The Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival takes place this weekend, with free performances on Liberty Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh for the first time since 2019, as well as ticketed concerts in the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. Among the artists performing on outdoor stages this Saturday and Sunday are Marshia Ambrosius, Robert Glasper, Emmet Cohen, and Orrin Evans with the Captain Black Big Band.
Janis Burley Wilson is President/CEO of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and founder and director of the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival. In the midst of preparing for the weekend’s festivities, she talked with WRTI about what makes this event unique, and why it feels like a jubilant return to form this year. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
What is this like for you, as we head into a big festival weekend? I know there are a lot of things coming together.
Absolutely. I just finished a call with a woman at Amtrak to finalize all the details for the Jazz Train, which is only in its second year. And we’re still figuring it out: Learning from last year what worked, what didn’t work, as we try to determine the best way to make sure that everyone can get on the trains with no issues, seamlessly, and just enjoy themselves on the train from New York to Pittsburgh.
I will be climbing aboard here in Philadelphia. It seems like such a fun way to bring people into the festival experience.
It was so much fun. Surprisingly, more fun than I ever had imagined it would be. This is the brainchild of Orrin Evans, who is a Philly institution; he and I talked last year about finding a way to bring people to Pittsburgh in a unique way. We hadn’t heard about any jazz trains anywhere else. So we did it. We had people that flew in from Memphis, a couple that flew from Vermont to New York to get on the train to Pittsburgh.
Now, this edition of the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival really is a return to form. Can you talk about that theme of resilience, and the practical implications of bringing it back to full capacity?
I started working on the festival, developing it, in 2009. For the first 10 years of the festival, it was free, on the street, with multiple stages. Or we would close down the street, similar to what you see in Detroit. I traveled to a lot of different festivals around the country, and also in Europe, to find aspects of those festivals that I thought would work in Pittsburgh. Then the pandemic hit and we did the first virtual jazz festival in June of 2020. The next year, we were trying to find a way to do it safely. We were concerned about safety in terms of the pandemic, and because the world had changed.
Right.
One of our sponsors is Highmark, the insurance provider, and they have a soccer stadium here in Pittsburgh, and so we did it there. It was a completely different vibe, but it was beautiful. There’s turf, so you can just sit out on the lawn. Behind the stages is the city skyline, and the river. But it was just different. It was the first time that we had charged admission to the festival. And we honestly just didn’t have the luxury of time to build that up and get people used to going to the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival and paying for a ticket, when they had gone for the first 10 years for free.
Ah, that makes sense.
So we did it for three years at the Stadium, and it got better and better every year. Some people love it there, because you have that safety and security. But there are other people that love it on the street. So for 2024 — with the 15th anniversary of the opening of our performing arts center, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center — we decided to have a homecoming, where we’re bringing the festival back to the cultural district, to the street. A lot of the artists that have played it for years are thrilled to have it back in the street. Most of our audience is very excited about having it back in the street. But you also can become a member of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, which would make you a VIP and give you access to reserved seating access to the lounges we have available. So it depends on what you want and what kind of experience you want, but we’ll be able to provide both of those.
You mentioned the Detroit Jazz Festival, which is a free urban jazz experience. When you go there, you’re really struck by what that has done, in terms of building the local jazz audience. Can you speak to that aspect of it, and how it resonates specifically with Pittsburgh?
Well, you’re a jazz writer, a critic and historian. So you know the legacy of jazz in Pittsburgh. There’s so many great artists — and a lot of the artists that are still living in Pittsburgh have performed with Stanley Turrentine and Art Blakey, and they knew Mary Lou Williams and George Benson, and people like that. So the legacy and the history is there, and Pittsburghers are very proud of that. I will say that if you look at pictures from the last 14 years, you see people that are there as a couple, and then a few years later they’re there with their child — or you see people as they’re getting older, and then their children are getting older along with them. I think about my father, who really introduced me to the music. I used to listen with him, sitting in the back seat as a little girl, and then I became a presenter, and he would come to my shows to cheer me on. So I’m onstage announcing, and I see him in the audience. It’s really the legacy aspect of the music. I think that that’s what draws people to it in the first place, the history and legacy, and the ability to share your love of something with your family and your friends. That’s what the festival is about, and you can feel that in Pittsburgh
You lead the August Wilson Center. His is as exalted a name in American theater as we have, and he’s obviously a really important figure for African American history and culture. Can you speak to what the existence and programming of this center has done to anchor the Black community in Pittsburgh?
The building opened 15 years ago. The architect is an African American woman, Allison Williams. They opened to great celebration and fanfare, but had financial difficulty and closed for a number of years. A new 501c3 was formed, and then they hired me. So I’ve been there for seven of the 15 years. Our mission is to be a home for art and storytelling and exchange of ideas rooted in the African American experience and the African diaspora. We’re the second largest multidisciplinary African American performing arts center in the country; the first is The Apollo. So we have grown quickly over those seven years. Our programming is extremely diverse. We have the festival, obviously, which I started when I was working at another organization and brought along with me. But we also have a music series. We have a speaker series. We have visual art and exhibitions. We have a film festival called the Black Bottom Film Festival, named after an August Wilson play. We also had the Highmark Blues and Heritage Festival; blues music was a great inspiration to August Wilson. Now, instead of doing the blues festival and the jazz festival separately, because it was expensive to do both, we’re finding ways to kind of merge the two. So we have a variety of different styles of music at the jazz fest.
