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