nyc winter jazzfest 2026
last year i went to the nyc winter jazzfest for the first time, something i'd been meaning to do for many years. friends from out of town came in to attend, and so we all went together.
i had a very nice time, so i went again this year.
2026-01-08 (thu): opening night
before the show, we went to get dinner at spicy moon, mostly because that's where we went before opening night last year and there was one right by le poisson rouge. uh, because we communicated this entirely via an imessage extension that emulates pictochat for the nintendo ds, well:
oops. anyway, the dry pepper drumsticks at spicy moon are really, really good.
because of pictochat shenanigans, dinner ran long and we got in partway through the second set at the opening night show at le poisson rouge: joe westerlund with sam gendel and sylvan esso's nick sanborn.
🎵 joe westerlund - felt like floating (04:28)
i: do not like le poisson rouge. as a venue it's... fine, i guess, but the crowd at this show was one of the worst i've ever been at a show with. the entire show there was kind of a low conversational background din going on. at one point a guy angrily shouted at people to take their conversations outside.
when we got in this big group of folks was next to us talking about the logistics of their friend getting in from the airport and after we moved away from them the world's tallest, rudest 22-year-old just kind of jammed himself in front of me with his armpits just in my face all of a sudden. then he called his girlfriend over.
anyway. everyone but sam gendel left the stage after that.
🎵 sam gendel - so so good u guys (5:19)
then, gendel did a kind of weird and charming solo set where he spent a lot of time fiddling with an ipad and an electronic wind instrument. at one point he played a bagpipe song, and another was kind of... i would describe it as being in the vein of those "x but in the y soundfont" videos that crop up on youtube. vaguely shitposty. super interesting to see gendel play like that having only heard his like... serenely beautiful and atmospheric saxophone stuff.
🎵 amy gadiaga - paloma negra (05:14)
amy gadiaga and her band was new to me. there was a kind of delightful flourish at the start of the set where she started singing and you think, "ah okay, she's the vocalist." and then she picks up the enormous bass from flat on the ground and starts playing the fuck out of it and you go "ohhhh." i don't think this photo quite captures it, but the lighting on the stage was such that her bass strings looked like they were made out of gold. i think that's neat.
🎵 john roseboro & mei semones - waters of march (3:50)
you can just make out that too-tall-for-manners 22-year-old on the right edge there. because of reasons, i have a dinky little cassette player in my office. i only got it for a little cassette of ambient lake noises, but then i ended up getting a copy of this—which i'm just now realizing is also out of durham, NC where psychic hotline is based. a student later gave me a random cassette she found lying around. anyway, i doubled my cassette collection that night by grabbing two albums by john roseboro and another by mei.
2026-01-09 (fri)
manhattan marathon day! i spent the morning digging through john roseboro and mei semones albums i hadn't heard, then went down into the city to meet up at dia chelsea to see the duane linklater show which i thought filled that huge installation space in interesting ways. down to chelsea market via the highline to get one single spicy noodle from very fresh noodle co. and halva ice cream from seed + mill around the corner.
🎟️ james carter quintet, full set at birdland 2024-08-14 (1:15:00)
from there we walked to city winery where we ended up spending most of the night. we started downstairs with the james carter quintet, which also had steve turre playing trombone and a set of like six conch shells of varying sizes and decoration. the set they played was fine, but very straight-ahead jazz. the vibe of a lot of the jazz clubs i've been to in the city have never been... great? something about the seating arrangement and culture around "you must be spending this much money per set on drinks, and also this is an overpriced restaurant" has always bothered me a little bit.
besides the awkward intrusion of commerce, my main highlight was seeing steve turre play conch shells and playing them into the piano to pick up resonance off of that.