Right.
And the other really important part of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center is that it’s free and open to the public. We have ticketed concerts in our theater, but you can walk in during open hours and go to the galleries for free. We’re a nonprofit, so we’re always looking for ways to try to subsidize that. With the 15th anniversary, we’re launching a campaign called Fuel the Future, where people can support the future of the center being sustainable, and the opportunity to continue to create that kind of work.
As for the festival: I always take a look to see what I’m missing. This year I’m excited to finally experience it. But I wonder if you would characterize the tone or vibe of this festival lineup? Every festival has a kind of mood-board identity.
Yeah.
Like, “This is a very Newport Jazz lineup. This is a very Detroit Jazz lineup.” Can you do that for Pittsburgh?
I’d say it’s a Pittsburgh lineup. The beauty of having a free festival is that I get an opportunity to introduce our audience to artists that you really need to hear, without having to worry about selling a ticket for it. So, artists like Cimafunk, just a dynamo Cuban artist. He’s amazing. We also have a Brazilian vocalist named Luedji Luna, and to my knowledge, she has not played the festival circuit here in the States. Pittsburghers like to party, like to dance — so we’re bringing the Average White Band back for the umpteenth time. I’ve worked with them many times over the years. They’re one of my favorites, and this is their farewell tour, which is really kind of hard to take. But you’ll see that the Pittsburgh crowd is right there with them when they’re onstage. They played the festival many times. We also love straight-ahead. So you know we have Emmet Cohen, who has played the festival many times. I think I met Emmett when he was about 20. Legacy is so important to him. We also have Sean Jones, who is not from Pittsburgh, but Pittsburghers think he’s from Pittsburgh because he’s spent so much time here.
Haha, yes.
We’ve commissioned him to do a lot of different things. He’s going to be working on a special project with a jazz musician named Chris Coles, who’s just a phenomenal artist, and he has a project that he created, funded by the Knight Foundation, called Nine Lives. It is inspired by the mass killing of people at the Emmanuel Church in South Carolina. It includes animation, video. So that will be in the theater. We wanted to do it inside, and that’ll be late night, on Saturday. So, after all of the outdoor concerts, we’ll go inside to the theater. That’s a ticketed show, and you’ll get an opportunity to see this amazing project.
I’m looking forward to that.
Who else do we have? Orrin Evans — again, straight-ahead. Howie Alexander, who’s our artist in residence; he is very versatile. He plays straight-ahead. He plays gospel, he plays R&B. Then you’ll hear Endea Owens and the Cookout: that’s a party, but she’s such a master on that bass that you know even as she’s having fun, she’s doing some really intricate things on her instrument. So there really isn’t one style that we present. It’s always jazz-based; we’re not going to have an R&B festival and call it a jazz festival. I promised the people that love this festival that I would never do that, and I don’t believe in that, anyway.
But I love all kinds of music. So I think that giving people what they like, but also taking the opportunity to introduce them to what they might like, or exposing them to different genres, is really important. And then we have the Taste of Jazz Party, which is a celebration of different kinds of music, different kinds of food. We’ll have three different bands performing within the August Wilson Center, and a DJ — so you can go and dance if you want to, or you can go and chill and listen to some straight-ahead, or you can listen to different kinds of music. And we have about 20 different restaurants that will be on site serving a featured dish from their menu. It’s a good time.
Now, we’ve been talking about audience and accessibility. And this is obviously a very interesting moment: here in Philadelphia we just hosted a presidential debate, and both candidates spent significant time preparing and rallying in Pittsburgh.
Yeah.
As we are getting ready for this festival, we are barreling towards this presidential election, and there’s all kinds of talk about differences. It strikes me that this festival — being a free event in the community, in Western Pennsylvania — there may be some tensions in the air. I wonder if you can speak to what it means to convene in this celebratory spirit, with this music?
Wow, that’s a deep question. You know what I've noticed over the years, producing a festival like this? If you get there at 11 o'clock, you’re going to be up front. If you get there later, then you won’t be. It’s not a matter of if you had more money to attend. What I find is that you have people of all ages, races, backgrounds, probably political beliefs, sitting together and focusing in on this person, onstage, and the message that they’re putting out there. Our festival isn’t segregated as you look into the audience, and as I look back at pictures from the past. It’s extremely diverse. And I think that that’s also the beauty of jazz. I mean, how many artists have talked about the democracy of jazz? It’s really about who can play when you’re on that bandstand. And so that is what I think. That’s what I enjoy most about this music. And I think that the people that come to the festival, that’s what they enjoy most. They get an opportunity to interact, to enjoy, to smile, to cry, to feel something with a lot of different kinds of people.
Yeah.
One thing that I will point out as I was looking at my lineup is that Black women are really front and center in this festival. That wasn’t something that I decided last year. It’s just the way that I programmed, maybe because I’m a Black woman, too. But Endea, Luedji Luna, Marsha Ambrosius, Maysa, Shemekia Copeland, Vanisha Gould. So you’re going to have all of these people in the audience, that diverse audience, focusing on these amazing, masterful artists. And I think that that’s also the strength of this kind of music, is that you might see that Black woman on stage. But you’re not thinking, “I want to find a way to suppress this Black woman onstage.” You’re focusing on the beauty of what she’s presenting. And so I’m very proud of that.
The Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival runs Sept. 19 through 22.
