“There are so many amazing artists and trailblazers, and to have them all in one festival represents so much and represents how free the music can be,” he said then, in part.
And that is especially poignant in relation to Blue Note Jazz Festival 2023, as it will continue the year-long celebration around hip-hop’s 50th anniversary. As Zoë Jones contextualized it for Uproxx, “Blue Note has the potential to be much more than a festival – the lineup alone can stand as music history: tracing the evolution of Black music at a time when it’s more present than ever in mainstream consciousness.”
The event will unfold across three stages: Black Radio Stage, Footprints Stage, and Blue Note Stage.
On Friday, July 28, the Black Radio Stage will host Big Freedia (1:45-2:45 p.m. local time), Ari Lennox (3:45-4:45 p.m.), and Glasper alongside De La Soul and Dave Chappelle (5:45-7:30 p.m.) ahead of Blige’s headlining set (8:30-9:45 p.m.).The Footprints Stage will host the likes of Madlib (2:45-3:45 p.m.) and Cordae (4:45-5:45 p.m.).
Come Saturday, July 29, Madlib will be joined by Talib Kweli on the Black Radio Stage from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m., and Glasper will occupy the same slot (5:45-7:30 p.m.) but this time cohabitate the stage with Chappelle and Lalah Hathaway & Terrace Martin. Nas’ headlining set is also scheduled for 8:30-9:45 p.m.
Chance The Rapper will wrap the party with his 8:30-9:45 p.m. headlining set on Sunday, July 30.
Check out the full Blue Note schedule below, and find more information about the festival here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Jazz thrives in cities with history: New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. These cities are also places where you’d expect a new festival to pop up and have success, taking full advantage of a post-pandemic hunger for live music. The California iteration of the Blue Note Jazz Fest, now in its second year, is hundreds of miles away from these hubs for the genre, tucked between the beautiful peaks and canyons of Napa Valley.
This year’s Blue Note, sharing a name with the legendary label it’s created by, is centered around a lineup that pays tribute to the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop. Mary J. Blige, Nas, and Chance the Rapper are in the headliner spots, with sets from Ari Lennox, Smino, De La Soul, Bilal, Lalah Hathaway, and a host of other greats across the Black music space who are all connected to, influenced by, and champions of hip-hop.
Hip-hop’s birth can be directly traced back to the Bronx in 1973, where turntables and spoken word collided. By the ’80s, its reach had gone far beyond the borough; artists began to reach for more complicated beats and lyrics that represented a complex image of the Black experience. Jazz samples built the bones for many of these songs, while the Jazz ethos built the attitude. Artists like Rakim & Eric B. and A Tribe Called Quest are the golden standard of this period: music that is urgent, frenetic, skillful. Created for and by Black people.
After inspiration from jazz fell out of fashion through the ’90s and early 2000s, its direct connection to hip-hop came back to center in a big way with To Pimp A Butterfly, the 2015 project that’s widely considered Kendrick Lamar’s best effort. It’s a dense, cerebral album layered with live jazz so complex that sometimes it’s hard to tell where the horns and drums end and the rapping begins. Despite its ambitious and politically-charged format, it was a monumental, critically acclaimed statement from rap’s newest visionary.
Robert Glasper, the jazz producer and pianist, was instrumental in many aspects of TPAB, from its jazz-centered concept, to writing and session playing for the album’s keyboards and synths. The record became a modern statement of excellence in every corner of music that it touched. Kendrick was elevated to great status, and brought those who were critical to the record’s creation with him into that arena, including Glasper. From that moment on, he became a connecting figure between modern jazz and hip-hop. Glasper is, without a doubt, taking up the mantle of being jazz’s most prolific and present leader.
Robert Glasper’s history with Blue Note is direct: he’s had an annual residency at their club in New York for years. Once the West Coast concept for a festival was solidified, Blue Note label head Steve Bensusan tapped Glasper personally to help him curate the lineup and get his network of West Coast jazz friends and collaborators onboard. Many of the same artists he’s performed with during his residencies and on his records are slated to make appearances at this year’s fest, all contributing to the small-world feel of the lineup.
“The club becomes the engine which then drives some of the other concerts or events that we produce in that market,” Bensusan explained to me while on-site at Silverado Resort a couple months ahead of the fest. After opening a club in Napa in 2019, then hosting a successful outdoor series and big-stage events, a festival was the next big step to conquer the music market in wine country.
