TJF is proud to announce the ninth edition, with dates and deadlines. Fans can start marking on the agenda the dates of main festival in June (from 19 to 27) and Jazz Cl(H)ub autumn section (from 27 September to 3 October). The whole event will be held in in-person attendance, and this is a great news, not taken for granted in this year still dominated by Covid-19.

For more details, you will have to wait until the end of May, when the artistic directors Diego Borotti and Giorgio Li Calzi will reveal the full line up!

On july 24, a press conference unveiled the program for Part 1 of Torino Jazz Festival 2020. Mayor Chiara Appendino and councilwoman Francesca Leon, who heads the city’s culture sector, both expressed their satisfaction in a year that has proved complex for live music. This year’s program, under the supervision of artistic directors Diego Borotti and Giorgio Li Calzi, serves up a rich selection of performances, featuring 10 evening concerts, August 21-30, on the main stage at Combo, on Corso Regina Margherita. Opening night: a quartet from Sardegna led by Enzo Favata, a musician who’s brought the poetry of Italian jazz to the world. Followed by all-star percussionist Manu Katché, who once played with Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits. Another drummer, Roberto Gatto, presents his project dedicated to Pasolini, featuring acclaimed Italian actor Valerio Mastandrea. A tribute to Charlie Parker, for the 100th anniversary of his birth, sees the participation of high-power saxmen like Francesco Cafiso, Mattia Cigalini, and Jesse Davis.   From France: avant-garde guitarist Marc Ducret and Souad Alsa, with music that spotlights his North African roots. We wind things down (or up?) with a performance by big-name Italian jazz artists Enrico Rava and Gianni Coscia, performing together. Plus Paolo Fresu with Daniele di Bonaventura, and Daniele Sepe, with guests Hamid Drake and Roy Paci. Download the complete program or check out the schedule of events posted on our website.

The Torino Jazz Festival continues its musical journey, riding the wave of last year’s tremendous success and a cavalcade of high-quality performances. The 2018 program offered audiences a thoroughly convincing jazz experience, thanks to the unremitting care and dedication that the festival’s staff put into it, as well as to the appearances of local talent from the city of Torino’s own jazz pantheon. Of course, that success was also made possible by audiences thrilling to an array of world-class musicians and the involvement of a tried-and-true network of jazz clubs throughout the city. Besides performances in packed venues, droves of music lovers were also treated to shows that filled the city’s streets and open-air markets with the sounds of jazz – our Jazz Blitz concert offerings in unconventional locations. Such overwhelming success led the City of Torino to provide further support for the Torino Jazz Festival this year, recognition of an enthusiastic turnout on the part of local crowds and visitors, to whom our sincere thanks go out. A sign that Torino has stepped onto the world stage of jazz, and that our city and its annual jazz festival have become a beacon for this art form, a magnet for practitioners and enthusiasts alike. We owe a lot to all the people who continue to make the Torino Jazz Festival a truly special event, from the musicians to the hard-working folks behind the scenes, including this year’s artistic directors Diego Borotti and Giorgio Li Calzi.

For the 2019 edition, we’ve sought to raise the stakes by asking the dynamic duo to expand what was already a hefty program of jazz concerts, with extended scheduling, more performances and additional venues across the metropolitan area. Performances by world-class artists and the best jazz musicians on the Torino scene today promise to make this, the seventh edition of the Torino Jazz Festival, a showcase of quality entertainment that will prove to be a benchmark for years to come. Nine extraordinary performance-filled days and nights await, to the delight of hard-core jazz fans and neophytes alike. The program also includes shows for children and young people. As the legendary Enrico Rava – whose 80th birthday we’ll be celebrating with a concert in “his” Torino – once put it, “When everything works, it’s a perfect democracy, which only jazz can create.”

Chiara Appendino
Mayor of Torino
Francesca Leon
Commissioner of Culture

Is it possible to hold a jazz festival in a large city featuring a program that breaks the molds, where local artists play alongside big-name international stars; a festival that boasts extremely affordable ticket prices; where audiences, the true protagonists of any cultural process, reply with a resounding “Yes!”? That might seem almost utopian in a country like Italy, which apparently has little interest in exploiting its extraordinary cultural resources. But last year such a utopian dream came true right here in Torino, thanks to the Torino Jazz Festival, the musicians that took part, the staff, and the people who came out to enjoy the performances. This year audiences will be reaping the rewards of their dedication, inasmuch as we’ve worked to come up with a creative festival that communicates jazz, which is considered the musical mainstay of the 20th century, to the vastest, most variegated audience imaginable. Not a commercial festival by any means, but one designed with a demanding audience in mind – like the denizens of Torino and those who make their way to the city for the express purpose of soaking up the sounds of the Torino Jazz Festival.

We feel that what makes our focus distinct is the excellence of the festival’s venues and fine-tuned, time-tested work groups, our original productions that are the result of artistic residencies, our attention to the social context, through high-quality programming featuring performances spread out evenly among theaters and jazz clubs, and the utmost stylistic variety. In more abstract terms, we feel that music – especially the kind that pays little heed to marketing, that preserves the kernel of humanity responsible for generating it, a spontaneous and vital flow of expression – has the power to build communities around shared artistic experiences and values. We certainly hope the sounds of the Torino Jazz Festival sooth the soul of this city, and we are confident that our artistically inclined audiences will once again place their bets on music that’s alive, contemporary and bursting with vivid imagery. Music with the power to save us all.

Giorgio Li Calzi and Diego Borotti
Artistic Directors