Like a musician taking a handful of notes on improvisational twists and turns, the Indy Jazz Fest is spicing things up this year.

Festival-goers will gather under the shady trees surrounding Garfield Park’s MacAllister Amphitheater for two days packed with master-level music. They’ll groove to the rumbling and funk-flecked basslines of Victor Wooten, flit through a neo-soul wonderland with Moonchild and get lost in the upside-down R&B jams of Thundercat.

Local legends such as Rob Dixon, Jared Thompson & Premium Blend and Native Sun will use their sets to explore exciting new sounds while offering up important calls to action.

Performers are looking forward to a fabulous day in the park.

“It’s a beautiful park, and it’s nice to see this festival move to different communities in the city,” said Jared Thompson, one of this year’s performers. “The food, the drink, the music, the fellowship. All of that coming together for these two days really makes it a genuine festival experience this year.”

The Indy Jazz Fest returns this year with a weekend-long outdoor festival at Garfield Park, a new location for the annual event. The lineup includes artists with international reach, such as Wooten, a founding member of Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, and the genre-bending Thundercat, who has worked closely with rapper Kendrick Lamar.

At the same time, the festival offers an opportunity to support area musicians, as well as the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation’s commitment to community education and performance.

“With the bigger names, that puts a whole spotlight on jazz music and the mission of the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation. We get a little bit more stature there, which carries over to all of our work, whether that’s jazz legacy projects or jazz education,” said David Allee, Indy Jazz Fest director and owner of the Jazz Kitchen.

Since it was founded in 1999, the Indy Jazz Fest has been dedicated to promoting jazz and music education throughout central Indiana. Indianapolis has its own noteworthy jazz heritage, dating back to when the Indiana Avenue neighborhood served as an incubator of great musicians on the same level of Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans. Icons such as Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Wes Montgomery, JJ Johnson and Freddie Hubbard all helped shape the Indy jazz scene.

The festival is a celebration of that, as well as helping support jazz education programs in local schools and youth outreach events throughout the year.

Over its history, the festival has been presented in a variety of different formats: a 10-day series of concerts all over the city, a block-party celebration, even virtual shows held during the pandemic this year.

The decision to move to a two-day outdoor music festival was one of keeping things fresh, Allee said.

“We wanted to change it up this year, kick it up a couple notches,” he said. “We had been doing a 10-day festival primarily inside, and we felt like we maxed out that model a little bit. There were too many options for people to attend to attend them all. People were picking and choosing shows.”

Instead of spreading out performances throughout the week, organizers chose to focus on a weekend extravaganza of music. The structure allowed them to book a wider variety of national acts.

“Our main goal with the festival is to really put a spotlight on jazz music,” Allee said. “The big outdoor park thing, it has some risks involved, but from a stature standpoint, we can book more well-known acts. It has a little more hype to it.”

With big-name acts taking part, the festival also provides a showcase for local musicians such as Pavel & Direct Contact, the Amanda Gardier Quintet featuring Greg Ward and the Indiana All-State High School Band.

“One thing that we’re always really bullish on is to make sure we’re including the great local talent we have right here, so I think we’re done a decent job with that,” Allee said. “We hope that people realize that there’s some great music scheduled earlier, so they get out there and soak up some sun.”

Thompson has been a mainstay with the Indy Jazz Fest for years. For him, the new format offers something to change up the festival and put the spotlight on Indianapolis as a jazz city.

“Indianapolis, on a national and global scale, tends to get lost in the shuffle. So it’s nice to continue to remind people that music is a living, breathing and evolving creature that we create,” he said.

Last year, he and his band Premium Blend were chosen to be part of the Commission Series, a special program of the jazz festival started last year to allow artists to comment on how society has affected their music, as well as spotlight the challenges brought forth by the pandemic, racial tensions and a year of introspection.

Thompson and guitarist Ryan Taylor started planning on a suite of performances to put together. They enlisted 17 different artists — jazz musicians, hip-hop artists, spoken word performers, authors and others — to get their take on the different issues facing the community.

“38th & Post Modernism” was the result. The work examines a part of the city in many people elicits negative connotations, Thompson said. But under that superficial surface lies a tight-knit community that is more dynamic that people realize. The piece addresses the complex narrative of systemic racism as it pertains to the black communities in Indianapolis today.

“Last year, initially, we wanted to do it in a live setting, and we weren’t able to do that,” Thompson said. “It was a great project and concept behind it really resonated with a lot of folks, not just in the jazz community but the community at large. To be able to present that in a live, spontaneous setting, is really exciting to look forward to.”

While the main festival is the centerpiece of the festival, it wouldn’t be jazz with a cool after-hours party to attend. At the Jazz Kitchen in Indianapolis, Clint Breeze & the Groove will play a late-night show on Friday, while MonoNeon takes the stage for the afterset on Saturday.

Getting everyone together, whether in a large-scale festival setting or in an intimate club, is going to feel really good, Allee said.

“It’s going to be a celebration of jazz,” he said.

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Indy Jazz Fest

When: Saturday and Sunday

Where: MacAllister Amphitheater, Garfield Park, 2450 Conservatory Dr., Indianapolis

Schedule

Saturday

  • 12:30 p.m.: Kenny Banks Trio Jr. + Kenny Phelps and Nick Tucker
  • 1:45 p.m.: Jared Thompson & Premium Blend
  • 3:15 p.m.: Rob Dixon & Trilogy
  • 5 p.m.: Akiko Tsuruga Organ Trio featuring Jeff Hamilton and Graham Dechter
  • 6:45 p.m.: Moonchild
  • 8:30 p.m.: Victor Wooten

Sunday

  • Noon: Indiana All-State HS Band
  • 1 p.m.: Amanda Gardier Quintet featuring Greg Ward
  • 2:20 p.m.: Pavel & Direct Contact | El Caribe
  • 3:45 p.m.: Native Sun
  • 5:15 p.m.: Marion Meadows
  • 6:45 p.m.: Cory Henry
  • 8:30 p.m.: Thundercat

Indy Jazz Fest Aftersets, The Jazz Kitchen, 5377 N. College Ave., Indiananpolis

  • Friday: 11 p.m., Clint Breeze & the Groove
  • Saturday: 11 p.m., MonoNeon

Information and tickets: www.indyjazzfest.ne

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