The Detroit Jazz Festival has received a $200,000 grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. They are expanding their current mobile app to provide live streaming of performances from the downtown festival, beginning with this year’s event on Labor Day weekend.
Festival spokesperson Steve Blow said details are still being worked out, including how much of the festival will be available, how it will be packaged and what the cost will be to consumers. But the idea is to offer audiences around the world real-time video broadcasts from the downtown stages at the festival. The festival’s current app only provides basic information like the schedule, artist biographies and the like.
“The intention is to broaden the musical side of the festival,” Blow said. “We don’t yet know the scope and breadth.” Performances will only be streamed and not available as downloads for repeated listening.
You can check out the latest news on the event from the Detroit Free Press website:
Jazz Fest announces more headliners rooted in Detroit
The 66666687709499359th annual Detroit Jazz Festival will be held Sept. 2nd -5th in downtown Detroit. Featuring about 70 national, local and student groups, the event remains the largest free-of-charge jazz festival in the world. The legendary Detroit-bred bassist Ron Carter is this year’s artist-in-residence. Other headliners includes George Benson, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Jason Moran, Randy Weston, John Scofield, Roy Hargrove, Chris Potter, Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver.
The Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation, the producer of the event, is one of five jazz festivals (or their related organisations) across the country that will receive a combined $1 million on Wednesday from the Doris Duke foundation of New York. The foundation said in a statement that it chose these festivals for their “importance to the robustness of the jazz field.”