The Napa version of Blue Note is designed to be more intimate than its East Coast sister event, which has existed since 2011. In Napa, attendees have the chance to experience multiple stages and genres on mid-sized grounds, without the overwhelming setup and crowds of most other festivals. This setup creates an experience where the music is central, and artists are more likely to be on top of their game and feed from one another’s energy.
With Glasper’s influence, Blue Note Napa is a gathering ground for new West Coast icons like Glasper, Terrace Martin, and Anderson .Paak to assemble, while giving shine to legends like George Clinton, Madlib, and Bobby McFerrin. Even though many of the festival’s acts aren’t straight-ahead jazz artists, the legacy of its name implies a certain air of musicianship that needs to be lived up to.
“Most of the time on the festival stage, you go see that one artist and that’s what you see, that’s what the festival is,” Glasper told us last year ahead of the festival’s first outing. “This one’s gonna be more cross-pollination, with a family-oriented kind of vibe. It’s smaller than most festivals on purpose,” he continued.
This year’s celebration of hip-hop is an important milestone, where the modern prestige of jazz and the acknowledgment of hip-hop as essential are both celebrated. Glasper himself explained it best: “There are so many amazing artists and trailblazers [in Black music] and to have them all in one festival represents so much and represents how free the music can be.”
Blue Note has the potential to be much more than a festival – the lineup alone can stand as music history: tracing the evolution of Black music at a time when it’s more present than ever in mainstream consciousness. Jazz is often considered prestige music, inaccessible to people who are young and disconnected from its history. Expertly curated lineups focused on a multi-generational slate of artists, like Blue Note Jazz Festival Napa, have the potential to connect the dots between all Black genres and make their relevance more apparent than ever.
Blue Note Jazz Festival Napa‘s 2023 lineup has been revealed. The three-day outdoor festival will be headlined by Mary J. Blige, Nas, and Chance The Rapper. Set to take place between July 28 and 30, this year’s festival will feature Grammy Award-winning musician Robert Glasper as the artist-in-residence, as well as special guests De La Soul, Bilal, Lalah Hathaway, and more.
This is by no means Glasper’s first time working with the festival. However, each time he takes the stage, the musician finds a way to reinvent his rich discography.
Other notable acts on the lineup include Parliament Funkadelic featuring George Clinton, NxWorries (Anderson .Paak & Knxwledge), Ari Lennox, Cordae, Digable Planets, Big Freedia, Bilal, Lalah Hathaway, Talib Kweli & Malib, PJ Morton, Rapsody, BJ The Chicago Kid, and Smino. View the full lineup below.
The Blue Note Jazz Festival Napa 2023 will be held at the Silverado Resort in Napa, California. The event will also feature curated after parties each night, with sets from 9th Wonder, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and more. Not to be confused with their iconic New York installment slated in June, the Napa series is a much more intimate experience compared to the flagship event.
Tickets for Blue Note Jazz Festival Napa 2023 go on sale on Wednesday, April 5, beginning at 9 am local time. For more information, click here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The Blue Note Jazz Festival is set to return to New York City this summer. On June 24, several jazz and R&B acts will perform across seven venues in New York City, including the famed Greenwich Village jazz club Blue Note, Sony Hall, the iconic Beacon Theatre, and more.
Taking one of these legendary stages is Grace Jones, whose performance will mark her first headlining solo show in over a decade. Fans can also look forward to seeing Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s supergroup NxWorries, as well as Robert Glasper with Lalah Hathaway, Buddy Guy, BJ The Chicago Kid, and more.
“The Blue Note Jazz Festival is celebrating the pulse and culture of New York City, and there is no better way to do that than by experiencing iconic artists throughout iconic venues this summer,” said Alex Kurland, Blue Note’s director of programming, in a statement. “We’re proud to spotlight multi-generational, legendary artists who have had an extraordinary impact and influence on music and culture.”
Fans can purchase tickets and view a full schedule of events here.
You can see the full line-up below.
Blue Note Festival
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Robert Glasper is doing it all these days. He’s just come off a European Tour in support of his latest album, Black Radio III, performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival earlier this month (where he received the prestigious Miles Davis Award), and is in the midst of scoring not one, but three TV and film projects. But the biggest and most personal undertaking of them all for the four-time Grammy Award-winning pianist, producer, and composer, is the inaugural Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa, CA.
