National Youth Jazz Festival Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, and Zimbabwe. South African jazz students audition for places in the Standard Bank National Schools Big Band and the National Youth Jazz Band (NYJB). The NYJB performs regularly at festivals around South Africa—Grahamstown, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban—and has performed in New York City, Sweden and the North Sea Jazz Festival, the Netherlands. National Youth Jazz Festival The National Youth Jazz Festival runs as party of the National Arts Festival also known as the Grahamstown Festival which has been running in Grahamstown since 1974, and is the world’s second-largest single cultural festival, attracting performers
Annual Charlie Parker Celebration Annual Charlie Parker Celebration The Annual Charlie Parker Celebration is an annual festival held in Kansas City, Missouri since 2014, celebrating legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. It is held for 10 days in August and celebrates all aspects of Parker from live jazz music shows and boot camps, to tours of his haunts in the city, to exhibits at the American Jazz Museum. During the 2nd celebration in 2015 the museum featured rare programs, album sleeves, a pocket watch and cuff links that belonged to “The Bird” himself. In 2016, saxophonist Tivon Pennicott was artist-in-residence at the festival. A 21-sax