Throughout Northampton, Mass., this weekend, a festival that fills the Paradise City with music will be in full swing.
Grammy Award-winning Latin Jazz, a storied group of vocalists on a sendoff tour, and free shows all over the place are all part of this year’s Northampton Jazz Festival.
Starting Friday evening and going throughout Saturday, the festival features jazz acts of all kinds playing in parks, breweries and restaurants. The festival traces its roots to 2011 and was revived in 2018 after a brief hiatus, growing ever since.
It exposes new listeners to one of the most expressive genres out there, all while bringing culture into the city’s downtown, festival organizers say.
“Our mission (continues) to be bringing live jazz to Northampton and to support education of jazz with young people in the city,” says Ruth Griggs, president and board member of the group behind the festival. “But, we also very deliberately now stage it all over town. We have over a dozen different venues over those two days where we stage live music and that's deliberately to bring folks that are visiting Northampton to the music, to the restaurants, to the cafes, to the galleries…”
Griggs, who hosts an "All About Jazz" segment on WHMP, tells WAMC the festival taps into a region sporting a deep appreciation for the music. Northampton’s long been a stop for touring artists for decades, she says, while area colleges like UMass Amherst, Amherst College and others host their fair share of jazz programs.
This year, she says, the festival’s landed a recent Grammy-winning act.
“For the first time ever, this year, we have a Grammy Award-winning artist coming to the festival: Zaccai Curtis and his Cubop Lives! band is coming to the Unitarian Society on Saturday at 4 p.m., and they just won a Grammy in March for best Latin Jazz album,” Griggs says.
“‘Cubop Lives!’ is full of congas and timbales and percussion and masterful piano playing by Zaccai Curtis, and it's a wonderful take on the old Cubop that started way back in the 40s,” she explains. “It's his take on some of these standards that have just been mashed-up with Latin rhythm and it's going to be very, very exciting!”
This year’s series will also feature a group that got its start at Ithaca College almost 40 years ago: New York Voices, a vocal ensemble that’s been putting out music since at least 1987. It’s the only show one has to pay for during the festival. It’s also one of the group’s last performances.
“They're in their final year of performance after performing together for 38 years,” Griggs explains. “They are a jazz vocal quartet … and they will knock everyone's socks off with their tight harmonies, their fast harmonies, their bebop, their renditions of everything from Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon songs to the jazz standards. They're going to be at the Academy of Music on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and that's going to be super fun.”
The event formally kicks off Friday at 4:30 p.m. – a “Jazz Strut Kickoff” at Pulaski Park, with acts at participating venues soon afterwards.
Griggs says the festival only seems to be gaining steam with each new iteration.
“The community reaction gets better every year,” she tells WAMC. “We are lucky ... that we really haven't had to depend much on federal or state grants, which a lot of nonprofits do in the arts world. We have a growing number of individual patrons, as well as corporate business sponsors this year - that whole fundraising side has never been better. To me, that's an indication that people understand we're bringing great jazz music to downtown Northampton, which folks love, and we’re also delivering on that promise of bringing vitality and a positive spirit to Northampton.”
More information on the Northampton Jazz Festival can be found here.
Griggs’s “All About Jazz” segment can be heard on Thursdays on WHMP, from 9:30-10 a.m.
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This story aired on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025.
WAMC notes New York Voices has previously been billed as a "Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble," having been featured on the Grammy-winning Count Basie Orchestra album "Live at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild.” They were also featured on Paquito D'Rivera's "Brazilian Dreams" album, which won a "Latin Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz/Jazz Album."
