San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival will expand by a day for its 2026 edition
SAN DIEGO - The San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival, which debuted in 2024 with nearly $400,000 in seed money from Qualcomm co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs, will return in expanded form this fall for its third year at multiple venues on both sides of the border.
The event will grow from three days in 2024 and 2025 to four days this year. Free concerts will take place in downtown Tijuana and downtown San Diego, along with a paid concert at California Center for the Arts, Escondido, for which tickets go on sale May 30 at sdtjjazz.org.
Last year's festival drew more than 4,500 people to one indoor and two outdoor concerts. The Oct. 1-4 schedule for the event's 2026 edition includes one ticketed indoor concert and three free concerts featuring a total of 11 bands and solo artists from across North America and beyond.
This year's roster includes drum dynamo and five-time Grammy Award-winner Brian Blade with his genre-blurring group, the Fellowship Band, and Panamanian-bred piano great Danilo Pérez, who is a three-time Grammy-winner. Blade and Pérez were both longtime members of the late saxophone legend Wayne Shorter's quartet. Pérez, who heads the Global Jazz Institute at Boston's Berklee College of Music, will perform here with the SDSU Jazz Ensemble and the Ensenada-based La Covacha Big Band.
Also set to appear is 2022 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition-winner Lucia, a native of Veracruz. Lucia performed here at the 2025 festival with her jazz band. She is returning with a four-man son jarocho group that features her father, Ramón Gutiérrez, a keen musical improviser and master of the four-stringed requinto.
In addition, the festival will present San Diego and Tijuana performances by the seven-piece Mingus Dynasty, which features tenor saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, pianist Helen Sung and Russian-born bassist Boris Kozlov. The band pays tribute to the music of modern jazz pioneer Charles Mingus and will perform some pieces from his classic 1957 album, "Tijuana Moods."
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and UC San Diego music professor Anthony Davis is a lifelong Mingus fan. He has agreed to write a new piece for Mingus Dynasty to play at the festival, which is now seeking underwriting for what will be a world premiere if funding is found. The full schedule of festival performances appears at the conclusion of this article.
The San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival was created by Daniel Atkinson, the founder of the nonprofit San Diego Jazz Ventures, in partnership with Tijuana restaurateur Julian Plascencia, who is the founder of the annual Tijuana Blues & Jazz Festival.
"The situation at the border is always very fluid. But in some ways it's easier to do the festival now because we have a track record established and have good communication and relationships with people on both sides of the border," said Atkinson, who is the longtime jazz-program coordinator at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla and former executive director of the Western Jazz Presenters Network.
Plascencia is the owner of the famed Caesar's restaurant on Avenida Revolución, the same street where the festival will host two nights of free music this year.
"Tijuana is growing and the festival is growing, too," Plascencia said. "So, we are excited to add a second evening of free music in Tijuana on Oct. 2 to highlight musicians from our local scene."
Qualcomm co-founder Jacobs, an avid jazz and classical music fan, gave the festival a three-year donation of nearly $400,000 in seed money in 2024.
"He has, without question, been the decisive source of funding to make this entire event possible and we can't say enough about how grateful we are for that support," Atkinson said. "We hope he'll continue to support us in the future."
Despite growing by one day this year, the festival has to trim back some overall programing goals because of looming city arts funding cuts in San Diego that could see the festival lose 10% to 15% of its planned 2026 budget.
"The threat of the withdrawal of city funding has put immense pressure on everyone else who is engaged in supporting the arts in San Diego," Atkinson said. "All of them are being asked to step up and fill the gap, so there's a cascading effect throughout the community."
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2026 San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival
Oct. 1: Binational Youth Ensemble, Jungle Fire, Colectivo Fronterizo with rapper Femina Fatal. Quartyard, 1301 Market Street, East Village. Free; online registration required.
Oct 2: Lineup of Tijuana bands to be announced. Avenida Revolución at Calle Emiliano Zapata, Tijuana. Free.
Oct 3: Charlie Chavez y su Afrotruko (free outdoor stage); Danilo Pérez and the SDSU Jazz Ensembles (indoor stage); Lucia and the Familia Gutierrez (free outdoor stage); Mingus Dynasty (indoor stage); Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band (indoor stage). California Center for the Arts, Escondido, 340 North Escondido Blvd. $45-$75.
Oct. 4: Binational Youth Ensemble; Danilo Pérez and the La Covacha Big Band; Lucia and the Familia Gutierrez; Mingus Dynasty; Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band. Avenida Revolución between Calle Flores Magon (6th) and Calle Hermenegildo Galeana (7th),Tijuana. Free.
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This story was originally published May 2, 2026 at 3:49 PM.