Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 38th Season to Unite African, American Traditions

By DownBeat I Jun. 24, 2025

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2025–’26 concert season will explore the enduring ties between jazz, the African continent and its diaspora.
(Photo: Courtesy JALC)

The concerts of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2025–’26 season, adhering to a theme of “Mother Africa,” will delve into the creative spirit that unites African and American musical traditions. Running from July 24, 2025, to June 20, 2026, and featuring 30% more shows than its last run, the organization’s 38th season includes 19 unique weekends of Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts in the 1,233-seat Rose Theater, nine concerts in the 467-seat Appel Room and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, in addition to webcast performances and in-person and virtual education programs.

The 2025–’26 season also features tour dates worldwide by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in collaboration with noted guest artists and appearances by major figures in jazz and related genres.

Dominating Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 38th season are concerts that explore the deep and enduring ties between jazz, the African continent and its diaspora, a leitmotif that the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis previously addressed in such past Marsalis opuses as Blood On The Fields (1996), Congo Square (2007), Ochas (2014) and the fresh big band arrangements comprising JLCO’s The South African Songbook concert (2019). The season highlights new works, commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, from jazz artists in the organization’s new The Commission Series. The new season also includes celebratory concerts to honor the centennials of three towering figures in jazz — Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson and Celia Cruz — further illuminating the far-reaching legacy of Afro-American and the African diaspora musical expression.

“The earliest and most fundamental human mythology is African,” JALC’s Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis said. “From Venda to Igbo to a host of other belief systems across the continent, there are viable solutions to today’s challenges.”

Several of the performances on the season address the creative sensibilities that enslaved Africans applied in embedding the rhythms, timbres and melodies from their religious-cultural traditions into the DNA of Black American Music — Negro spirituals, the blues and early jazz — in the United States. Another cohort of concerts home in on the Afro-diasporic vernacular and popular musical genres that evolved in the Caribbean, Central American and South American diasporas and permeated jazz expression from early 20th century New Orleans origins through the first quarter of the 21st century. Others focus on the African consciousness of such modern North American jazz masters as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Max Roach, Randy Weston, Oscar Peterson, Charles Mingus and Horace Silver, and the musical production of African jazz musicians after 1945, when the African nations were established and the United Nations was formed.

“Our ancestors had cogent and powerful thoughts on who we are as individuals as we pass through the natural cycles of life, how we should relate to one another socially, and how to be one with the universal spirit that inhabits all,” Marsalis said. “In their globally influential music and dance concepts, we can perceive how to find harmony and balance with nature, how to perceive and interact with the supernatural, and how to create endless variations on fundamental themes in pursuit of a good time.”

To view full details of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2025–’26 season concert schedule, CLICK HERE. DB