Manchester Jazz Festival

Manchester's longest continuously running music festival, held each summer since a 1996 debut founded by around forty of the city's own jazz musicians and activists. The planned opening day was disrupted by the 1996 Manchester bombing and re-staged that August, and the festival has since commissioned fifteen major new works.

Manchester Jazz Festival grew out of a 1995 meeting of around forty of the city's jazz musicians and activists at the old Musicians' Union office on Canal Street, where attendees, including saxophonists Matt Nickson and Phred Farret, who went on to found the venue Matt & Phred's, and Steve Mead, who remains the festival's Artistic Director, questioned why a city of Manchester's scale and musical reputation had no festival dedicated solely to jazz.