The Forked Road: Serenity, Courage, Wisdom
On reframing ambition, the Serenity Prayer, and learning what to change
Image created with DALL·E.
Jun 22, 2026
A poster can sell a festival. It cannot prove that a festival knows the city beneath its feet.
I have played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival several times, and those stages taught me how a major festival can anchor itself in the culture around it. The lesson for Los Angeles is structural: who shapes the program, where local artists are placed, which histories are made public, and what remains after the last set ends. Los Angeles has its own musical geography, its own cultural workers, and its own histories of jazz in public life.
A serious jazz festival draws a map of the city that hosts it. In New Orleans, that map appears through stages, food booths, craft markets, interviews, neighborhood traditions, education programs, and year-round grants. Visiting stars enter a field already shaped by local musicians, local foodways, local memory, and local cultural labor. Los Angeles now has a chance to build something rooted in its own terms.
Festival culture can easily turn a city into scenery. The beach, skyline, warm night, and headliner can make a festival feel expansive while the city itself stays slightly out of focus.
The inaugural Los Angeles Jazz Festival, founded by Martin Ludlow and billed as the largest Black-owned jazz festival ever, arrives with real promise: park concerts, late-night programming, a Caribbean Street Carnival, a youth jazz camp, a State of Jazz Conference, and beach concerts with major national names. Los Angeles has needed a festival with this level of ambition for a long time.
The festival is already doing meaningful public work. Free concerts, youth programs, late-night shows, neighborhood events, and a citywide footprint all help it reach people. The next question is authorship. A festival shows its commitments through curatorial power, prime placement, commissions, publicity, local partnerships, and the structures it leaves behind.
Los Angeles should be the festival’s curatorial center, the place where the program takes its shape. A festival can bring the world to Los Angeles while teaching the world how Los Angeles sounds. A lineup built mostly around national visibility leaves too much of the city in the background. Los Angeles musicians belong in central, visible, and well-supported positions alongside the visiting artists who bring wider attention.
Local musicians should shape the structure of this festival. Los Angeles jazz moves through many neighborhoods, institutions, and styles. Its history runs through Central Avenue, Leimert Park, Watts, South Los Angeles churches, Eastside Latin jazz circuits, Venice, Little Tokyo, Inglewood, independent venues, Black radio, studio orchestras, school bands, and community festivals. It runs through the World Stage, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Horace Tapscott’s legacy, Gerald Wilson’s large ensemble writing, Buddy Collette’s and Billy Higgins’s pedagogies, Latin jazz bandstands, Asian American musicians, the West Coast Get Down, and younger players building new musical languages across the city.
A festival that wants to represent Los Angeles should make those histories audible. The layout itself can teach the city’s jazz geography. Stages could be organized around historic Black Los Angeles, Leimert Park and the World Stage, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra lineage, Venice, Afro-Latin and Latin jazz, sacred sound from church to bandstand, experimental Los Angeles, and contemporary collectives shaping the city now. The festival can let audiences hear Los Angeles through the layout itself.
The people who sustain this music belong in the frame as well. Venue founders, bookers, DJs, radio hosts, archivists, educators, instrument repair workers, and neighborhood organizers keep the music alive between performances. They remember who opened doors, who made the calls, who moved the chairs, and who kept showing up outside the spotlight.
Food belongs in that cultural map. Harold & Belle’s has served Creole cooking on Jefferson Boulevard since 1969, offering a direct line from New Orleans to Black Los Angeles. Eastside Mexican foodways, Salvadoran pupuserías in Pico-Union, Japanese family kitchens in Little Tokyo, Filipino cooks in Historic Filipinotown, and Jamaican plates in Leimert Park each hold a piece of the same map. The food should help explain the city.
The festival should also say who is helping define Los Angeles jazz. A public advisory council of musicians, presenters, venue operators, educators, historians, cultural workers, and youth music leaders would make that process visible. This is a civic matter. If a festival claims the city, the city should be able to see how cultural decisions are being made.
Commissions would deepen that commitment by funding new work for the festival to debut: a Central Avenue suite, a Horace Tapscott and Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra project, a Latin jazz in Los Angeles commission, a Black church-to-bandstand piece, and an intergenerational ensemble that brings youth players together with elders. Work like that would let the festival add new music to the city’s repertoire and become a producer of Los Angeles culture. The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra under Mekala Session, the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, vocalist Dwight Trible, saxophonist Justo Almario, and artists from L.A.’s Afro-Caribbean and Latin jazz scenes are the kind of Los Angeles anchors who could make that possible.
Los Angeles already has jazz festivals and community-rooted efforts doing this work, from the AZZ-IS Venice Rebel Jazz Festival and the Central Avenue Jazz Festival to this year’s inaugural Santa Monica International Jazz Festival. A festival with real backing should platform and fund the work already here and join a field that is clearly alive.
Year-round investment should be part of the festival’s structure. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation uses festival proceeds and philanthropic support to fund schools, artists, nonprofits, cultural events, education programs, and new artistic works tied to Louisiana culture. Los Angeles should establish a comparable jazz fund for artist grants, youth music programs, venue preservation, community archives, instrument repair, honoraria for elder musicians, recording projects, and emergency relief for working players. A fund like that would turn the festival into infrastructure.
Jazz in Los Angeles lives in labor: in rehearsal rooms and classrooms, churches, clubs, public parks, studios, community centers, and the hands of musicians who kept this city sounding long before a major festival arrived.
A poster can announce a festival. Only the city itself will decide whether it takes root. Los Angeles has already given it everything it needs to grow