from “le détroit” · the strait
The 45th Detroit Jazz Festival opened with a restored harp once owned by Detroit-born Alice Coltrane, then moved its first night indoors when storms rolled up the river.
The 45th Detroit Jazz Festival ran over Labor Day weekend, August 30 through September 2, 2024, spreading free programming across Hart Plaza and Campus Martius downtown and the Gretchen C. Valade Jazz Center on Wayne State University's campus in Midtown. Organizers bill it as the largest free jazz festival in the world, and the festival says roughly a quarter of its audience travels in from out of state.
The weekend was built around a homecoming. A restored harp once owned by Alice Coltrane, the pianist, harpist and composer who was born in Detroit, was brought back to the city and set on the Carhartt stage at Hart Plaza for opening night. Coltrane took up the Lyon and Healy instrument in the late 1960s, after the death of her husband, saxophonist John Coltrane, and turned it into a signature of her later spiritual and improvised work.
The opening program, titled "Translinear Light: The Music of Alice Coltrane," paired her son Ravi Coltrane with harpist Brandee Younger, who was set to play the restored harp, along with bassist Reggie Workman and the Detroit Jazz Festival Chamber Orchestra. The title borrows from Alice Coltrane's 2004 album of the same name.
Grammy-winning drummer Brian Blade served as the festival's 2024 artist-in-residence, performing across the weekend with his Fellowship Band and with the festival's orchestra.
The weather did not cooperate on the first night. With severe storms moving up the Detroit River, the festival moved its Friday performances off the outdoor stages and presented them as a livestream from the Valade Center instead. The festival said the change was made "out of an abundance of caution and the safety of our patrons and artists." The broadcast setup, developed during the pandemic, made the indoor pivot possible on short notice. The rest of the weekend ran outdoors as scheduled.
The Valade Center carries the name of Gretchen Valade, the Carhartt heir and longtime jazz patron known in the music world as the "Angel of Jazz." Valade, who died in 2022, stepped in to save the Detroit Jazz Festival from collapse in 2005 and backed it with tens of millions of dollars in the years that followed, the support that keeps admission free today.
Location: Hart Plaza and Campus Martius, Downtown; Gretchen C. Valade Jazz Center, Wayne State University, Midtown.
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