The 43rd annual Spoleto Festival USA is scheduled to take place May 24 through June 9, 2019, in Charleston, S.C. The festival will feature more than 150 events, from opera to theater to music, with a particular emphasis on jazz.
Wells Fargo Jazz, the festival’s jazz series, will showcase a wide variety of jazz musicians, highlighting the importance of the Afro-Cuban jazz tradition in the United States along with three generations of visionary female jazz artists.
Performers will include bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, pianists David Virelles and Carla Bley, the Dafnis Prieto Big Band, and saxophonist Mark Turner and pianist Ethan Iverson in a duo.
A quintet including drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, and pianist Craig Taborn will also pay tribute to the late, great pianist Geri Allen, who died in 2017.
“Since its establishment in 1977, the Festival has been singular in its timeless dedication to the old and the new,” Nigel Redden, the festival’s general director, said in a press release. “For the 43rd season, the programming continues to transcend time and place, with long-heralded masterworks alongside world premieres and reimagined classics—fitting for the Festival’s setting in Charleston, an ever-evolving metropolis steeped in a rich and complex history.”
For more information about the festival, and to buy tickets, go here.
Read Perry Tannenbaum’s review of the 2018 Spoleto Festival.
