LA Jazz Festival cancelled hours before its debut, with Legend and Monae billed

The LA Jazz Festival, which had booked John Legend, Janelle Monae and Ezra Collective among its lineup, has been cancelled, NME reported on August 9. The event was due to open Friday, August 7, with a night in Leimert Park Village and run through August 23, but organizers pulled it just hours before the scheduled start.

Organizer Martin Ludlow, a former LA city council member, told the Los Angeles Times that "significant, unanticipated last-minute public safety and municipal costs" tied to the festival's final permitting forced the decision.

The cancellation landed the same week as another debut jazz event fell through on the opposite coast: the inaugural BKLYN Jazz Festival in Brooklyn was also called off, JazzTimes reported. Parliament-Funkadelic, Raphael Saadiq, Big Freedia, Free Nationals, Terrace Martin and Charlie Wilson had also been booked for the LA event. It's the latest addition to the festival tracker and our jazz coverage.

Ludlow said ticket holders would be refunded in full within 30 days, and that organizers hoped to present the festival in 2027. The festival's website was advertising an event for August 22-23 with further details still to come.

The festival had been billed as one of the largest concerts in Los Angeles history when Ludlow unveiled it at a City Hall event in February alongside Mayor Karen Bass, with organizers hoping to draw 250,000 attendees and establish the city as a jazz destination on par with New Orleans and Montreal. Ludlow, who pleaded guilty to misappropriating campaign funds in 2006 before rebuilding a career as a promoter and community activist, had framed the festival in historical terms: "This festival is intended to lift up our ancestors that came to this country in bondage, terrorized, brutalized." Los Angeles musicians organized their own show days later to fill the gap the cancellation left behind.