Meshell Ndegeocello is the quintessential Winter Jazzfest artist—restlessly collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and fiercely dedicated to chronicling the experiences of Black Americans through song. Across projects that braid soul, jazz, and spoken word, her work radiates the creative impulse to bring joy, pain, birth, death and all life’s events in words and music—always unflinching, and deeply grooving. Opening, GRAMMY-winning keyboard visionary Cory Henry brings the church with him—melding gospel, jazz-funk, and R&B uplift. His recent project Church draws on his musical heritage and family, a testament to an artist whose work moves feet and hearts alike.
Mississippi’s Annie & The Caldwells testify with disco-tinged gospel soul straight from West Point, MS. As Annie says, “My family is my band,” and their multigenerational harmonies and sibling rhythm section turn lived experience into praise, perseverance, and party.
January 11, 2026 - Giant Step 35.5 Years Celebration at WInter Jazzfest
Gilles Peterson, Ron Trent, Kassa Overall, plus guests TBA
Venue: Elsewhere
Time: 6:00 PM
Giant Step and Winter Jazz present an unforgettable night celebrating 35.5 years of Giant Step, featuring exclusive New York DJ sets from Gilles Peterson, Ron Trent, and a live performance from Kassa Overall. Both Gilles and Ron have deep roots in Giant Step’s history; from Gilles’ many iconic DJ sets over the years to Nuyorican Soul, and Ron’s influential DJ residency and production work during Giant Step Records golden era in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Expect a special musical journey only these legends can deliver, plus a live set from Kassa Overall and special guests. Kassa’s new album Cream is earning rave reviews for its bold fusion of jazz and hip-hop. This one will sell out so grab your ticket early.
January 12, 2026 — LPR - My Country ’Tis of Thee: Freedom Riders & Guests Arturo O’Farrill, Samora Pinderhughes, Mádé Kuti, Adegoke Steve Colson + more
Doors: 7:00 PM
Winter Jazzfest presents My Country ’Tis of Thee—a powerful night of music, resistance, and hope. At the heart of the evening are the Freedom Riders, an all-star ensemble of youngish voices in creative music, dedicated to amplifying messages of social justice through sound including Tomoki Sanders, Alfredo Colón, Milena Casado, Sasha Berliner, Carmen Staaf, Joe Dyson and co-leaders Luke Stewart and Ben Williams (both bassists with deep roots in our nation’s capital).
This one-of-a-kind performance takes the shape of a truly improvised round robin, interweaving spontaneous creation with standard repertoire linked to the civil rights movement. Alongside these echoes of history, the Freedom Riders and their invited guests—visionary artists Arturo O’Farrill, Adegoke Steve Colson, Samora Pinderhughes, and Mádé Kuti plus additional guests to be announced—will share current songs born from their own activist practice, underscoring the ongoing struggle for equality and freedom.
January 13, 2026 - Gilles Peterson Presents: Liner Notes
An Evening of Music, Stories and More presented by NYC Winter Jazzfest & Giant Step
Venue: Roulette
Internationally renowned broadcaster, DJ label owner, festival curator and record collector, Gilles Peterson has played a pivotal role in supporting and promoting underground music globally over the past four decades. Please join us for a unique evening where Gilles enters into a conversation with his records. Accompanied by a series of special guests, he will join the musical dots, playing and chatting about his favorite sounds past, present and future - think of it as a live radio show you can see.
Take Two: Dave Harrington’s Pranksters East Reimagine “Bitches Brew”
January 13, 2026 - Take Two: Dave Harrington’s Pranksters East Reimagine “Bitches Brew”
Venue: LPR
co-presented with Pique-nique
Pique-nique and Winter Jazzfest present guitarist and producer Dave Harrington and his Pranksters East, reinterpreting Miles Davis’ groundbreaking album “Bitches Brew” in his centennial year.
Part of the Take Two deep-listening series, the evening pairs an uninterrupted playback of the 1970 classic followed by a live reimagining by Harrington and his ensemble. Known for his work with Darkside, Taper’s Choice and exploratory solo projects, Harrington has assembled all-star Pranksters in cities across the country. Always a “behemoth grooving machine”, they drew inspiration from many substrates of free improvisation, asking what lies between “Bitches Brew” and “Blues for Allah”.
For this special performance, Harrington leads an ensemble of longtime friends and new collaborators, taking cues from Miles’ legendary 1970 Fillmore shows when he opened for the Dead. Honoring both the energy of those live sets and Teo Macero’s groundbreaking studio craft, the group will explore the space between composition, improvisation and production.
Visuals & Messaging: STILL WE RISE
The festival’s 2026 creative direction, led by Creative Director Maryam Shines, takes inspiration from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.” The artwork created for this year’s festival is a visual anthem of resilience, power, and joy, drawing on the bold lines of political poster art, the brilliance of Afrofuturist visionaries, and the lush imagination of artists like Kerry James Marshall and Mati Klarwein.
At its center, two hands rise—cupped open, both offering and receiving—embodying the spirit of jazz itself: the magic of cross-cultural and socio-economic exchange occurring across time, the embrace of tradition and the human urge to innovate new musical forms of expression. Flowers, especially roses, bloom throughout the imagery: as sound bursting from instruments, as threads binding musicians together, as offerings of joy in defiance of silence. (“Still I Rise” by Dr. Maya Angelou is officially used here with permission of Caged Bird Legacy, LLC)
The rallying cry echoes across the festival:
STILL WE RISE. STILL WE GATHER. STILL WE DANCE. STILL WE PLAY. STILL WE SING.
From Then Until Now
NYC Winter Jazzfest began in 2005 at the Knitting Factory on Leonard St., with the inaugural mission of highlighting music that deserved wider attention while the APAP conference was in town. To a large degree, that mission remains. But over the years it has grown to focus on artists with meaningful messages—serving as a beacon for racial and gender justice, climate action, immigration, mass incarceration, and other urgent issues that affect so many of us.
The overarching goal is clear: to grow the audience for jazz through a broad programming vision that reflects the diversity of New York’s scene, presenting the widest spectrum of what jazz can be. That mission continues in January 2026, as Winter Jazzfest once again supports a host of fearless and creative musicians while pushing boundaries and imagining new possibilities for our music scene and our world.
About NYC Winter Jazzfest
Praised by The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR and countless other outlets, NYC Winter Jazzfest has become a creative home for pathbreaking artists from New York and around the world, and a pivotal destination for arts leaders, hardcore fans, and new listeners alike. The festival has grown from its humble beginnings into a citywide event featuring as many as 150 groups and 600+ artists across 20 stages in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Founded by New York concert impresario Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest is the definitive all-inclusive jazz gathering, offering a “state of the union” of the music in all its forms—from avant-garde to post-bop, party bands to ambient electronics, jazz-funk to global fusions. Attendees regularly travel from across the U.S. and abroad, making it one of the most anticipated destination festivals on the international calendar—often referred to as jazz’s answer to SXSW.
2026 Partners: Boom Collective, Langham Hotels, Yamaha, Venue Pilot, Nublu, Giant Step, Paris Jazz Club, TSF Jazz, Psychic Hotline, Reservoir, Dada Strain, Pique-nique, KMDH, WRTI, Fusicology, DoNYC