Santa Monica International Jazz Festival 2026: Your Complete Guide
Santa Monica just launched its first-ever International Jazz Festival — nine days, fifteen-plus acts, free shows on the Third Street Promenade, a John Coltrane centennial concert at BroadStage, and Kamasi Washington headlining a full afternoon at Tongva Park. If your May calendar has an opening, this is where it goes.
The Santa Monica International Jazz Festival runs May 1 through May 9, 2026, and it arrived with the kind of lineup that makes you question why this city took so long to do it. Presented by BroadStage, SM Festivals, and the City of Santa Monica, it sprawls across three venues — the Third Street Promenade, BroadStage, and Tongva Park — with programming that ranges from free street performances to a ticketed all-day concert finale. The caliber is immediately serious: double Grammy winner Kamasi Washington, bass legend Stanley Clarke, Miles Electric Band, and a night devoted to Coltrane's centennial. This is not a promotional event dressed up as a festival. It's the real thing.
“It’s the royal flush.” — Stanley Clarke on the inaugural Santa Monica International Jazz Festival lineup
The Free Stuff First
The festival kicks off on Saturday, May 3 with an all-day free event on the Third Street Promenade. No tickets, no wristbands — just show up. The lineup includes Elijah Fox, Genevieve Artadi, Duffy x Uhlmann, Billy Mohler, and Instant Alter. It's the kind of afternoon where you intend to stay for one set and walk away four hours later with a sore neck from nodding along. The Promenade doesn't always lend itself to this kind of thing, but the pedestrian-only stretch is genuinely one of the better outdoor performance settings in the city when it's done right. May 3 looks like it will be done right.
Beyond the Promenade opener, several festival events throughout the week are free or low-cost, with BroadStage programming that mixes ticketed headline shows with accessible community performances. The full schedule is at smjazzfest.com — worth bookmarking now before the May 9 finale sells out.
The Coltrane Night You Shouldn’t Skip
On May 8, BroadStage hosts what may be the most musically significant event of the entire festival: saxophonists Lakecia Benjamin and Isaiah Collier each performing their own tributes to John Coltrane on the centennial of his birth. For anyone who cares about the arc of jazz, this is not a nostalgia exercise — it’s two of the most vital young voices in contemporary jazz reckoning with the tradition on its own terms. Benjamin's tone is massive and visceral; Collier plays with a mystical intensity that earns the Coltrane comparison. Together on the same night, at BroadStage, the intimate 500-seat venue on 2nd Street — this is a genuinely rare room to be in.
The Finale: A Day in the Park with Kamasi Washington
The closing event on May 9 — billed as “A Day in the Park” — is the one that will define whether this festival becomes an annual institution. It’s a ticketed, 1 to 7pm concert at Tongva Park, and it marks the first full-scale concert event ever held at the six-acre park on Ocean Avenue. The park has hosted smaller performances before, but nothing at this scale. The headliner is Kamasi Washington, the LA-born saxophonist who released two critically acclaimed albums this past awards cycle and walked away with two Grammy wins in 2026. Washington is one of the few jazz musicians who can fill an outdoor park without losing the room — his sets function equally as spiritual experience and straight-up party.
Also on the bill: Stanley Clarke and Friends, the Miles Electric Band (a tribute to Miles Davis’s electric period), left-field jazz-pop duo KNOWER, and emerging vocalist Sam Smylie. Six hours of this, in a park two blocks from the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by the kind of crowd that actually listens. We’ve been waiting for West LA to have an event like this for years.
Why It Matters
Santa Monica has never had a jazz festival of this scope. The city has world-class cultural infrastructure — BroadStage, the Broad Stage partnership with the Santa Monica College, the pier, the parks — but it has historically underprogrammed the kind of multi-venue, multi-day festival that other LA neighborhoods take for granted. This inaugural edition is an argument that it should happen every year. The lineup punches above the city’s weight class. The venues are exactly right for the format. And putting the finale in Tongva Park, the most underused great park on the Westside, is the kind of curatorial choice that makes you think the people running this actually live here.
