Tucson Jazz Festival

The festival is produced by Jazz In January, a 501(c)(3) cultural arts organization doing business as the Tucson Jazz Festival, and it has been running for over a decade. Its January timing is deliberate and is its main structural advantage: it lands in the middle of the northern winter, when Tucson's climate lets the festival combine indoor theater concerts with outdoor daytime programming that no northern festival could stage.

Performances are concentrated in downtown Tucson's existing venues — the Fox Theatre, the Rialto Theatre, Centennial Hall, Century Hall and Hotel Congress among them — so the festival works as a walkable circuit rather than a single site. The organization states its mission as encouraging the discovery of live jazz performance and music education through community engagement, and free community programming sits alongside the ticketed concerts.