Frank Alkyer

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.

The jazz and blues community may not have been center stage for the majority of the 67th annual Grammy Award presentations on the evening of Feb. 2, but plenty of artists in the improvised music and blues worlds were recognized for their achievements — earlier in the day, as they say — and a tribute to Quincy Jones served as a focal point and showcase for jazz

Exceleration Music, a music company dedicated to independent music, has acquired Mack Avenue Music Group, a jazz label that has been home to such artists as Christian McBride, Kenny Garrett, Veronica Swift, Christian Sands, Yellowjacket, The Bad Plus, Emmet Cohen, Mike Stern and many more