By Darlene Donloe
Contributing Writer
LOS ANGELES — The inaugural Los Angeles Jazz Festival has hit a major pivot before the first note sounds.
A notice posted to the Los Angeles Jazz Festival website Aug. 5 states: “LA Jazz Festival, Aug. 22-23. Updated event info coming soon.”
In addition, the highly anticipated Leimert Park opening night Aug. 7 has been canceled.
Also scrapped: the Aug. 8 kickoff at Edward Vincent Jr. Park in Inglewood and all of the 24 free Jazz in the Park concerts that were slated for parks in each L.A. City Council district, Compton, Inglewood, Moreno Valley and Antelope Valley.
A festival representative confirmed the changes, stating that the 17-day, 150-artist event has been streamlined and updated just days before its debut.
Organizers did not provide a reason for the cancellations.
The festival was the brainchild of founder and CEO Martin Ludlow, a music promoter, labor activist, and former Los Angeles city councilman.
The Leimert Park cancellation marks a symbolic shift. Ludlow originally anchored the festival there because of the neighborhood’s deep ties to African, African American, and Caribbean culture.
The opening was meant to center the community — and spotlight students from the Fernando Pullum Community Arts Center — before the festival expanded citywide.
The loss of Jazz in the Park also removes the festival’s hyper-local footprint that promised Grammy-winning artists in neighborhood parks from Antelope Valley to Compton.
Still tentatively on the schedule are Jazz After Dark, a free evening planned for Aug. 20, at Harold & Belle’s restaurant, honoring supper club history; and a free Caribbean Street Carnival set for Aug. 21 in Venice kicking off the festival’s closing weekend.
The festival’s website still had the 17-day schedule Aug. 4, but the next day the site had been reduced to one page that said “LA Jazz Festival, Aug. 22-23. Updated event info coming soon.”
And a musician who was scheduled to perform during the festival, Dennis Mitchelltree, posted on his Facebook page Aug. 4 the following message he said he received from festival organizers: “Due to unforeseen permitting and production challenges, we have made the difficult but prudent decision to postpone this year’s Jazz in the Park, Jazz After Dark, as well as the opening night event and the Caribbean Street Carnival.”
The marquee Jazz on the Beach concerts remain locked for Aug. 22–23 at Dockweiler Beach, with four stages of New Orleans, Latin Jazz, Afro Beats, Caribbean and Cuban programming.
Scheduled performers include John Legend, Janelle Monáe, Raphael Saadiq, Charlie Wilson, Parliament Funkadelic featuring George Clinton, Poncho Sanchez, Big Freedia, Original Koffee, Free Nationals & Friends, Alfredo Rodriguez, Nubya Garcia, Joey Alexander and Ezra Collective.
In June, Ludlow said the festival was “about the power of music.”
“The socialization at a jazz festival is unlike anything else I’ve witnessed,” he added. “It’s multicultural, inclusive, and uplifting, not monolithic.”
Ludlow said he had envisioned this kind of festival for decades.
“I’ve been dreaming of this kind of event for a while,” he said. “It started when I was a young guy who had just arrived in L.A. At the time, the biggest tribute to jazz was at the Hollywood Bowl through a brand that was essentially a pornographic magazine. I wanted to figure out another way to express jazz and put its history on a different stage with a different sort of narrative wrapped around it.”
Darlene Donloe is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers who covers South Los Angeles. She can be reached at ddonloe@gmail.com.
