This fall 2025, JazzFest White Plains returns for its 14th year with more energy and excitement than ever. The 5-day festival presents 18 live performances taking place across downtown White Plains – from emerging talent to world-renowned artists, including seven GRAMMY Award winners and nominees.
Schedule
Sunday, September 14
Sunday Jazz Al Fresco
12:30-7:30pm | FREE | Rain or Shine!
(Mamaroneck Ave. between E. Post Road and Maple Ave.)
Westchester Center for Jazz & Contemporary Music
12:30-1:15pm
The Westchester Center for Jazz & Contemporary Music provides opportunities for musicians of diverse backgrounds, abilities and ages to develop their skills in jazz and other related musical forms. This performance features a selection of the Center’s top student musicians and faculty.
April May Webb with the Sounds of A&R
1:45-2:45pm
The Billboard-charting artist Sounds of A&R, aka S.O.A.R., is the brainchild of vocalist April May Webb, winner of the 2024 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, and trumpeter Randall Haywood, voted Male Rising Star at Hot House Jazz Magazine and Jazzmobile’s NYC Reader’s Jazz Award. Sounds of A&R, awarded and named “Best Group” at the Reader’s Jazz Awards, effortlessly weaves elements of swing, cool, hard bop and avant-garde, paying tribute to the jazz greats while boldly embracing the future with fresh, innovative arrangements and compositions.
Pete Malinverni & His Invisible Cities Quintet
3:15-4:15pm
Pianist, composer, educator Pete Malinverni has been a fixture on the New York City Jazz scene since moving here in the early 1980s from his hometown of Niagara Falls, NY, where he’d begun Classical Piano studies at the tender age of six. Since moving to NYC, Pete has recorded sixteen times as a leader, and established himself as a performing, recording and inspirational contact with a host of masters on the scene including Joe Lovano, Vernel Fournier, Charles Davis, Mel Lewis, Dennis Irwin, Karrin Allyson, Steve Wilson and many others. He currently serves as Chair of Jazz Studies at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College.
Chembo Corniel Quintet
4:45-5:45pm
Wilson “Chembo” Corniel, Jr. was raised in the humble streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn by proud Puerto Rican parents. It was during these years, that he had the privilege to study with percussion luminaries Tommy Lopez Sr., “Little Ray” Romero, Louie Bauza, and Cachete Maldonado. Later he honed his skills at The Harbor Conservatory for the Performing Arts and at the prestigious La Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana, Cuba under the direction of the great Chucho Valdés. Today, he is considered as one of the best hard-hitting, versatile percussionists around. Chembo teaches percussion to students at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College and leads numerous clinics throughout the U.S. where he brings awareness to others of the rich Afro-Caribbean traditions.
Steve Turre Sextet
6:15-7:15pm
Trombonist and seashellist Steve Turre, one of the world’s preeminent jazz innovators, has consistently won Readers’ and Critics’ polls in JazzTimes, Downbeat, and Jazziz for Best Trombone and for Best Miscellaneous Instrumentalist (shells). Turre was born to Mexican-American parents and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, where he absorbed daily doses of mariachi, blues and jazz. In 1972, his career picked up momentum when Ray Charles hired him to go on tour. A year later, Turre’s mentor Woody Shaw would bring him into Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He has worked with a diverse list of musicians from the jazz, Latin and pop worlds, including Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, J.J. Johnson, Herbie Hancock, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Van Morrison, Pharoah Sanders, Horace Silver and Max Roach, as well as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who introduced him to the seashell as an instrument. Since then, Turre has incorporated seashells into his diverse musical style. He has a strong command of all musical genres and, when it comes to his distinct brand of jazz, he always keeps one foot in the past and one in the future.
