Launching a music festival from scratch is a huge undertaking. Even if planning is airtight and the lineup is stacked with talent, things can and will go sideways — such as the near-freezing temperatures and pouring rain that plagued the first Stowe Jazz Festival in September 2017.
“I actually had to send someone up to Aubuchon Hardware to buy small space heaters for our stage,” festival founder George Walker Petit recalled recently.
Now entering its ninth season, the Stowe Jazz Festival, which prides itself on being a pure jazz experience, has grown stronger and expanded considerably from the fledgling enterprise it once was. And it remains entirely free. Its upcoming run this Thursday through Sunday, July 17 through 20, features a new main stage at the Stowe Events Field and many satellite locations. The festival’s former central hub, the Alchemist brewery, is still included as one of the “village venues,” along with Doc Ponds, Piecasso, the von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort and others scattered around the mountain town.
Most notably, women lead every act performing on the main stage this year. Walker Petit explained it’s not so much a political statement as an opportunity for the festival to offer as much variety as it can.
“Why are women not given the same opportunity as bandleaders?” Walker Petit pondered. “Excuse my expletive, but it doesn’t fucking make sense to me.”
Looking at industry trends, he’s right to be incensed. According to Book More Women, a painstakingly researched grassroots project that tracks gender parity at music festivals, women comprise less than 25 percent of artist lineups at the 10 largest American music events. Female representation at some smaller music festivals is sometimes in the single digits.
Walker Petit stressed that his goal is to make the festival as community-minded as possible. That spirit can be seen in the Friday and Saturday jam sessions at Doc Ponds, where folks who’ve played on various stages come together for spontaneous fun.
“[Those] jam sessions are kind of epic for us,” he said. “We’ve had people from Snarky Puppy come in and play with locals.”
Speaking of the Vermont contingent, a mix of household names (in the Green Mountains, at least) such as Paul Asbell, Patricia Julien, Bruce Sklar and others round out the schedule.
The festival kicks off on Thursday night with Michigan-based pianist Matthew Fries and his quartet at Outbound Stowe. Read on for a closer look at some of this year’s main stage artists.
Jensen Sisters Organ Band
Friday, July 18, 3 p.m.
Sisters Christine and Ingrid Jensen, a saxophonist and trumpeter, respectively, are heavy hitters in Canadian jazz. Among other accolades, both have taken home JUNO Awards for their contemporary and traditional jazz albums, which are cross-pollinated with each other’s contributions.
The daughters of musical parents, their most recent collaboration is Christine’s album, Harbour, on which Ingrid plays lead trumpet throughout. Brought to life by Christine’s Montréal-based orchestra, the album is at once calm and lively, its songs swelling and crashing like ocean waves.
Jennifer Wharton’s Bonegasm
Friday, July 18, 5 p.m.
Likely a response to being boxed in, pigeonholed or tokenized, New York City’s Jennifer Wharton named her second album Not a Novelty. The title seems to ask why it should be a novelty that a bandleader is not only a bass trombonist — an uncommon weapon of choice for an ensemble’s principal player — but also female.
“I’d run into people who believe the trombone was a man’s instrument and that you needed ‘balls’ to play [it],” Wharton told the website JazzWax in 2021. “I’d like to think I’ve proven myself quite a few times, and this stuff doesn’t happen much anymore.”
Broadway aficionados have possibly heard Wharton’s brass all over the Great White Way in musicals such as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, 9 to 5: The Musical and the original orchestra for Wicked‘s pre-Broadway run in San Francisco. Her seven-piece band, Bonegasm, makes good on its suggestive name with sleek tunes centering an eruption of trombone.
Nicole Zuraitis
Saturday, July 19, 4 p.m.
Nicole Zuraitis was “shocked and surprised” to win the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album for her record How Love Begins, she told the website Australian Jazz, mainly because she had “steep competition” against other nominees who’d claimed the prize in previous years. But the Christian McBride-coproduced LP proved triumphant, its original tunes exploring “the all-encompassing journey of modern love, including the beauty of taking chances, the complexity of desire, the fragility of emotion,” according to the album’s announcement in Bass Magazine.
Several years before her big win, she was nominated for a scintillating new arrangement of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” included on her 2017 album, Hive Mind. Over whispered congas and murmured piano chords, she updated the classic lament with avant-garde leanings and plenty of soul.
Sarah Cabral Quintet
Saturday, July 19, 6 p.m.
Before moving to the U.S., Brazilian artist Sarah Cabral played heavy rock music with a garage band. It wasn’t until a musical mentor turned her on to música popular brasileira, or Brazilian popular music — a culturally representative style that traces the legacy of the South American country’s signature bossa nova and samba styles — that she began writing in her native Portuguese.
In the past few years, Cabral has released a progression of dreamy singles. Spacious and languid, her interpretations of Paulo Jobim’s “Valse,” Chico Pinheiro’s “Varanda,” and Antônio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina’s “Pois É” are imbued with serenity and peacefulness.
Lulada Club
Saturday, July 19, 8 p.m.
From Tito Puente to Ray Barretto to Vermont’s own Ray Vega, New York City has birthed some of the world’s foremost salsa musicians. Brashly entering a traditionally male-dominated space in 2021, 11-piece ensemble Lulada Club defy the norm with their jubilant compositions and scintillating energy. Paying homage to Colombia’s Orquesta Femenina D’Caché, another all-female salsa band, Lulada Club aim to reinvent what a night at a salsa club can be.
“If we think about the message that has led us here today, we want to see more diversity onstage,” bandleader Andrea Chavarro told Rolling Stone in 2023.
Known to play a variety of tropical genres, Lulada Club recently released their debut single, “Lulada Llegó.” Traditionally the band’s set closer, the bouncy song encapsulates the group’s intricate orchestrations and percussive energy.
Mimi Jones Quartet
Sunday, July 20, 3 p.m.
In the mid-2010s, bassist Mimi Jones and pianist Arcoiris Sandoval created a highly conceptual, multidisciplinary project called the D.O.M.E. Experience. Its founding principles — dance, orchestration, media and environment — coalesced as a series of performances that centered social causes such as climate action, sustainability and musical outreach. Jones and Sandoval continue their collaborations in Jones’ quartet.
In the previous decade, Jones served as a member of the U.S. State Department’s the Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad, a program that sends American musicians across the globe to participate in cultural exchanges. Jones traveled throughout Africa and later returned to Mali to work with music students of all ages.
Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom
Sunday, July 20, 7 p.m.
Allison Miller commands the stage from behind toms, snares and cymbals. Following in the footsteps of titans Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington, the New York City-based drummer traveled the world while serving as a U.S. State Department Jazz Ambassador, a program partnership with the Kennedy Center.
Her experimental quartet, Boom Tic Boom, is known for stylistic hairpin turns. The group’s most recent album, Glitter Wolf, volleys from Afro-Cuban grooves to complex bebop. Just after the album’s release in early 2019, she explained to DownBeat how the album attempts to capture juxtapositions, such as “the fierce and the fabulous, the feminine and the masculine, and everything in between.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ladies’ Night(s) | Entering its ninth season, the Stowe Jazz Festival is bigger — and more female-fronted — than ever”
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!