Mar 4, 2025 1:29 PM
Changing of the Guard at Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra
On October 23, Ted Nash – having toured the world playing alto, soprano and tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass…
Ruth Griggs, president of the Northampton Jazz Festival, emphasizes “creating and growing partnerships and building a positive reputation for jazz and the festival in the community.”
(Photo: Julian Parker Burns)Mention the word “festival” to jazz fans and chances are they’ll first think of legendary annual events at Newport, Monterey, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Montreal or Montreux. However, quality jazz festivals take place in a variety of lesser-known locales as well. Although these festivals are smaller in scale, they can pack plenty of quality musicianship into intimate, comfortable surroundings — and create memorable experiences for jazz aficionados.
Case in point: the annual Northampton Jazz Festival in western Massachusetts. In 2025, the fest will run Friday, Sept. 26, and Saturday, Sept. 27. It’s a free event, except for a concluding Saturday evening concert that has featured headliners such as Anat Cohen & Quartetinho, Ron Carter, Kurt Elling and Paquito D’Rivera.
The Northampton Festival debuted in 2011 but stalled out after the 2015 event. It returned in 2018 under the leadership of Ruth Griggs and has expanded to include additional jazz concerts and educational events year-round in Northampton and the surrounding area. In a recent conversation, Griggs traced the 2011 debut of the Northampton Jazz Festival, its shutdown, the renewal and subsequent expansion.
“Northampton is my hometown, but I spent three decades in New York City as a marketing professional,” Griggs said. “I’m a jazz fan, so I went to the festival concerts, got to know the producers of the event and helped advise them. During the early years of the fest, it was blended with a food event, so there was no single focus on music. And it all happened in a tent on a parking lot behind Main Street. There was too much going on in a small space, and the event eventually lost its funding.
“In 2017, Amy Cahillane, the executive director of the Downtown Northampton Association, told me the merchants were really missing the Jazz Festival and having live music downtown. She asked me if I’d be interested in trying to restart it, and since I had really gotten involved in the local jazz scene at that point, I said, ‘Yes.’”
Griggs was able to renew the 501(c)(3) from the previous festival, pull together a new board and manage a successful restart with a new mission: a focus on bringing live jazz into businesses throughout downtown Northampton, including educational events for young people, and expanding the impact of the festival throughout the year. So far, even battling through the pandemic, it’s worked.
The two-day festival begins on Friday with a kickoff musical performance at Northampton’s centrally located Pulaski Park, followed by the Friday Night Jazz Strut, which features solo, duo and trio performances in a variety of venues — restaurants, bars and breweries. All these downtown performances — on Friday evening and during the afternoon on Saturday — are free.
“Northampton only has 30,000 people, so it’s a very walkable, eclectic town with many individually owned restaurants and artisan shops,” said Griggs. “It makes sense to have music happening in different environments rather than just one place like a large hall or under a tent. We switch it up and have staggered starting times so people can move around and catch different performances throughout Friday night and Saturday day.
“Different group sizes and instrumentation are arranged to fit what each venue can accommodate. We even schedule a solo artist into a space like an art gallery that can only seat 80 people. The art gallery happens to have a beautiful baby grand, so we’ve had pianists like Emmett Cohen in 2019 and Sullivan Fortner in 2021 play there. At the 800-seat Academy of Music Theatre, we conclude the fest with our only ticketed performance. The ticketed event for the 2025 festival will feature the farewell tour of New York Voices.”
Griggs said she is especially proud that the Northampton Festival has greatly expanded its educational offerings as well as other events and jazz-related activities — not only during the fest, but also throughout the year.
“We have an educational program with four related components,” she explained. The latest is “Ask Me about Jazz,” which debuted last year during the festival. Professional jazz musicians led by Richie Barshay present a concert for elementary school children — basically, an introduction to jazz. The musicians then answer questions from the students, who then join a march to Pulaski Park with a brass band.”
Additional educational programs featuring musicians from the Northampton Jazz Workshop working with middle school and high school music students. In addition, a program directed at high school art students had them create artwork related to jazz after attending a high school jazz band performance.
“Paul Arslanian, who is on the festival board, runs the Northampton Jazz Workshop, and has musicians coming in from Boston, New York, Philadelphia and other cities,” explained Griggs. “Paul asks them to come in a day earlier and stay a day later to go into schools and work with students. So we’ve been able to have noted jazz musicians like Gary Smulyan, Don Braden and Camille Thurman work with these students. And with the Student Art Project, art students at the high school attend a jazz concert, then each of them creates a mixed media artwork related to what they’ve experienced about jazz. We used one of these artworks as the cover for our 2024 festival program.”
The festival also presents a Jazz Film Night in April as well as a Jazzy Art Night Out in early September leading up to the full festival. Pianist Sean Mason and his quartet appeared at the Drake in Amherst in March and the festival co-promoted the performance. Collaborations are also in place with the record label Signature Sounds to co-promote an upcoming concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra in May at the Academy Theatre of Music in Northampton.
“Partnerships and collaborations will keep you alive,” said Griggs, who was named a 2025 Jazz Hero by the Jazz Journalists Association. “And an important aspect for me is creating and growing these partnerships and building a positive reputation for jazz and the festival in the community.” DB
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