Winter Jazzfest Plans Expanded Bill and Focus on Gender Equity for 2019

NEW YORK — The NYC Winter Jazzfest, the city’s leading showcase of cutting-edge improvised music, is expanding its itinerary and issuing a new commitment to gender equity.

The festival will take place Jan. 4-12, making this the lengthiest edition in its 15-year history. The signature event, the Winter Jazzfest Marathon, will stretch across two weekends for the first time. A so-called Half Marathon on Jan. 5 will bring a full night of music to six venues in and around Greenwich Village.

The following weekend, Jan. 11-12, the standard two-night marathon will feature more than 100 diverse acts at 11 venues across Lower Manhattan.

The festival announced on Friday that in addition to bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, its 2019 artist in residence, Marathon artists will include saxophonist and former David Bowie collaborator Donny McCaslin; pianist Amina Claudine Myers; guitarist Mary Halvorson; and pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, who will perform in duo.

Reflecting growing awareness of persistent gender inequities on jazz stages, the Winter Jazzfest’s organizers have signed on to the PRS Foundation’s Keychange initiative, which aims to make festival bookings 50 percent gender-equitable by 2022.

The first weekend’s Half Marathon is timed to coincide with the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Professionals) conference, a conclave that has typically overlapped with Winter Jazzfest and helped drive interest in it.

“In keeping with the tradition, we are specifically targeting the programming on the first weekend toward both industry and the general public,” Brice Rosenbloom, the festival’s founder and producer, said in an interview. “The second weekend is really in the spirit of celebrating our 15th season and welcoming the growing fan base that we’ve seen.”

On the nights without marathon programming, the festival will feature creatively envisioned, à-la-carte concerts at venues across New York.

Those individual shows will include a shared performance by saxophonists Gary Bartz and Pharoah Sanders; the festival’s second annual concert spotlighting young British jazz musicians, presented in partnership with the PRS Foundation and BBC Music; and a listening session led by Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM Records.

Tickets go on sale Oct. 26 at winterjazzfest.com.