For the first time in four decades, there won’t be a jazz festival in the streets and concert halls of Montreal this summer.
Instead, the Montreal International Jazz Festival will take place digitally this year, with a lineup of intimate concerts recorded professionally in a studio made just for the occasion.
The four-day digital edition of the festival will feature some of its favourite local artists, each of them performing live from l’Astral concert hall with high-quality audio and multi-camera video production.
The lineup includes performances by Jacques Kuba Séguin, Pierre Kwenders, Dominique Fils-Aimé, Marianne Trudel, Charlotte Cardin, Alain Caron and Jean-Michel Blais.
All the concerts will be available to stream for free on the festival’s Facebook page. Each concert will be made available for on-demand streaming after the live broadcast has ended.
The programming lineup also includes highlights from previous years, including performances by Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Jaco Pastorius, Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones.
A fixture of the global jazz scene, the Montreal International Jazz Festival normally features roughly 3,000 artists in more than 650 concerts and welcomes more than 2 million visitors annually.
The festival still has a number of upcoming live concerts that it was forced to postpone to later dates. The rescheduled concerts include Gregory Porter, Christian McBride, GoGo Penguin, Hiromi, Marcus Miller and Avishai Cohen.
The TD Edmonton International Jazz Festival recently announced that it will also hold online events this summer, mixing live-streamed concerts in empty venues with pre-recorded events every weekend till the end of July.
The Edmonton lineup will feature performances by Emmet Cohen, Bria Skonberg, Sheila Jordan, the Funkford Family, Andrew Glover, Julian Lage and Veronica Swift.
These announcements follow in the footsteps of other summer festivals that have gone virtual this year.
The Beaches International Jazz Festival, the Kensington Market Jazz Festival and the TD Markham Jazz Festival have all announced plans to proceed with a curated lineup of online performances after being forced to cancel their original plans.
Meanwhile, JAZZ.FM91 recently announced a partnership with the TD Toronto Jazz Festival for a weekly concert series taking place throughout this summer. Every Friday at 5 p.m. EST this summer, The TD Toronto Jazz Festival Summer Concert Series, presented by TD, is broadcasting live from the Long & McQuade Performance Hall at JAZZ.FM91.