Manchester Jazz Festival

Manchester jazz festival is the UK’s leading showcase for contemporary jazz, with an ongoing focus on championing the region’s creative artists and offering the UK’s only open jazz commissioning scheme for composer-musicians. This means you will see things at mjf that you won’t experience at any other jazz festival.

Year after year, audiences return to enjoy the ten-day celebration of fresh and innovative contemporary music – offering opportunities to discover artists who challenge, surprise and excite.

mjf is a Signature Event in Manchester’s cultural programme, animating the city centre and reinforcing its image as a great place to live and work. Fostering the regional scene and presenting as wide a range of musicians as possible, mjf especially encourages young, female and multi-cultural musicians, and also introduces local audiences to the best established and emerging artists from Europe and beyond, often giving them their first UK showcase.

Our mission is to push jazz forward, to lift the music from its stereotypical image of a smoky, late-night, older male-dominated artform to one which is surprising, vibrant, totally connected to today’s music-making across all contemporary genres, relevant to, available to and enjoyable by all.