Going down at the Charles Krug Winery from July 29th – 31st, Glasper is the festival’s artist in residence and curator. The lineup is an eclectic representation of jazz, hip-hop, and R&B’s inextricable ties. Where Chaka Khan, Maxwell, and Black Star are playing rare headlining sets, the lineup is as eye-popping for the creative collaboration performances like Snoop Dogg with Dinner Party (Glasper, Kamasi Washington, and Terrace Martin), The Soul Rebels with GZA & Talib Kweli, and Glasper alongside Erykah Badu, BJ The Chicago Kid, Ledisi and D Smoke — oh, and Dave Chappelle is also the weekend’s host.
We caught up with Glasper by phone to talk about the vision behind the festival, how the legacy of Miles Davis has inspired him, and how his career sees him tracing the evolution of Black music in incredible ways.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
AS: You just got back from Europe and I saw you first tour stop at Montreal Jazz Festival a couple weeks ago. Considering your work on the Everything’s Beautiful tribute album of sorts to Miles Davis, and scoring Miles Ahead, what was it like be honored with the Miles Davis Award as someone pushing jazz music forward into new realms the way Miles did?
It’s so funny how Miles Davis pops up in my life. Miles Davis is the first jazz musician that I ever heard cover pop songs. I was in junior high school and I got that record Miles Around The World where he covered Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and he also covered Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” That opened my eyes a lot. It’s part of the thread of who I am in just being open and being modern and not forgetting the history, but not being held back by the history. And then you fast forward and Don Cheadle asked me to score the Miles Davis movie he did, Miles Ahead, and that was the first thing I ever scored. Then in the middle of scoring that, Sony hits me and asks me to produce a record on Miles Davis because it was going to be his 90th birthday. So they asked me to do this remix record and I told them that I would love to, but I explained to them how I wanted to do it: It can’t just be that I put some hip-hop drums under a muted trumpet and call it a day. I wanted to really dive in. That’s why it’s [Everything’s Beautiful] also one of my favorite projects too, cause the way I did it, and the way I captured more of Miles than just his trumpet. I think he’s on two songs on the whole album as far as the trumpet goes. ‘Cause the other stuff, I literally have his breath tied in with the bass drum on a song, I have him talking, clapping, whistling. I’m trying to get the elements of the whole person. You can’t narrow him down to just the trumpet. So me getting that award, it just fell into place that with Miles, he is who he is, but he’s the reason that jazz started being so open to begin with. He’s a trailblazer.
He’s always looked to blur the definition of jazz, which is kind of what you’re pushing forward now.
Exactly, it was such an honor and I’ve been playing Montreal Jazz Festival for years, so it was an honor to get that. It was also the heaviest award I’ve ever gotten [laughs] I might’ve gotten knocked over by the trophy, it’s so heavy.
Oh yeah, I saw that thing, it was like as big as your torso!
And since that was the first day of my tour, I was gone for three weeks, so I had to have them mail it to me.
Victor Diaz Lamich/Montreal Jazz Fest
Well speaking of festivals, you’ve got Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa coming up. I think it really speaks to so much amazing collaboration between jazz and hip-hop and R&B artists. What’s been the vision behind the way you guys curated this and brought everything together?
The idea literally came from my residency at the Blue Note [in New York] every October. I’ve done it three times so far and this last October, Steve [Bensusan] and Alex [Kurland] from Blue Note, the owner and the booker, came to me and started talking about doing something outside of the residency, maybe doing a festival. They approached me and I was like, “That makes all the sense in the world.” We kept talking about it here and there and then literally this past April, we pulled the trigger on it and said, “Let’s actually do it and make it happen.” The festival is cool cause it feels like a family reunion. Everyone performing at the fest, I know them. I kinda got to handpick my own f*cking festival. It doesn’t get better than that. They’re all amazing artists and I got to handpick them and put them all together. That’s not a typical thing that an artist or musician gets to do.
Yeah, and for the more high-profile collab sets like Dinner Party and Snoop, there’s also one like Amber from Moonchild and Kiefer. Like, where the hell else can I see that?
Yeah, Amber’s my homie cause she was on my R+R=Now record. We’re all friends. And really, it’s like a pick-up game. Like when Michael Jordan did Space Jam and he got to invite all his NBA basketball player friends to play pick-up games with him while he was recording the movie. This is like my Space Jam [laughs]
It definitely feels like a version of your residency on steroids.
For sure. That’s literally where the idea burst from. We even got going with some guests that we’d had on the residency before and some that we wanted to have. I think it started with me making a list of people that I wanted at my next residency and then was like, “We should do a festival and have all these people.”
