Concert of Colors fills Midtown for its 33rd year, free as ever

Concert of Colors ran for the 33rd time from July 16 to 21, 2024, anchored at the Detroit Institute of Arts and spread across nearby cultural-center venues. Admission was free, as it has been every year.

The festival organizers set the theme as Peace, Love and Understanding. Programming filled six days, with music, dance, film, poetry, food vendors, children's activities, and the festival's running series of community conversations.

Producer Don Was, a longtime Detroit figure, appeared twice on the lineup. He led the Don Was Detroit All Star Revue and organized a tribute to the MC5. In the festival's announcement, Was tied the theme back to the event's origins. "Concert of Colors originally began as a way to bridge cultural differences in Detroit through music and art," he said. "Considering the chaos of the world today, we need to laser in on that so it was easily unanimous to choose the theme of 'Peace, Love and Understanding.'"

The 2024 bill leaned on the global mix the festival is known for. Headliners included Transglobal Underground, the electro-world music group from England, and the Afro-Cuban ensemble Big Palladium 3, per the festival's announcement. The week ranged across world music, reggae and Caribbean styles, jazz, and the indigenous music of Detroit, with stages running both indoors and outdoors.

Beyond the DIA, performances and panels ran at venues including the Detroit Historical Museum, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Arab American National Museum, the Hellenic Museum of Michigan, the Michigan Science Center, the Scarab Club, and Spot Lite, according to the festival schedule. The Forum on Community, Culture and Race, the festival's annual discussion series, ran alongside the music.

The festival started in 1993 as a one-day event at Chene Park on the riverfront, founded by Ismael Ahmed, the former head of the human-services organization ACCESS, in partnership with New Detroit. By 1999 it was drawing more than 10,000 people a year, per the festival's own history. It grew to three days in 2001 as part of Detroit's 300th-anniversary celebration, when the festival says it drew an audience of more than 100,000, and expanded to nine days of programming by 2019.

The festival bills itself as one of the few remaining large-scale free-admission music festivals in the region and one of the longest-running free global music festivals in the country. After 33 years, it has kept that no-admission line.

The Detroit Institute of Arts is at 5200 Woodward Avenue in Midtown.