🎵 sarah elizabeth charles, scope - blind emotions (4:03)
we ended up heading to the smaller upstairs area at city winery (which was where we had wanted to go to begin with), and wound up camping out there until the last show. hard to beat chairs, a table, and nobody bothering us to buy drinks at the front of the stage. this first set with sarah elizabeth charles was i think my highlight for all of jazzfest. everyone was in really top form, and there was something really great about seeing four individually great musicians come together to do some really great playing. jordan peters on guitar, or bareket on bass, and eliza salem on drums were all stellar.
📼 tia fuller - the coming (8:34)
i learned who tia fuller is after seeing her live, which i'm kind of glad for. before the set they played some home movies and related what their upcoming album fuller sound is about—a family band that tia, her sister shamie, and their parents recorded an album for in 1999 and are doing a second release with the next generation. (tia's sister shamie plays piano and shamie's son koleby plays drums.)
🎵 veronica swift - sing (5:44)
somehow this was the most jazz age act i saw this weekend, complete with a vaguely flapper vibe and scat singing. swift is an incredible vocalist, though the set was more songbook-y/cover-y than i would have liked. she has some interesting projects outside of the more clearcut jazz stuff, she and her husband brian viglione are working on a project called dame that i would maybe describe as "eighties hard rock revival".
📼 brandon woody's upendo - we're not scared (16:29)
imani grace's vocals add a lot to this group for me, where there are like certain phrases or lines that just get repeated over and over again until they stop being words, become musical, and then kind of ebb and flow between meaning and noise over the course of the song. at jazzfest last year there was an interesting show where ravi coltrane performed a love supreme for its 60th birthday which i think is kind of the pinnacle of this kind of devotional repetition thing for me.
i was talking to lattner while we were walking to the crash pad later that night that my favorite things in live jazz are:
- people listening and waiting for the right moment to jump back in
- people who have never or barely played with each other as they try to communicate live
- people who have played with each other for a million billion years and have their own secret language they communicate with
michael saunders on bass and quincy phillips on drums definitely had that last one. just constantly like looking at each other and laughing and smiling as they play off of each other, an incredible energy. quincy had a very cool spiral crash cymbal.
🎵 william hill trio - keep it movin' (4:03)
city winery finished for the evening, we made our way to zinc bar to see if we could find a spot for one of the last shows of the evening. it was pretty crowded in there, but we were extremely lucky to get a spot at the front, seated with a british guy named tom, who was sitting next to an abandoned gin and tonic that he said a lady friend of his left. he tried to tell us that broadway is good, actually, and then we ordered little potato flatbreads (amazing, actually) and were treated to a set we described as whiplash-core. i don't think this is especially captured on the studio version, but live they kind of... all gave each other a look at one point and just played as fast as they fucking could for like five minutes.
as someone i was chatting with at a later show described, hardcore music conservatory shit. it was also, notably to me because i was two feet away, the only point in the entire set in which drummer matthew fu smiled.
and finally, some trees i saw while playing treespotting, a game where you win by being the person in a friend group to see a discarded christmas tree furthest from the most recent christmas holiday. these trees will not win the game, but i do enjoy the "who can find the most trees" subgame.
2026-01-10 (sat)
in the morning we ended up getting donuts and coffee before heading up to the icy plains of the northern hinterlands to have lattner feed ravioli a churu, and then we went down to queens to get dinner at a vegan joint and go see the jim henson exhibit at the museum of the moving image. any exhibit where you are invited to do a live puppet performance on camera is a good one.
🎵 either/orchestra - adèrètch arada (4:35)
i kind of have a fondness for brooklyn bowl because we had a great spot at the sun ra show there last year, so i wanted to stop in. we only stayed for a few songs, though, and then went across the street to superior ingredients.
🎵 sasha berliner - the worst person in the world (8:44)
i don't know a lot about sasha berliner, but i did think it was very funny that half of her songs were about movies. the track above is, of course, named for the 2021 norwegian film of the same name, which i only saw the once many years ago in a pandemic watch party but remember enjoying.
