2023 Lineup / Straight Ahead

Guggenheim grant-awarded Billy Childs is a piano prodigy with a gift for composition, with an astounding 16 Grammy Award nominations and 5 Grammy Award wins. Widely regarded as one of the foremost American composers of fusion jazz and chamber music, he is a technical wizard who continues to innovate harmonically and rhythmically.

Emmy Award nominated Benny Benack III is not only a fiery trumpet player with a stirring command of the post-bop trumpet vernacular, but also a singer with a sly, mature, naturally expressive delivery. The 2022 DownBeat Critics Poll recently featured him as both a Rising Star Male Vocalist and Rising Star Trumpeter.

Halie Loren is an international, award-winning jazz singer and songwriter. Raised in Alaska and currently based in Oregon, she brings a fresh and original perspective to time-honored musical paths, channeling her innate understanding of connectedness across musical boundaries to forge bonds with diverse audiences in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Soul Message Band is founded on the 25-year partnership of the celebrated Hammond B3 organist Chris Foreman and drummer Greg Rockingham, aka “The Rock.” The pair have an unmistakable chemistry that has taken them to venues around the world as both headliners and as an opening group for Steely Dan, now with veteran guitarist Lee Rothenberg.

An unequivocal musical prodigy, singer/saxophonist/songwriter and bandleader Grace Kelly has rocked the jazz world with sold-out concerts, 14 acclaimed albums, a performance at the Hollywood Bowl and a stint in the house band for Late Show with Stephen Colbert—all before reaching her mid-twenties.

SJZ Collective, composed of some of the Bay Area’s most prominent jazz voices, join forces with Ukrainian trumpeter Yakiv Tsvietinskyi to pay tribute to Freddie Hubbard. Since all band members double as composers and arrangers, count on a night of thoughtfully re-imagined material from the catalog of a boundary-breaking modern jazz heavyweight gone too soon.

Hailed by Variety Magazine as “one of contemporary jazz’s most talented and inventive musicians” and DownBeat Magazine as “The Jazz Warrior-Goddess,” Steinway artist and pianist Connie Han performs with a fiery contemporary style, “combining the precision of her training as a classical pianist with the improvisation, and irrepressible emotion, of her heroes Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Kirkland.” (Variety)

A select group of the San Jose Jazz High School All Stars Big Band, the SJZ U19s feature our finest young musicians in a small combo setting.

Together, Kenny Washington, Nicolas Bearde and Jamie Davis are the Vocal Gents of Jazz. Having given memorable performances at Summer Fest in years past, they are teaming up for the very first time, offering individual and ensemble interpretations of the music of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Joe Williams.