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Nina Horvath, executive director, Coastal Jazz & Blues Society.

Photo courtesy Matt Taylor

Four decades of great music in the city

By Jim Gordon and Leeta Liepins

Published 1:06 PDT, Fri June 20, 2025

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Our City Tonight weekly TV series travelled to Granville Island to meet with Nina Horvath, the executive director of the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society. The Vancouver International Jazz Festival is celebrating its 40th year.

OCT: Granville Island has been one of your longest partners of the festival, let’s talk about what people can expect this year when attending this exciting music event.

NH: Granville Island has been with us pretty much from the very beginning of this festival.

They are one of our biggest and long-time partners. We have three different venues on the island this year that we will be activating for the 10 days of the festival.

There will be a little over 40 different concerts of music offering everything from free, to pay what you can, to ticketed events.

OCT: Let’s talk about each of these venues on Granville Island and we can start with Performance Works Theatre since we are having this interview right outside of the main building in the park.

NH: Performance Works Theatre has great inside and outside seating. If you come here in the afternoon, you would be able to sit here outside on the benches in the sun and listen to the music through the open garage window. It’s a really beautiful spot to take in some music in the afternoon.

You can hear a lot of up-and-comers in Canadian jazz or listen to touring musicians who are travelling through the Vancouver area.

We also continue into the evening and that’s when we do a lot of our ticketed events.

Some of our really popular shows happen here with a little bigger name in Jazz. It is also a really great place to see some people who are just on the cusp of making it really big in the industry.

You can see somebody like Nubya Garcia from the UK who’s already won their equivalent of the Polaris Music Prize called Mercury Prize.

She’s really well recognized as an up-and-coming saxophone player. If you like more blues type of music, you will want to check out the Delvon Lamar Organ Trio.

And we have the great Canadian jazz artist Christine Jensen; she will be closing out the festival at the end.

OCT: Those artists all sound amazing. What will be happening across the Island at the next venue?

NH: What we like to do is try and make it so that you can have an entire day of jazz on Granville Island.

Once you are done at Performance Works Theatre, you can walk over to Ocean Artworks which is our outdoor venue. It is sort of like an outdoor beer garden or pub area and has beautiful shade with a really nice vibe near the market.

We like to keep that space as a fun party atmosphere. There will be everything from jazz, to blues, to R&B and funk.

We even have progressed into having DJs later in the night that we programmed with some of our partners.

It is a great place to come and explore and then hang out with your friends after dinner and listen to some excellent music.

OCT: And now let’s talk about the third and final venue here on Granville Island that will showcase your musical performances.

NH: The final venue is the Revue Stage which is a little bit more like the traditional soft seat theatre. It is a lovely small theatre, and every seat is a good seat inside.

This is where we put our artists who are really pushing those edges of experimentation and coming up with new and exciting sounds with the grooves within jazz.

We will often pair up visiting European artists at this venue with some of our local artists and the result is very exciting “lightning in a bottle moment of improvisation”. That’s one of the most interesting and unique things that you can get at a jazz festival.

OCT: The Jazz Festival will run from June 20 and extend to Canada Day this year. What special things are happening on this special day?

NH: We will be having performances on Canada Day this year, which is exciting. We are going to have programming at the Ocean Artworks venue starting at 1 p.m. and going all the way into the evening. There will be four different shows of completely free music.

OCT: It is so wonderful that the Jazz Festival is accessible offering free or pay options for the music events.

NH: It has always been a huge priority for us to keep things free and accessible. We have over 50 free shows where we offer several that are pay what you can and many more shows offering very reasonable and affordable entrance fees.

OCT: To help support the festival we understand that you are currently running a 50/50 raffle and that anyone can participate online.

NH: Fifty percent of those proceeds from the 50/50 raffle go to Coastal Jazz because we can’t make this festival accessible without the support of our donors, our grants, and our valued partners. We are so grateful to all of those who continue to contribute.

The 40th anniversary commemorative guidebooks are available at libraries around Vancouver ahead of time or the digital version can be found online. For more information, go to CoastalJazz.ca