Something that struck me in Montreal and now looking at the lineup of this festival, and then looking at Black Radio — Black Radio III specifically — is that you’re really trying to tell the story of the evolution of Black music and where everything is at now. Talk a little about that and how everything is connected with the artists you’ve got playing at this festival that has your name at the very top.
A lot of people have put jazz in this box of exclusivity. Where it’s this exclusive thing that doesn’t f*ck with anybody else, any other genres. And that’s just not the case. In its conception, it’s already amuck. Jazz is mixed with classical music, blues, gospel… And later on, when you listen to certain jazz standards, they weren’t even standards, they were show tunes. They were songs people got from musicals. Like “My Favorite Things” or “All The Things You Are,” these important jazz standards, these weren’t jazz tunes. These were jazz artists reaching out into the world and bringing worldly things into the music and then they became standards. That’s kind of where I come from it. Black music is a big house and it has many genres under that roof, blues, gospel, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, you name it. I like to go room to room in this big house of Black music. Like I have a key to it all, because it’s in my DNA. I studied this music, I went on tours with some of the greatest in each genre, so I feel like I’m one of the people that can represent this thing that we call Black music. There are so many amazing artists and trailblazers, and to have them all in one festival represents so much and represents how free the music can be.
I’m hard-pressed to think if I’ve ever seen a festival lineup quite like this. What’s your hope for this weekend?
I’m hoping that this turns into an annual thing. But also, with the kinds of musicians and artists that we have, it lends itself to probably a lot of things we’ve never seen before. People sitting in with other people, cross-pollination on the stage. Most of the time on the festival stage, you go see that one artist and that’s what you see, thats what the festival is. But this one’s gonna be more cross-pollination, with a family-oriented kind of vibe. It’s smaller than most festivals on purpose. We’re trying to mirror the Blue Note residency so we wanted to keep it intimate (in festival terms) and try to mimic that feeling that you get when you’re in a small club; like the residency, with unexpected pop-up guests. I’m getting all kinds of calls from all kinds of artists on it. I’m really looking forward to it.
The brand new Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa Valley was already sporting one of the more unreal music festival lineups of the summer. With Robert Glasper as the artist-in-residence and Dave Chappelle hosting the festivities, the slate of performers features Erykah Badu; Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli performing as Black Star; Thundercat and Maurice Brown, joined by Anderson .Paak; Flying Lotus and The Soul Rebels, joined by GZA and Kweli; and Maxwell. Not bad right?
But this was merely the two-day slate, as the Blue Note Jazz Fest has now added a third day and a ton of new big-time acts. The most significant addition is easily Snoop Dogg, who’ll be performing a set alongside Dinner Party, the Uproxx-favorite project consisting of Glasper, 9th Wonder, Terrace Martin, and Kamasi Washington. Also added to the lineup are R&B and soul legend Chaka Khan, hip-hop production mastermind Madlib, Chris Dave & The Drumheadz, pianist Kiefer with Moonchild’s Amber Navran, and more.
Suffice it to say, a great thing just got even better. The festival will be going down from July 29 to July 31 at the Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena, CA. This is in the heart of Napa Valley’s wine country and all in all is a stellar addition to the summer festival circuit.
Check out the daily lineups below and get your single-day tickets here.
The notion of a “jazz music” festival has become about a lot more than just jazz. Like the storied Montreal Jazz Festival and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival that came before it, the brand new Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa Valley presents the best in jazz music and the hip-hop and R&B artists who are inextricably tied to the genre’s roots. Blue Note’s first outdoor, multi-stage festival will be hosted by Dave Chappelle and features Robert Glasper as the artist-in-residence. Glasper will be performing onstage alongside Erykah Badu, Ledisi, D Smoke, Terrace Martin, and BJ The Chicago Kid. It all goes down at the Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena, CA on July 30th and 31st and the loaded lineup just keeps getting better from there.
Also performing at Blue Note Jazz Festival will be Maxwell, the newly reunited Black Star, Thundercat, and Flying Lotus. But the most intriguing part of the lineup is the jazz and hip-hop collaboration sets: Maurice Brown featuring Anderson .Paak?! The Soul Rebels featuring GZA & Talib Kweli?! Now this is unique curation. Not to mention appearances from Chief Adjuah (fka Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah), Butcher Brown, Keyon Harrold, and late-night DJ sets from Dj Jazzy Jeff and Badu’s DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown alter ego.
Peep the full lineup poster below and stay tuned for tickets which go on sale on 04/26 here.
