The Kansas City Jazz and Heritage Festival bows in May — with Janelle Monáe headlining

Janelle Monáe has most recently won acclaim co-starring in the movie Hidden Figures. She models for CoverGirl. But she is recognized first as a singer on the exotic edge of R&B, with six Grammy Award nominations.

Now, she’s set to mingle in the jazz world. Over Memorial Day weekend, Monáe leads the list of headliners for the first Kansas City Jazz and Heritage Festival, in the historic 18th and Vine district.

The KCK native embodies the heritage part of the event’s name. The festival’s biggest jazz-veteran draw, meanwhile, is guitarist John Scofield. Rounding out the national talent pool: violinist Regina Carter, high-energy act Trombone Shorty, the Hot Sardines, and R&B singer Brandy.

Scofield, a key part of Miles Davis’ band for more than three years, spices his distinctive jazz fusion with blues, funk and soul. He succeeded Pat Metheny in Gary Burton’s quartet and has recorded with musicians as diverse as Charles Mingus and Mavis Staples. For this festival, he’s bringing the band from his latest release, Country for Old Men, which just won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. (Scofield also won this year in the Improvised Jazz Solo category.)

Carter’s dynamic solos and rich tone have established her as the premier jazz violinist of her generation. She has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.” Her instrument, uncommon in jazz, is welcomed with special affection in Kansas City, where violinist Claude “Fiddler” Williams helped define swing music almost a century ago. 

The Hot Sardines, which layers energetic brass over stride piano, plays jazz as we imagine it thrived in speakeasies. Trombone Shorty shines New Orleans–style brass through a jam-band-tinted lens.

Brandy’s early recording career gave way to her sitcom, Moesha, and subsequent reality shows (to say nothing of her line of Barbie dolls). Yet her six albums, spanning contemporary R&B to urban pop, have sold a combined 40 million copies worldwide, and she remains a stage attraction.

The festival, presented by the American Jazz Museum, is scheduled for Friday, May 26, through Sunday, May 28. It will be bookended by a free meet-and-greet on Thursday night and a paid jazz brunch on Memorial Day. The meet-and-greet, says the museum’s executive director, Cheptoo Kositany-Buckner, will be “with all of the artists we’re bringing in town.” So: your chance to maybe catch a selfie with Monáe. 

Outdoor stages will dot the 18th and Vine district, with acts also playing in the Gem Theater and the Blue Room. A marketplace of vendors will line 18th Street between the Paseo and Woodland. The museum also plans an area to entertain children, and a cigar tent to entertain adults. Access to the main stage will require a $50 ticket each day. Music spread across other stages, plus the marketplace and the kids’ zone, will be free. A higher-priced VIP package gets fans into preferred seating (and the cigar tent). 

Music impresario Jo Blaq is producing the event. Blaq grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, as Joseph Macklin, a basketball standout at Washington High School. He worked on Jill Scott’s latest album, Woman, and on the TV series Empire. Through those connections, he will bring to town Empire cast members, including Jussie Smollett (who plays Jamal Lyon on the show), Bryshere Y. Gray (Hakeem Lyon), Sierra McClain (Nessa), and Serayah McNeill (Tiana Brown). Each actor is also a musician. They will participate in a Saturday panel discussion on, according to Kositany-Buckner, “life in the music world.”

Festival funding is coming from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Missouri Arts Council and an anonymous $200,000 donation.

The jazz museum has staged a festival for years, but not before on this scale. The most recent, in 2015, was a one-day event. After that, with a grant from the Hall Family Foundation, the museum’s board of directors commissioned a study to examine jazz festivals in other cities and to determine just what Kansas City — an area identified internationally with jazz — should present.

Jazz festivals in Chicago and Detroit hew closely to the advertised genre. Others, however, are more loosely notional; the headliners in April’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, probably the world’s largest, are Trombone Shorty, Dr. John, Buddy Guy … and Stevie Wonder, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. So if Janelle Monáe and Brandy don’t leap to mind as natural headliners for a jazz festival here, that may be due more to local reverence for tradition than to genre. In fact, Monáe has performed at the Montreaux, Toronto and North Sea jazz festivals.

As Kositany-Buckner puts it, “We are bringing some music that is jazz-related, like neo-soul, which is more attractive to younger people. I know there are jazz connoisseurs who like to come here and listen to straight-up jazz. This is not the venue for it. The idea of the jazz festival is to elevate jazz in Kansas City and also to build community. Part of building community means that there are people we want to attract here who don’t necessarily like jazz but will like the other music and will grow into jazz.

“We are promoting musicians in Kansas City and musicians who have made it but are no longer here,” Kositany-Buckner adds. “It’s not a festival just to have a festival. It’s a festival to build pride in who we are as Kansas City and our role in the heritage of jazz in the nation and the world. It’s to give our musicians a platform and give the community an opportunity to see that we have this wonderful art coming out of Kansas City.”

So singers Oleta Adams and Queen Bey and saxophonist Logan Richardson will be some of the artists returning to their hometown to perform. And stalwarts Bobby Watson, Angela Hagenbach and Eddie Moore are among those also set to play the festival.

The art of outdoor music on the night before Memorial Day has traditionally belonged to the Kansas City Symphony. The festival will provide Sunday transportation to and from Union Station for those who want to cap their jazz weekend with a classical experience. “We are making sure that we do not create any conflict with the symphony,” Kositany-Buckner says. “We are going to program Sunday evening so that we are not competing but are complementing each other.”

Still, Kositany-Buckner is keenly aware of at least one challenge to drawing a large crowd: a decades-old perception — unsupported by statistics — that sometimes the jazz district is not safe.

“The musicians we’ve selected, how we’ve branded the festival, is significant,” she says. “My biggest job as executive director of the American Jazz Museum is changing that perception. And changing the perception not from the safety part alone, but making everybody understand and appreciate what this area means to Kansas City. The one thing we have that is authentic Kansas City is 18th and Vine. The music is taking place here, but this is the entire community’s festival. This is about all of Kansas City.”

Additional details are on the festival’s web site at kcjazzfest.com.