The start of January is often a hibernatory write-off after the excesses of the festive season. Ambitious New Year’s resolutions are not yet abandoned and the world is temporarily restrained: exercising more, eating better, drinking less. This early year ascetic atmosphere makes Winter JazzFest – New York City’s annual January jazz indulgence – a welcome and reassuring extravagant exception.
Winter Jazzfest runs for a full week across the city, with shows and talks covering jazz of all subgenres. But it is the two Marathon nights – all-night multi-venue showcases hosted across a half dozen different venues, encouraging constant choose-your-own-adventure venue swapping with the simple wave of a wristband – that are the unique differentiator from other city festivals. On these Marathon nights it feels like mainlining live jazz; hoovering the stuff up as early in 2025 as possible, as if it is time-limited and someone might take it away later in the year.
While the Marathon night is a special format, for each quiet moment inside a specific venue a gig might look and sound disarmingly familiar; trios and quartets proliferated across the schedules, with intimate shows in classic small Manhattan jazz bars. Riley Mulherkar led a group with tasteful traditional trumpet stylings in the back of Zinc Bar, and The Bitter End was taken over by Paris Jazz Club to showcase either perfectly coordinated modern jazz from pianist Amaury Faye, comforting hard bop standards with drummer Paul Moravan, or having Flash Pigs present variable tempo jazzed-up Doris Day classics. NYC scene stalwart Vijay Iyer expanded the cosy quartet format at a packed-out National Sawdust in Williamsburg – a hi-tech high-fidelity newer music space – mixing his grand piano with Fender Rhodes for some funkier pieces, and leaning into his multi-decade rewarding working relationship with Tyshawn Storey on drums.
The 2025 Marathon’s might also be the year that jazz and science unexpectedly meet. Sirintip gathered a rich nine-person lineup at the Le Poisson Rouge, replete with swooping nordic bass clarinet and violin lines to reimagine her new project MYCELIUM, an “interdisciplinary musical suite” which covers the magical world of fungi. Pyrophilous an energetic piece about regrowth after wildfires – one of a few poignant moments at the festival in light of the current fires ravaging Los Angeles. Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg lean into the science of cells and the cores of atoms in their recent project Accept When, and Eisenberg’s mesmerizing clean guitar and clear singing coupled with Davis’ live alto saxophone multitracking.
Compared to Sirintip’s 9-person musical presentation, Londoner Theon Cross made a lot out of seemingly very little, using electronic augmentation of a solo horn to the next level. Standing center stage alone – surrounded by the looming frames of a literal dozen abandoned microphone stands from the previous acts at Nublu – it was a joy to watch Cross at work armed only with his tuba and a board of knobs and buttons, looping and dropping snappy drum machine lines to conjure up irresistible grooves and deep engaging soundscapes. At times appearing to be clutching at his tuba for safety, at others wielding it confidently, watching this band leader and sideman by himself live is an unusual treat.
Ben LaMar Gay, Mike Reed – Photo credit: Lev Radin
Theon Cross was introduced with snappy radio DJ flair (“deep sound, big horn”) by KMHD radio, and it was interesting to see the depth that WJF enjoys wide support from established radio in what is a reassuring multi platform approach to sharing live music. The continued support of US West Coast radio from Oregon and Washington – as well as East Coast local NYC and Philadelphia-area radio – hid the fact that much of this year’s WJF has its center of gravity not on the US coasts, but deep in the middle in Chicago. The 2025 artist-in-residence Makaya McCraven is for sure integral to the Chicago jazz scene, but the influence of the windy city (perhaps secretly named for the proliferation of horns and woodwind, not for meteorological effects?) was wider than just McCraven. The excellently-named Mike Reed’s Separatist Party brought intense energy to the Brooklyn Marathon outpost venue Union Pool, Reed’s strong drums combining powerfully with the spoken-word rhythms of Marvin Tate.
However it was Chicago’s Isaiah Collier who ‘won’ the marathon nights, his group The Chosen Few performing an important set at Brooklyn Bowl. This is a versatile band, swinging from percussion-heavy joy and sweeping tenor in their opener, to anguished strains and a sensitive soprano improvisation in their second. There was Amerikkka the Ugly – a send-up of patriotism, and also an exciting cross-generational collaboration with AACM’s Ernest Dawkins. Building on the release of their October 2024 album The World Is On Fire, Collier admitted that he didn’t expect that title to land quite like it does this week. But he delivered calm and wise musical commentary on the ills we face today, and the influence that the ills of the past still have. It is sets like this that one occasionally wishes there was more leeway in the schedules for a few more songs.
The intensity of Collier’s set meant that the novelty of background noise of flying skittles from the adjacent ten pin bowling alleys was easily ignored (it is called Brooklyn Bowl for good reason). In contrast, Smag På Dig Selv brought all their own novelty themselves. Exhaustingly high-energy and charmingly irreverent, this young Danish trio of two saxophones plus drums brought an intimate-yet-adoring crowd through a party-trick set of neverending tenor trills and screaming solos over storming bass saxophone rumblings. One can only have respect for a drummer who carefully starts a set wearing a fur hat on top of a hoodie, only to slowly striptease items of clothing number by number, and a saxophonist who is so serious about playing the lowest notes possible that he travels internationally with both a baritone and a bass saxophone, two instruments that are together larger than most New York apartments.
Two days of this much live jazz choice is an overwhelming joy. Getting this show on the road is also a logistical feat, and organizer Brice Rosenbloom and promoters Matt Merewitz and Taylor Haughton at Fully Altered Media deserve praise for running a tight ship that gets tighter each year. The Marathon nights, unique in providing the crowd with flexibility to float between diverse spots and genres, have in the past come a little unstuck when schedules have been unbalanced by a few very-in-demand groups playing at over capacity venues. This year a helpful venue capacity update was posted on the WJF website to help punters understand which venues might let them in before trying their luck, which I think helped minimize the numbers forlornly waiting outside. And while no concert lineup ever stays on track, this year the schedule timings seemed to slip less than they have done in the past.
The NYC jazz scene thrives on regional and international travel and cross-pollination, and WJF is no different. And while it might seem unusual at first glance to have a New York festival with its heart in Chicago, this is perhaps missing the point. What I think makes WJF so special is how the city owns it: straddling traditional jazz clubs, modern performance art spaces or capacious venues, WJF is a showcase of the diversity of jazz infrastructure that is available here. And while the at capacity venues could indicate WJF is a victim of its own success, I am constantly heartened by the size of the crowds who have a hunger for this music. And this engaged, critical and enthusiastic crowd is the most important piece of the NYC jazz network.
And now, after the come down from the NYC Winter JazzFest Marathon nights, that crowd has a year to absorb jazz in a more normal way and recover to do it again in 2026.
