Jazz Road Tours, the national jazz grant program of South Arts, is accepting applications for touring grants for emerging and mid-career jazz artists in 2020-2021.
Artists can apply for funding for small U.S. tours (three to six sites), with a premium on bringing jazz to rural and underserved parts of the United States.
Grants typically range between $5,000 and a maximum of $15,000. Recipients can use the funds to pay for necessary aspects of touring such as travel, lodging, food, and artist fees.
Jazz Road grants for the 2019-2020 cycle helped support 31 tours, bringing jazz to locations that included Caspar, Wyoming (Damon Zick/Quarteto Nuevo); Clarksburg, West Virginia (Monika Herzig/SHEROES), and Luck, Minnesota (Mads Tolling Duo), in addition to cosmopolitan areas such as Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
To apply, an artist must be 18 and over (and not a full-time student) and a U.S. citizen or permanent resident living anywhere within the United States; and may be working solo or in an ensemble of up to 10 musicians. A complete application will include a biography of the applicant and any other artists in their ensemble, samples of their work, the structure and budget of the tour, and offer letters countersigned by the performance venues. A peer panel will review all of the applicants using the criteria of artistic excellence and merit of the proposed tour to recommend funding.
Applications must be received by April 21, 2020. Recipients will be notified in July.
Launched in 2019, Jazz Road is led by South Arts in partnership with five other U.S. regional arts organizations (Arts Midwest, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, and Western Arts Alliance/WESTAF). It is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
