Telluride Jazz Preview: Education and Festival Kick Off

If you are up for a mountain getaway in the Rockies this August, Telluride Jazz Festival is a destination festival full of world-class performances, exciting after-hours shows, and breathtaking views.

Now in its 47th year, this celebration continues to attract jazz, funk, and soul fans to the historical mining town of Telluride, nestled at 8,750 feet, surrounded by 13,000-foot peaks. This festival takes place August 8-10 and engages our community through music, education, sustainability, and a number of outdoor activities, including yoga, arts & crafts, historic walking tours, and even a New Orleans 2nd Line Parade down Main Street.

Their flagship educational scholarship program is the Telluride Student All-Star Jazz Ensemble. The co-directors of the Telluride Jazz Festival Student All-Star Ensemble are Colorado's own award-winning composer, arranger, pianist, and educator (starting this fall at the University of Colorado Boulder Thompson Jazz Studies Program as Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies) Annie Booth and US-born Costa Rica-based saxophonist Josh Quinlan (who has held teaching positions as Instructor of Jazz Studies at the University of Colorado, music faculty member at Denver School of the Arts, Director of Education for the Colorado non-profit Gift of Jazz.) Students enjoy a week of collabing, pop-up shows, and performances on Tuesday, Wednesday, and finally Saturday, where they share their hard work on the Town Park main stage. This year's students include:

Alexa Cornejo - Bass & vocals (Eugene, OR)

Daniel Trujillo - Vibraphone (Westminster, CO)

Madhav Ramaprasad - Alto sax (San Diego, CA)

Miri Izenberg - Trumpet & vocals (Irvine, CA)

Ryan Black - Tenor sax (Denver, CO)

Roberto Rodríguez Rojas - Drums (Heredia, Costa Rica)\

Scarlett Before Horses - Piano (Denver, CO)

Congrats to this next gen in jazz!

The festival gates officially open at 1 p.m. MT on Friday, and the music kicks off at 1:30 p.m. with the Stillwater All Stars. This is a group of select students from Stillwater Music, a non-profit music school based in Durango, Colorado. With jazz, funk, neo soul, and Latin in their sound, they gig during the summer months in the Four Corners Area. Joslyn & The Sweet Compression takes the stage at 3 p.m. If soul and funk are your thing, this powerhouse band is a must see. With notes of Chaka Khan and Rufus, Billboard Magazine described them as “magical … gives everybody the joy” - what more could you ask for?

Colombian Trio BALTHVS graces the main stage at 4:30 p.m. with cosmic grooves that blend psychedelia, Middle Eastern music, surf, disco, funk, and Cumbia into a transfixing musical mirage. Since their inception in Colombia back in 2020, this band remains “an evolving concept,” exciting audiences on an international scale. In fact, Balthazar Aguirre (guitar, vocals), Johanna Mercuriana (bass, vocals), & Santiago Lizcano (drums, vocals) will be fresh off a European run before their stop at Telluride Jazz. Following up is Grammy-nominated Cuban musician and showman Cimafunk, who is sure to light things up when he comes across the stage at 4:30 p.m. He brings his mix of hip-hop, afrobeat, funk, and Cuban rhythms to life alongside his 8-piece band from Havana.

Telluride Jazz at the core is committed to bringing era-defining, genre-transcending jazz to the Rockies, which is why they chose to round out the main stage Friday night at 8 p.m. with a pillar in the modern jazz scene. With each musical statement, Grammy-nominated composer, bandleader, and saxophonist Kamasi Washington continues to honor the evolutionary tradition of this Black-American art form. Through his most recent release, his fifth studio album Fearless Movement, he explores the new world of fatherhood. Per his website, he expresses, “Being a father means the horizon of your life all of a sudden shows up. My mortality became more apparent to me, but also my immortality — realizing that my daughter is going to live on and see things that I’m never going to see. I had to become comfortable with this, and that affected the music that I was making.”

After the main stage closes for the day, festival goers can continue enjoying live music through their curated Jazz After Dark series, where three of the day's acts, Joslyn & The Sweet Compression, Cimafunk, & BALTHVS, start the music back up at 10 p.m. at a few clubs in downtown Telluride. Keep in mind, this is just the start of this three-day and night live music event centered around jazz - Check back in with KUVO soon for continued coverage of this year's line-up as we count down the days till the 2025 Telluride Jazz Festival.