Williamstown Jazz Festival

Brandee Younger is revolutionizing the harps’ role in modern music. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists. In 2022, she made history by becoming the first Black woman to be nominated for a Grammy® Award for Best Instrumental Composition. Ever-expanding as an artist, she has worked with cultural icons including Common, Lauryn Hill, John Legend, Pharoah Sanders and Christian McBride.

Hailed by Variety Magazine as 'one of contemporary jazz's most talented and inventive musicians' and Downbeat Magazine 'The Jazz Warrior-Goddess' with 'a skill and ferocity unmatched by all but the most accomplished of pianists,' young jazz piano superstar and composer Connie Han interprets the jazz piano pantheon with her own fiery, contemporary style.

Explore the vibrant intersection of sight and sound in this unique celebration of jazz history and culture. From intimate documentaries to electric performance footage, witness how the rhythm of jazz has shaped the art of storytelling on screen.

The Cookers bring an aggressive mid ‘60s spirit with a potent collection of expansive post-bop originals marked by all the requisite killer instincts and pyrotechnic playing expected of some of the heaviest hitters on the scene today.

One of the world’s preeminent jazz innovators, trombonist and seashellist Steve Turre, has performed as a member of the Saturday Night Live Band since 1984. He has consistently won both the Readers’ and Critics’ polls in JazzTimes, Downbeat, and Jazziz for Best Trombone and for Best Miscellaneous Instrumentalist (shells).

Berkshires Jazz Youth Ensemble, the MCLA Jazz Ensemble, and Berklee Alum Richard Stanmeyer and Company.

Lead vocalist for Heth, Bradley & Houston, the Wanda Houston Band and Big & Bigger, Wanda Houston also lends her talent to regional projects including the Convergence Progect, Mothership Trio, The VT Jazz Center Big Band and the NOLA inspired Rejuvenators.

Triangle Offense is a band built by and for spacious symbiosis, unforced chemistry and good humor. Drummer Jonathan Barber, saxophonist Kris Allen and bassist Matt Dwonszyk, each share deep roots in the fertile scene of Hartford CT, are each in their own rights world-renowned performers and bandleaders.

A protégé of the legendary jazz master Dizzy Gillespie, Arturo Sandoval was born in Artemisa, a small town in the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, on November 6, 1949, just two years after Gillespie became the first musician to bring Latin influences into American Jazz. Sandoval began studying classical trumpet at the age of twelve, but it didn’t take him long to catch the excitement of the jazz world. He has since evolved into one of the world’s most acknowledged guardians of jazz trumpet and flugelhorn, as well as a renowned classical artist, pianist and composer. He is one of the most dynamic and vivacious live performers of our time, and has been seen by millions at the Oscars, at the Grammy Awards, and the Billboard Awards.

John Gennari will discuss his latest book The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life (2025) with MC Todd Barkan. 3-day and Sunday pass holders can attend with first-come, first-served seating. Lenox native John Gennari is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. The Jazz Barn is published by Brandeis University Press. His earlier books include Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (2017) and Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (2006), which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Book in American Culture Studies. Currently he is working on BlackItalian, a documentary film based on the themes explored in Flavor and Soul. Todd Barkan is a 2018 NEA Jazz Master and a world-renowned jazz impresario. As the proprietor of Keystone Korner Baltimore and the former Artistic Administrator for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Barkan has spent over five decades at the heart of the jazz world. He is a Grammy Award-winning producer with a discography of hundreds of recordings featuring legends like Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis. From managing the Boys Choir of Harlem to programming Dizzy's Club, Barkan’s career is defined by his dedication to the music and its practitioners. He famously maintains that 'If you take care of the music, the music will take care of you.'