Though the staging area will be more spacious than last year’s location, near Penn Avenue and 9th Street, about 20,000 people are expected to pack the streets to hear the music-for free. At this year’s event, now called the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival (June 15–17), the bulk of the action will take place on three outdoor stages near Liberty Avenue. “We wanted to make sure the festival had a certain vibe-energetic, easily accessible and free,” said Jones, then a professor at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University. The inaugural event in 2011 was conceived along the lines of the Detroit International Jazz Festival, but on a smaller scale. “We have a great legacy and history here,” Burley Wilson said. Jazz advocates all, they cooked up a plan and two years later, the Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival was born. That began to change one day in 2009, when Janis Burley Wilson, then an executive with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, met with trumpeter Sean Jones, drummer Roger Humphries and bassist Dwayne Dolphin for a barbecue at Dolphin’s Pittsburgh-area home. But as the 21st century dawned, the onetime Steel City lacked a major jazz festival. ![]() ![]() Pittsburgh’s contributions to the jazz firmament stretch from seminal figures like Roy Eldridge, Kenny Clarke and Earl “Fatha” Hines to modern-day luminaries like Geri Allen, Steve Nelson and Jeff “Tain” Watts. Vibraphonist Roy Ayers performs last year in Pittsburgh.
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