2016 Detroit JazzFest

A made-in-Detroit theme defines the slate of additional headliners announced Tuesday by organizers of the 2016 at Detroit Jazz Festival.

The musicians and events that will honor Detroit’s jazz legacy at this year's annual Labor Day weekend festival include:

Other newly announced acts include pianist Stanley Cowell’s Quintet featuring trumpeter Charles Tolliver and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the Herlin Riley Quintet and the John Abercrombie Organ Trio.

The 37th annual Detroit Jazz Festival will be held Sept. 2-5 in downtown Detroit. Featuring some 70 national, local and student groups, the event remains the largest free-of-charge jazz festival in the world. The legendary Detroit-bred bassist Ron Carter was previously announced as the 2016 artist-in-residence of the 2016 festival.

Carter, the most widely recorded bassist in jazz history and best known for his landmark tenure with Miles Davis in the 1960s, will perform four times during the weekend — with a trio, quartet, nonet and big band.

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Ron Carter named Detroit Jazz Fest artist-in-residence

The festival has always made it point to honor Detroit’s jazz heritage, but Carter's position at the top of the bill combined with Tuesday’s newly announced acts gives the 2016 event an extra pop of Motor City soul. Like Carter, Kirk Lightsey and Louis Hayes represent the migration of top local talent to the national scene in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Thad Jones, who died in 1986, was one of three Pontiac-raised brothers who became jazz immortals — the others were Hank, an elegant pianist, and Elvin, a revolutionary drummer. Thad Jones joined the Count Basie band as a trumpeter in the mid ‘50s, but his place in the pantheon rests on his innovative compositions and arrangements for the big band that he co-founded in 1966 with drummer Mel Lewis. Its current incarnation, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, takes its name from the Village Vanguard, the basement club in Greenwich Village in New York where the band has had a steady Monday night gig for 50 years.

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Kenn Cox, who died in 2008, spent most of his career in Detroit, where he was a stalwart bandleader, standard-bearer and mentor to young musicians. Cox founded the Contemporary Jazz Quintet, a bracing modernist ensemble that captured the progressive currents of the '60s and had a hot moment in the sun when it recorded two LPs for Blue Note in 1968-69. Those recordings are now highly prized by aficionados.

At the festival, New York trumpeter David Weiss and his band Point of Departure will perform compositions by Cox and the late Charles Moore, the original trumpeter in the CJQ. On another front, a band of Detroit musicians associated with Cox in later decades will also perform his music.

In the late '60s, Cox and Moore created Strata, an artist-run collective that produced concerts and recordings.Their efforts at self-determination inspired Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver to start Strata-East, which in the end became far more widely known and celebrated than its Detroit progenitor. So Cowell and Tolliver's appearance at this year's festival offers yet another allusion to Detroit's impact on wider currents in jazz.

Other previously announced national headliners at the festival include guitarists George Benson and John Scofield; pianists Jason Moran, Randy Weston, Brad Mehldau, Marcus Roberts, Omar Sosa and Alfredo Rodriguez; saxophonists Chris Potter and Jimmy Heath; trumpeter Roy Hargrove; drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and vocalists Freddy Cole and Roberta Gambarini.

Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459. [email protected]

37th annual Detroit Jazz Festival

Sept. 2-5

Downtown Detroit

www.detroitjazzfest.com