For the culture. for everyone.
17 days. 250,000 people. Over 175 free concerts.
LA Jazz Festival takes over Los Angeles August 2026. A city-wide celebration of music, culture, and community with some of the freshest and most legendary artists in the game.
Jazz in the Park brings free live music to public parks across the LA region. Jazz After Dark pops up in locally neighborhood spots with electrifying late night events. The Caribbean Street Carnival pays homage to the rhythms which shaped the DNA of early jazz in New Orleans.
JAZZ & LA
Los Angeles has over a century of Black music history that most people don't know about.
Jazz arrived in Los Angeles on the Union Pacific rail line, straight from New Orleans into Watts, as Creole musicians came to Los Angeles in the early 1900s seeking to escape Jim Crow, drawn west by the booming entertainment industry, vaudeville touring circuits, and the promise of a more racially tolerant society.
Jazz filled the supper clubs of Central Avenue, scored Hollywood films, and raised artists who changed music forever — shaping the sound of this city from the inside out.
Behind the festival
Founder Martin Ludlow – music promoter, labor activist, and former LA City Council Member – has been working toward this moment for over a decade.
As someone who grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, known for its renowned music conservatory as well as its early 1800's history as a final stop on the underground railroad, Martin has always understood the relationship between music and freedom, between joy and the conditions that make joy possible.
The festival draws on more than a decade of relationships: with musicians, with community organizations, with city and county government, with the California Coastal Commission, and with the neighborhoods across LA County that will host it.
BY LA,
FOR LA
LA Jazz Festival Foundation Youth Camp brings over 2,000 high school students from across the region together for a day on the beach, many of them for the first time. Almost 70% of young people living at or below the poverty line in this region have never visited California's coast. The camp addresses that directly, with workshops on protecting the coastline, the real history of jazz, masterclasses with musical icons, and honest conversations about mental health.
Coastal Cultural Tours take participants to the sites of coastal racial pushout – the places where Black and Brown communities built something beautiful and had it taken from them through force, fire, and eminent domain. It's not a comfortable tour. It's a true one. And it ends in music, food, and community.
Environmental Responsibility
LA Jazz Festival holds one of the most comprehensive environmental permits ever issued by the California Coastal Commission. That means zero-waste kitchens, compostable and reusable everything, paperless ticketing, electric shuttles, and a strict no-plastic-bags policy across all festival grounds.
In partnership with LA County's Food DROP program, surplus food will be redirected to the 1.7 million Angelenos who face food insecurity. And after the final festival weekend, a communal beach clean-up brings together the team, celebrities, athletes and regular Angelenos alike. The beach will be left better than it was found.
LA Jazz Festival is grateful to gather on the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino Tongva, Tataviam, Kizh, Serrano and Chumash peoples, and honors the profound and unpaid labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans whose contributions built this region and nation. Read the full Land + Labor Acknowledgment.
