(light upbeat music) - Chris, I'm gonna start with you.

We do this every year.

I'm always blown away by what you manage to put together for Detroit, every Labor Day, every Labor Day weekend, tell me about this year's Jazz Fest.

- Well, you know, we have an incredible team at Jazz Fest Foundation, and we're in such an incredible city with partners like Wayne State University and "American Black Journal" and others, get the word out and let everyone know how special this thing really is and how fragile it can be.

But after 45 years, we're still free and we're still one of the premier real jazz festivals in the world.

So, to that end, as always, our programming, we look to have those legacy artists, Billy Chiles, Monty Alexander, Christian McBride Quintet, James Blood Ulmer, talk about cats, and we have the incredible world-class artists that are right here in Detroit, living here and coming from here are legacy artists, the great Wendell Harrison, and the Walter White Big Band and some upcomers, Mark Rosenblatt and HAKI!.

These are cats looking to the future where jazz is gonna go.

So mix that with our Artist in Residence, the great Brian Blade, who will be playing with the Jazz Fest Big Band.

He'll be playing with Octet and of course the Fellowship Band.

So it's gonna be quite special.

- Yeah, yeah, 45 years.

That's an incredible, that's an incredible run.

Talk about how significant that is for Detroit.

This is not just about us, but it does feature us and it features us to the world in a way that I'm not sure everybody who lives here quite understands.

The festival is so much different and bigger than it has been in the past.

It really is a worldwide phenomenon.

- It is.

And everything we do in Detroit, these kind of things that draw tourists, jazz festivals now drawing 1/3 of its audience in person, it's about 325,000 people from outside the region, outside the country.

Our streams, which we have metric by professional companies, so there's no hyperbole.

They're free and they reach, last year they reached 1.6 million people in 32 countries.

And so it's a jazz vessel that's in a city that has a symbiotic relationship between its culture and jazz.

They feed one another, they always have.

And it's also in the city, the city, the architecture and the skyline, the community is the backdrop for the entire festival.

So we're really proud of being able to be an ambassador to the artists, to the patrons, and all around the world because Detroit's a very special place.

And when they come here, they're rather blown away by that connectivity.

So that's along with our last economics thing showed a little over $30 million in economic development over the four days of Jazz Fest.

So we're trying to do everything we can to be great citizens, keep this thing alive, and keep it available to everyone by keeping it free.

Although when people can, we ask 'em to join our sponsors and our donors and help us reach that $4.5 million note every year to keep it alive.

- Jess, tell me about the poster.

What inspired you?

What does this this poster kind of mean to you?

What do you think it means to the festival and the city?

- So when I saw the open call at first, like, I was thinking about what I could possibly do because I love jazz music, so I knew I wanted to apply for this opportunity.

And so one of the first things I thought of when I was thinking of the Detroit Jazz Festival was community.

I mean, that's one of the biggest jazz festivals ever.

You have a whole bunch of people like flocking down to downtown Detroit, all with the same appreciation of loving jazz music.

I knew that I wanted to use bright colors and not like super, like stereotypical dark blue, like, jazzy, like, super deep colors.

Like, I wanted to be like a celebration.

I wanted it to be fun.

There's literally like women dancing on the roof.

And like, I wanted to show what I felt like when I go to the jazz festival and I see people having fun and being free and coming all together as one to like celebrate like one thing that brings us together as a community 'cause Detroit's been doing that forever.

It's like a celebration of history.

The graffiti on the side of the building is to pay homage to like every great jazz musician.

I guess you could say that there was.

And just to show that, like, we still appreciate that, you know, after they transcended and moved on from that, and we still have such a big appreciation for jazz music in Detroit.

And that's basically just what I wanted to showcase.

- Yeah, yeah.

And tell us a little bit about you, Jess, what's your story?

- Well, I do a whole bunch of different types of art in Detroit, I've been here for a while now.

I'm a student at College for Creative Studies.

I'm studying illustration and entertainment arts.

I love doing gallery shows.

I love doing murals.

I recently just did a sculpture work with City Walls for the NFL draft.

And I just love doing stuff for like, nonprofits, with the Steam Foundation and helping the Belle Isle Conservancy, and I just love giving back to the community.

So any way that I can volunteer, that I could also use my art to help, it's like a win-win for me, so.

- Yeah.

Patrick Lindsay, I wanna bring you into the conversation here.

This year's festival, of course, will feature the Gretchen C. Valade Center Jazz Performance Center on Wayne State University's campus.

I actually have had a chance to be there a couple times already.

it is a mind-blowing experience.

I predict that this will be, if not the premier, it will be one of the premier music venues in the city just because of how great it sounds, how great it looks, how great it feels.

I mean, it is a stunning achievement.

- Well, thank you, Stephen.

I couldn't say it any better.

As you can see, I am keeping Gretchen close to my heart.

Municipal aid's generosity not only to Wayne State, but to the world relative to building a world-class center where artists can come and be featured and do it in such an intimate setting.

But in such a dynamic place such as Wayne State, it is a great honor for us to host it and to welcome the community into this space.

You know, I grew up here in Detroit.

Detroit is a place in my opinion, where music is just a part of the fabric of our culture.

And music is the most universal language I know, and we are most fluent in it here in Detroit between jazz, R&B, hip hop, gospel, classical, and the many other genres.

How blessed are we to have such richness here?

But the Valade Center, in my opinion, will help to catapult and cultivate jazz even more so because of its strong, rich year, people will be able to experience it, to learn it, and to grow it here in the city and world.