Nashville Jazz Festival 2025 Recap!
THAT’S A WRAP! The inaugural Nashville Jazz Festival is over, and we’re filled with gratitude for an incredible weekend of music and community.
For 25 years, the Nashville Jazz Workshop’s mission has been to enrich people’s lives by providing world-class jazz performance and education. This weekend was a celebration of that mission! Our performers embodied all that jazz is in 2025—from the Guthrie Trapp Trio to the Blair Big Band to Ralph T. Lofton’s gospel organ to Tia Fuller, Jeff Coffin, and Cory Wong—improvised music is ALIVE and WELL! We honor the roots and tradition of jazz, inextricably linked to the African-American experience and expression, and we celebrate the many branches of improvised music that continue to evolve from this foundation. We’re thankful for the dozens of performers whose dazzling artistry cemented an unforgettable Year One of the Nashville Jazz Festival!
Jeff Coffin and the Blair Big Band, directed by Dr. Ryan Middagh. Photo by Michael Weintrob.
NJF25 by the numbers:
Look what we did together in year one of the Nashville Jazz Festival!
We built community support for jazz in Nashville:
70,000+ : number of dollars raised to support the mission of the Nashville Jazz Workshop, including 10% that will go directly to our Scholarship Fund to increase access to high quality jazz education.
17: number of corporate sponsors
30: number of individual sponsors (Friends of the Festival)
We expanded the audience:
800+ : number of tickets sold
3,000+ : number of viewers and listeners on Lightning100 and Volume.com
8,000+ : number of new accounts reached on social media, plus over 3,000 website visits
We created economic opportunity for artists and working musicians:
13: number of diverse musical acts presented over two days
70+ : number of paid musicians who took the stage
4,758,392: number of notes played*
*okay, we made that up, but… it has to be pretty close, right?
The Emmanuel Echem Group live on Lightning100. Photo by Michael Weintrob.
Media Highlights
Read the great Ron Wynn’s piece in the Nashville SCENE about how the Nashville Jazz Festival came to be
Check out Co-Artistic Director Jeff Coffin’s beautiful recap here.
Watch the livestream of the festival on the Lightning100 stage on Volume.com! Click here for day 1 and here for day 2.
Click below to see a clip by Continuous Motion of Jeff Coffin’s tribute to Denis Solee!
Share Your Experience
Do you have photos or memories to share with us? Email abi@nashvillejazz.org to share your photos, favorite stories from the weekend, or tell us who you’d like to hear at next year’s festival!
