Our Jazz Heritage
The Northampton Jazz Festival presents, promotes, and preserves the cultural tradition and creative expression of people of color and women. That cultural tradition and creative expression is the heritage of JAZZ.
Jazz is the purest of the American art forms, born from black indigenous people of color in America and influenced by the peoples of the African diaspora as well as European classical music. Jazz continues today through the many musicians, composers and listeners who keep it alive as a musical form. And it is continually renewing and advancing from its multicultural roots.
Part of the Northampton Jazz Festival’s mission is to keep this great American art form alive by presenting musicians of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. We also reach out through our social media sites, the internet, and regional press and radio to attract a diverse audience to our musical offerings throughout the year. Through these efforts, our concerts have attracted a diverse audience in terms of age, income, physical ability, and gender status.
We are very conscious of the need to reach out to a diverse audience, and Jazz, as an art form, is arguably the most diverse. The Northampton Jazz Festival proudly upholds diversity, equity, and inclusion as one of its main tenets.
Land Acknowledgment
We acknowledge that the City of Northampton, where Northampton Jazz Festival events take place, is built within the ancestral homelands of the Nonotuck peoples. We also acknowledge the surviving Native nations of what is now called "New England": the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East; the Mohegan, Pequot, and Schaghticoke to the South; the Mohican to the West; and the Abenaki to the North.
We acknowledge the presence and memory of these Indigenous nations who, after having inhabited this land for more than 10,000 years, were displaced in the 1600s to 1700s by English colonial settlers who exploited Native generosity and provoked warfare. We affirm, honor, and respect the sovereignty of these and hundreds of other Native American nations across North America that survive today.
Acknowledging this history is just the beginning. We encourage you to help repair some of these harms by supporting native artists and musicians locally here in our community. No Loose Braids, a Nipmuc-led organization, is actively revitalizing Eastern Tribal art and music. We invite you to learn more about and support their important work at https://www.noloosebraids.com.