Fall Arts Season Kicks off with the 39th Detroit Jazz Festival

The world's largest free jazz festival kicks off this weekend, and Detroit Public Television for the first time will be broadcasting live from the Detroit Jazz Festival in a 90-minute program hosted by our own Fred Nahhat and Jazz Fest President Chris Collins.

It will feature a live performance from famed saxophonist Ravi Coltrane along with other festival highlights. Coltrane has a strong jazz lineage, as the son of the legendary John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, a native of Detroit and a jazz stalwart in her own right. A critically acclaimed Grammy-nominated saxophonist, bandleader and composer, Ravi Coltrane has released six albums and worked as a sideman on many other noteworthy recordings.

This jazz special kicks off our year-long celebration of arts and culture, the bread and butter of Detroit Public TV and its sister radio station, WRJC 90.9 FM. Throughout the coming months, our Ticket to Arts initiative will herald a full spectrum of arts content and coverage.

There will be remarkable national programming from PBS, like Great Performances, Masterpiece dramas and American Masters. And there will be close-to-home culture gems, such as DPTV's weekly arts program, Detroit Performs, and WRCJ's live broadcasts of the DSO and MOT and its regular schedule of classical music during the day and jazz at night.

Your Ticket to the Arts begins this Labor Day weekend with the 39th Detroit Jazz Festival, a global showcase of America's music. This year's artist-in-residence is Chick Corea, who will perform a wide range of sets with his Akoustic Band, Elektric Band and the Detroit Jazz Festival Symphony Orchestra. Terri Lyne Carrington and Esperanza Spalding will lead the inaugural Resident Ensemble, which will focus on the music of Geri Allen, a Pontiac native who died last year.

The festival runs from Friday, Aug. 31, through Labor Day Monday, Sept. 3, in Hart Plaza and at other venues downtown. A complete schedule can be found here.

Be sure to stop by the WRCJ 90.9 FM tent, where you'll find the station's jazz hosts, Maxine Michaels and John Penney if they're not serving as emcees on the music stages.

For those who can't make it to the festival, DPTV is working with the festival to offer the Detroit Jazz Fest LIVE! streaming service again this year. For $10, viewers can watch live performances from their mobile devices, tablets and desktops. The service comes equipped with several helpful features including festival maps, the full lineup and artist bios. Sign up for the service at live.detroitjazzfest.com.

As if this wasn't enough Your Ticket to the Arts on Saturday will include live coverage of the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., brought to you by PBS Books.

From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Rich Fahle, executive producer of PBS Books, and Jeffrey Brown, chief arts correspondent for PBS NewsHour, will interview some of the most important and popular authors writing today, including: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Amy Tan, Tracy K. Smith, Celeste Ng, David Ignatius and Madeleine Albright.

There will be a special appearance by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Watch it all on PBS Facebook Live, brought to you in partnership with The Great American Read (which resumes on Sept. 11 on DPTV).

Your Ticket to the Arts on DPTV and WRCJ can take you just about anywhere your imagination wants to go, and the best thing- it's all free!

Enjoy it all and have a great Labor Day weekend!

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