During seven glorious days in June 1986, a fledgling jazz festival in Vancouver, Canada, burst into the consciousness of local and international jazz fans.

If great art is made in chaos, get ready for some killer festivals this year. In digging into the 2025 festival scene while crafting this guide, one thing is for certain.

Editor’s Note: The following served as the First Take column, which is our editor’s letter, in the April issue of DownBeat.

At the end of last summer, over the Labor Day weekend, vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa took time out from preparing for her concert with Joshua Redman at the Detroit Jazz Festival to take a real chance: her first Blindfold Test, in front of a live audience. Silky smooth in her vocal delivery, Cavassa proved to be adept at this musical guessing game, too. She recently signed a deal with Blue Note Records, with a new album expected to drop later this year.

On March 20, the night before the release of Defiant Life, the new Vijay Iyer-Wadada Leo Smith duo album from ECM, the label was throwing what their invitation termed a “private listening party” at Bang & Olufsen, the high-end electronics store on Madison Avenue in New York.

Brooklyn is indisputably a power spot in the musical universe, especially in terms of its contributions to jazz, R&B, hip-hop and other genres. Who better to sing praises to the place and its historical and ongoing influence than a musically gifted native daughter?

If the DownBeat Critics Poll had categories for “most eclectic musician” and “working-est man in show biz,” there’s a good chance that Nashville-based multi-reedist Jeff Coffin would win both for his remarkably diverse output and frantic schedule through the final half of 2024. Just check the record.

Joel Ross was touring Europe last summer with his group Good Vibes in support of his new Blue Note album, Nublues. On the same day of a performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival, he made time for a live Blindfold Test — his first — on the festival’s Central Park talk stage.

Vibraphonist and composer Roy Ayers, whose soul-driven, electrified approach influenced generations of R&B-adjacent musicians, died March 4 at his home in Manhattan after a long illness. He was 84.

Vernice “Bunky” Green, the trailblazing alto saxophonist, composer and educator, passed away on March 1 at age 91.