Arts & Culture

Coming this week: Clearwater Jazz Holiday #47

WUSF | By Bill DeYoung - St. Pete Catalyst

Published October 15, 2026 at 5:00 AM EDT

Six band members are seen side by side performing on a stage with blue lights — New Orleans' Dumpstaphunk will play the music of Sly & the Family Stone.

It’s four days of jazz, funk, blues and music in between.

It takes a village to raise a music festival.

For 47 years, the Clearwater Jazz Holiday has had its own considerable village of supporters, volunteers, staff members and board directors, all determined to keep the three-day celebration going strong and growing every year. The 2026 edition takes place Thursday through Sunday in Coachman Park, overlooking Clearwater Bay, with headiners including drummer/percussionist Sheila E, blues/rock sister band Larkin Poe, the eclectic Wood Brothers, trumpters Arturo Sandoval and Chris Botti, and the funk music powerhouse Dumpstaphunk..

The Clearwater Jazz Holiday Foundation Inc. has been a 501(c)3 nonprofit since 1989. Its educational and outreach programs benefit students and aspiring musicians year-round. CJH also sponsors in-person and online jazz instructional programs in Pinellas County schools. “It’s a big part of what we do,” CEO Steve Weinberger says.

The Clearwater Jazz Holiday began as a tourism effort under the auspices of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. In fact, the “holiday” is a reference to hoped-for European tourists, who tend to use that word instead of “vacation.” The first stage was mounted on the back of a flatbed truck.

A black and white photo shows people sitting on lawn chairs looking up at a stage — Clearwater Jazz Holiday, early days.

“While they were jazz fans,” explains Weinberger, “the organizers’ main focus was bringing people to Tampa Bay, specifically to Clearwater and the beaches. So you have two things, the economic impact and the cultural impact.”

Jazz legends who played the festival in those early years included Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Mann, Dave Brubeck, Tito Puente, Stephane Grappelli, Stan Getz and the Count Basie Orchestra. In the 1990s, it was all about smooth jazz.

As the years passed, the roster expanded to include blues, rock, funk and other styles of music.

“The early organizers, to their credit, did a wonderful job of pulling this roots festival together,” Weinberger explains. “And as the organization grew, and developed this charitable component to it, a big focus was to increase the awareness of those things.

“And one of the tools that we use to do that is diversify the programming, which brings more people to our events, and more attention to that mission. We just changed and evolved over time.”

This year, he adds, “if you take everything into account, including all the side stages, there’s a lot of jazz, a lot of really, really great jazz.”

Clearwater Jazz Holiday programs are also funded in part by grants from the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture and the Florida Council on Arts & Culture and the Pinellas County Commission, through the Cultural Development Grants Program of the Cultural Affairs Department.

For tickets and additional information, visit the CJH website.

Here’s this weekend’s lineup, four days on three stages: