To understand what’s different about this year’s Burlington Jazz Festival, note the location of Saturday afternoon’s performance featuring The Bandwagon: the A-Dog waterfront skatepark.
The Skate Jam was the idea of, and stars, the festival’s new curator — pianist, composer and bandleader Jason Moran, known in the music world as a contemporary jazz trailblazer. Part of his vision for this year’s festival, running Wednesday through Sunday, was to focus on youth, he said in an interview last week.
“I could probably have the opportunity to work with any kind of legend I’d like to. But I think it’s most important right now to really focus on that next generation that’s going to inherit the music,” said Moran, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow who was most recently the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
That’s also why Moran will perform with the Vermont Youth Orchestra on Thursday. And why the festival includes a blended dance and music performance at Leddy Arena ice skating rink, led by opera singer Alicia Hall Moran, Jason’s wife, followed by a free skate Sunday. And why student bands will be playing on Church Street from Wednesday through Friday.
The vision aligns with Moran’s long tenure as a music educator, including lecturing at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, Denmark’s’ Vallekilde Jazz Camp, the Manhattan School of Music in New York and Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“Partially, what youth do is they teach their parents,” said Moran, who has been studying piano since he was 6 and was deeply inspired by jazz legend Thelonious Monk.
“As a young kid playing jazz, I felt that, though my parents loved the music, there was so much that was getting kind of pulled back into their viewpoint by way of the child,” he said. “And as a parent of 18-year-old twin boys right now, I know how much one learns from them.”
His passion was evident Saturday in his easy foray into the rehearsal room at the Elley-Long Music Center, where an auditioned team of about 15 jazz students were practicing the Duke Ellington tribute piece they plan to play with Moran.
Wearing a funky striped shirt, jeans and sneakers, Moran, 51, sauntered into the music room, bobbing his head and clicking his fingers to the tempo, and perched unobtrusively on a stool in the back to watch as jazz director Kyle Saulnier led the ensemble. Then he wove lightly through the student group, with quiet suggestions and words of encouragement, clearly enjoying every moment.
“This is huge,” said Jay Wahl, executive director of The Flynn, who was among the people who watched them rehearse.
“One of the things I look for in a curator is an investment in youth and in education and then, a belief that that’s a part of the life of a musician,” said Wahl, who approached Moran to ask him to curate the festival.
His philosophy mirrors Moran’s, who has created new ways of expanding the downtown setting beyond the usual music spots. Using the A-Dog skatepark and the ice skating rink as venues will contribute to the festival’s growth, Moran hopes, and show that music can grow into other parts of the city beyond the Flynn theater, the waterfront stage and Church Street.
“I always consider myself a co-curator of the festival because it really is a dialogue,” Moran said. “That it’s now over four decades for this festival to be in existence means that the community really takes ownership in it.”
The festival is not the world-renowned artist’s first foray into Vermont. Last September, Moran kicked off the Vermont Jazz Center’s 2025-26 season with “Mount Ellington,” a piano solo paying tribute to legendary composer Duke Ellington’s work.
Thursday at 7 p.m. he will revisit Ellington at the Flynn Space with the Vermont Youth Orchestra, accompanied by South Burlington vocalist Rachel Ambaye, one of his former students at Berklee.
Many of the young musicians he is working with he expects will leave Vermont and explore the world, and Moran is confident their music training will give them the tools to live by, like music did for him.
“To play a style of music that is not even remotely in style — that takes a level of bravery,” he said. “People make kids make fun of kids who play weird music.”
And for the youth to stand in front of an audience and create music is “a very rare trait,” Moran said, one that they need “all the support and applause” for.
The festival will include 44 school bands from across Vermont. That’s about 993 students, according to Wahl, and the most young participants the jazz fest has ever showcased.
For a small state with a population of about 650,000 to bring 1,000 students playing live at the city jazz festival is “insane,” said Wahl, who credits Moran with the vibrant youth programming. “We’re really proud of that.”
