This month’s LA Jazz Festival was slated to be one of the largest concerts in Los Angeles history.
With dozens of performances spread throughout every City Council district, organizers hoped the shows would draw 250,000 attendees and inaugurate the city as a home for jazz events on par with New Orleans and Montreal.
Those hopes will have to wait, as organizers announced the cancellation and postponement of the festival on Friday, including its main show Aug. 22-23 on Dockweiler Beach.
“Due to significant, unanticipated last-minute public safety and municipal costs associated with the final permitting of the On The Beach Festival, we have reached the decision to unfortunately postpone this year’s inaugural LA Jazz Festival,” organizer Martin Ludlow said in a statement to the Times. “Although this decision was an extremely difficult one to reach, our commitment to the audiences and artists participating in the festival is to have a first-class experience worthy of the great legacy of Jazz and our great city. We were encouraged by the enthusiastic support of the artists on the bill, the fans and our sponsors for this inaugural event, and we look forward to presenting all of the components of this incredible cultural opportunity for Los Angeles and the world in 2027 and beyond.”
John Legend, Janelle Monáe, Charlie Wilson, Parliament Funkadelic and Raphael Saadiq were booked to headline the main show.
“We are so grateful to all the artists–from our headliners to our musicians in the parks, many of whom went above and beyond to make this affordable to the community,” Ludlow added. “All current ticket holders for LA Jazz Festival events will be refunded in full within 30 days. We apologize deeply for this situation and vow to make this right over time.”
LA Jazz Festival was a major project for Ludlow, a former Los Angeles City Council member turned music promoter and community activist after pleading guilty to misappropriating funds in 2006.
Ludlow announced the show in a splashy speech on the steps of City Hall in February, flanked by Mayor Karen Bass and other civic leaders. “During this journey, you can only imagine there’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows,” Ludlow said then. “When you have those lows, you want a friend that really can lift you up.”
Back in February, Ludlow described the mission of LA Jazz Festival with a civil rights-inspired fervor, saying that “This festival is intended to lift up our ancestors that came to this country in bondage, terrorized, brutalized. It’s also about celebrating the end to those last bastions of Jim Crow racism, the days we were denied access to public drinking fountains, public swimming pools and public beaches. From the beginning of this journey, we’ve been very intentional about telling the narrative of that human rights struggle called Jazz.”