News Post

It’s been a while since our last update in March. We’ve been busy in the background working on plans for the future direction of the jazz festival and trying to gather resources for live jazz in Marsden in 2023. The Marsden Jazz Festival organisation is now entirely volunteer run, and we are still learning what that means in terms of our capacity and resources. Thanks for your patience.

Our activity over the 2023 jazz festival weekend (6-8 October) will not be on the scale of what we have been able to present in recent years. That’s just simply beyond our resources at the moment. However, this is what we can confirm for 2023:

We’ll be staging a ‘Marsden Jazz Festival Presents’ event in the Marsden Mechanics on Saturday 7 October. This will be a ticketed event that will feature Yorkshire based jazz acts. We’ll be able to share full details of this event in due course. We want this gig to feel like a celebration and a relaunch.

As regards the wider jazz festival weekend we’ll be creating a free printed programme that will feature all of the activity taking place throughout Marsden. We’ll be reaching out to people over the next weeks to let them know how they can have their gigs and events included in the programme.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to Arts Council England, Jazz Leeds, Jazz in Britain Ltd, Kirklees Council, Marsden Community Trust and all the local individuals who have helped and supported us over the last few months; people have given their help and thoughts generously. It’s time for a new start for the Jazz Festival. The financial challenges we face are still very present, but we will continue, one step at a time, to build back in a new way.