A ten-time Grammy winner who defected from Cuba with the help of Dizzy Gillespie is about to headline a free two-day jazz festival in downtown San Antonio. Arturo Sandoval will top the bill at Jazz'SAlive next month at Hemisfair's Civic Park, an event expected to draw 15,000 guests across two days of free, all-ages music programming.
The festival runs from 4 to 11 pm on September 25 and 11 am to 11 pm on September 26, according to CultureMap San Antonio. Jazz'SAlive is produced by the San Antonio Parks Foundation, the donor-supported nonprofit founded in 1981 that has staged the event as the city's official jazz festival since 1984, making the 2026 edition the festival's 43rd annual run. General admission remains free, continuing the festival's decades-long commitment to public accessibility even as the surrounding infrastructure around it has been transformed.
From Travis Park to a New Downtown Anchor
For 39 years, Jazz'SAlive called downtown's Travis Park home, running continuously there from 1984 through 2022 before permanently relocating to Hemisfair's Civic Park in September 2023, according to KSAT. Civic Park has showcased the festival every year since. The site itself represents a significant civic investment: a $28 million, nine-acre urban park project that opened its first phase in September 2023 for the festival's 40th anniversary and completed a second phase in March 2025, as the San Antonio Report has detailed. Designed by landscape architecture firm GGN, the park sits on a section of the historic 1968 World's Fair grounds, adjacent to the Henry B. González Convention Center and the River Walk.
This year's festival is presented in collaboration with Trinity University's KRTU 91.7 FM, the listener-supported station marking its 50th anniversary in 2026 as a longtime fixture of local jazz broadcasting, and the Carver Community Cultural Center, per CultureMap San Antonio's reporting. The Carver Center will also provide the Creative Cruiser Mobile Art Lab, letting festivalgoers paint mini wooden guitars and design album covers, with Kwanzaa Edwards featured in the activity.
A Headliner With a Cold War Backstory
Sandoval is touring in support of his 2026 world tour and arrives in San Antonio with a résumé few musicians can match: 10 Grammy Awards, 19 additional Grammy nominations, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Kennedy Center Honor. His path to American stages began decades earlier, when he defected from Cuba in July 1990 with assistance from his mentor, Dizzy Gillespie, during a European tour, before officially taking the oath of U.S. citizenship in Miami in December 1998, according to a Reuters account from that period.
Co-headliner Delfeayo Marsalis brings his own weighty pedigree, having toured with Ray Charles and Max Roach over the course of his career. In January 2011, Marsalis and his family — father Ellis and brothers Branford, Wynton, and Jason — collectively received the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship, the first group award in the National Endowment for the Arts' history. Marsalis has also written 16 musicals aimed at introducing young audiences to jazz and has reached more than 10,000 students through his Swinging with the Cool School workshops. He'll perform with the 16-member Uptown Jazz Orchestra, the New Orleans big band he originally formed in 2008 to perform Duke Ellington's arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker before it grew into a permanent touring outfit, according to a report from WGVU.
A Deep Lineup Beyond the Headliners
The bill extends well past its two marquee names. Yuko Mabuchi, a Japan-raised pianist blending classical training with jazz, R&B, and Latin influences, and Magos Herrera, a Mexico City-born, New York-based vocalist working in contemporary Latin American jazz, both join the schedule. So does Blaque Dynamite, the stage name of Grammy-nominated drummer Mike Mitchell, who has played alongside Herbie Hancock and Erykah Badu. Smooth jazz saxophonist BillyRay Sheppard and the USAF Dimensions in Blue Jazz Combo, a small ensemble from the Air Force Band of the West, round out the roster, per CultureMap San Antonio's reporting.
Beyond the stages, David and Cameron Montalvo will lead a world percussion drum circle open to all ages, adding an interactive element to the free programming.
VIP Perks and Park Rules
For guests wanting more than lawn seating, the festival's VIP Speakeasy Experience was curated by Pieter Sypesteyn and Susan Kaars-Sypesteyn, with New Orleans-inspired culinary pairings from Sypesteyn's San Antonio restaurant, NOLA. VIP tables of eight run $1,750, while individual VIP tickets cost $250, according to the San Antonio Parks Foundation.
As with previous years at Civic Park, festival guidelines prohibit outside food, beverages, and coolers, continuing eco-conscious policies such as paperless digital passes and recyclable serveware that were introduced when the park first hosted the event in 2023, per the San Antonio Report. Those rules, along with the free general admission that has defined Jazz'SAlive since its earliest days at Travis Park, underscore organizers' effort to keep the festival open to the broadest possible audience even as the surrounding downtown continues to redevelop around it.