🎵 brandon ross phantom station - sometimes i stand behind you (4:12)
i dunno, man. every jazz person i've talked to has gotten really excited about this band, but this was probably the set i most wanted to walk out on. it felt like five people talking to themselves discordantly instead of having a conversation. i like their recorded work a lot better, which was also a live set, so it's not a live/studio thing, but the live improvisation that night was really not working for me. maybe i simply just do not have the language or training to appreciate what they're doing.
📼 silkroad ensemble with rhiannon giddens - swannanoa tunnel / steel-driving man (6:39)
the dislike of brandon ross phantom station was probably compounded by leaving national sawdust to go to music hall of williamsburg and seeing this huge group on stage being immensely joyous and celebratory, playing seventy-five instruments, and seeing rhiannon giddens dance and whirl on stage in the kind of long dress that urgently demands spinning in.
i don't think the particular combination of people that was playing in silkroad ensemble that night has anything recorded! their other projects have a significantly different vibe, i think. maybe there is an upcoming release, or maybe it's behind a paywall.
🎵 mei semones - kemono live @ audiotree (4:24)
mei semones! this was maybe the set i was most excited about all weekend. i don't know how i came across it at this point, but i found the kabutomushi ep at some point and really really loved the blend of math rock and indie pop. i had said out loud at the show, probably standing directly behind semones' parents who were the only people in front of us at the show, that i wasn't quite sure i would have lumped mei in with jazz broadly, but listening more to those older albums i can begin to hear it more. (and: mei's original releases come out of a band she put together with berklee classmates while studying jazz guitar, so: lol)
there's a thing this group did that i really liked (which they do at around 2:32 in the video above) where during the drum solo the entire rest of the band is playing this simple little beat together. on stage they all even kind of lined up to kind of make a giant glowing neon arrow pointing to the drummer. love it.
🎵 kahil el'zabar & isaiah collier - ?? (15:03)
sometimes jazz is a guy going absolutely fucking nuts on a saxophone while another guy is screaming (not into a mic) while playing the drums so hard that his cymbal falls off his kit.
though the screaming drumming cymbal crash is probably the thing i'll remember the most, he also played like five different instruments, including a thumb piano and a wooden box, which we turned into an imessage sticker and promptly overused:
down the line from me a little bit was someone in the crowd going absolutely wild for this pair. i chatted with them on the subway a little bit, they told me they were a composer and el'zabar was one of their all-time heroes. there's something special about making friends on the subway after a concert.
2026-01-11 (sun)
didn't see any shows on sunday. woke up, went to kinokuniya and bought some vol. 1s: planetes, gundam origin, under ninja, some aspirational dragon ball and one piece in 日本語, and a one-volume called skygrazer that i know nothing about, but thought i'd gamble on.
then we got ramen from ichiran. i prefer the brooklyn location to the manhattan one since you can take the partitions down when eating with people. ramen is very good for eating, i think.
2026-01-12 (mon)
📼 freedom riders - peace (14:07)
the monday night show was a new-ish rotating ensemble calling themselves the freedom riders, after, you know, the freedom riders. there are some really talented musicians in that core group, and i was especially excited to see sarah elizabeth charles again after being really impressed with her and her band at the manhattan marathon. charles is for me really excellent at kind of... just building the space in a room. she's exceedingly charismatic on stage and adept at constructing and spinning the energy in a room. it's deeply unsurprising to me that she seems to do a lot of teaching, as she reminds me of some of the best workshops i've been in.
i got there a little after doors opened and camped out a spot in front of the stage, which ended up being right in front of the horn section composed of alfredo colón on alto sax and vape rig, milena casedo on trumpet, and tomoki sanders on tenor sax.
colón was wearing a really excellent cardigan. that's maybe my highlight of the show. there was a little yellow shape on the back, but i didn't get to see what it was. some things are obligate mysteries.
i did also get to have my first tallboy because they had a 0-proof beer. a pilsner! i don't know what that is or means, but i did like it.
unfortunately i don't really have much else good to say about the show. because there was a rotating cast of guest stars, the photographers were swarming the front of the stage the entire time, so i kept having to maneuver around them to let them pass. kind of on me, and i don't begrudge them for doing their job, but it was definitely distracting. then around the time adegoke steve colson came on to read a poem and play a song, an old white lady stormed her way through the crowd to record a five minute video on her phone and chatter a lot. she ended up retreating at some point and then i found her again when she was recording another five-minute video over my shoulder.
i don't know what it is about le poisson rouge that draws the most annoying assholes i've ever encountered at concerts, but this is certainly enough for me to develop an unreasonably strongly-held grudge that i bring up anytime anyone mentions the venue.
aside from further crowd grousing, it kind of felt like... all the special guests didn't really actually give a fuck about what they were doing. 16-time grammy nominated (this, and his role in hadestown, was emphasized) kurt elling showed up to talk about carrying the flag, sang a corny ballad, and then immediately left. dee dee bridgewater came on stage to talk about the power of resistance, sang a beautiful rendition of billie holiday's strange fruit, and then immediately left. she had her purse and a ten-pound dog (in a little rolling backpack) on stage behind the piano and took them with her when she left. on the set list she and kurt elling were both listed to sing in the big finale number, nina simone's mississippi goddamn. neither bridgewater or elling were there. apparently after your second grammy win, you're too much of a big shot to stick around after you do your one feature song. (in fairness, there's probably a good behind-the-scenes reason for the change from the set list, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.)
📼 nina simone - mississippi goddamn (4:40)
the whole night was very "we need to fight the good fight!" in a "fundraiser for the democratic party" kind of way. no details or specifications about what that fight is, exactly. just a lot of empty gesturing with no vision for any particular change or actions to take. which is frustrating, because they gathered a lot of musicians that have a lot to say individually. juilliard and harvard-educated samora pinderhughes at one point came on stage to almost, kind of say that big tech companies are enabling fascism and we need to sacrifice our quotidian niceties en masse to remove their power. the lyrics of the nina simone showtune were changed up a little bit to mention palestine and the south sudan, and ice might have been mentioned once. this is surely a byproduct of the large number of people involved, on- and off-stage, diluting the message, but the tone never really went beyond "well, the president is bad and we don't like him."
at several points people just read off names of historical freedom riders or musicians to, as sarah elizabeth charles said, bring them into the space. in the same way that family guy making an allusion is not the same as making a joke, though, name-dropping is a nice nod but not actually necessarily saying anything, and for me lacks the work to connect what the political moment of the 60s was to what this political moment sixty years later is.
when the musicians left the stage, the crowd that was left in the room was a kind of after-hours NPR set: mostly blue, mostly drunk, and mostly white. who is all this gesturing for, and to what end? is this actually uplifting black voices, as jazzfest founder brice rosenbloom came on stage to say, or is this more of that great NYC specialty that the british guy at the jazz age bar was trying to sell me on? which is, of course: feel-good musical theater. i am not really in the jazz space like this, just a casual passerby, so in a number of ways it's maybe simply not my place to say, but the thing i mostly will remember about that night is dee dee bridgewater giving a black power salute at the end of a performing a song about lynching and the annoying white lady who was recording the five minute videos giving one back.
freedom riders in a smaller configuration will be playing at the one-day winter jazzfest tokyo on 2026-02-07 (sat) in shibuya.
after the show, i went and got lukewarm vegan pizza. for a town that supposedly has the best pizza on the planet earth, i am often given reheated-to-lukewarm pizza by a guy who just wants to scoop his dog from behind the piano and get the fuck off the stage. i went to catch the ⑥ back uptown, but i got through the turnstile just as the train doors were closing. there was nobody on the train except a girl directly in front of me who grimaced at me through the window. i grimaced back. we nodded.
what else can you do but complain and wait for the next one to come around?