The Detroit International Jazz Festival (also known as the Detroit Jazz Festival) is a jazz music festival held each year over Labor Day Weekend at Hart Plaza and Campus Martius Park in Detroit, Michigan, U.S.. It is the largest free jazz festival in North America. Until 2000, it was known as the Detroit-Montreux Jazz Festival. The festival again changed names in 2005, becoming the Detroit International Jazz Festival after Ford Motor Company removed its sponsorship. In January 2006, Gretchen Valade, Chairman of Mack Avenue Records founded the Detroit International Jazz Festival Foundation, which took over production and management of the festival.
Notable past performers have included Dave Brubeck, Mulgrew Miller, The Manhattan Transfer, Paquito d'Rivera, Dave Holland, Regina Carter, Take 6, and Tower of Power. 2012 performers include Wynton Marsalis, Chick Corea, and Joe Lovano.
Famous quotes containing the words jazz and/or festival:
“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
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