Get to know Vinterjazz – an annual nationwide celebration of live music in February

Vinterjazz is a nationwide music festival that has existed since 2001 and takes place every year in February. The festival spans the entire month and features approximately 600 concerts spread across more than 120 venues and organizers from Skagen to Svaneke. The combination of the festival’s length plus the nationwide aspect makes Vinterjazz an opportunity to meet international stars on tour, new Danish award-winning projects and concert themes such as Jazz Remixed, Future Sound of Jazz, Wild at Heart, Jazz for Kids and others.

What makes Vinterjazz so special is its role as a national gathering of venues and organizers, musicians and audiences, the big cities and the outskirts of Denmark – a national initiative created and experienced locally. However, Vinterjazz is first and foremost a club festival which kicks off the concert season for a long line of jazz clubs, in turn sustaining environments where jazz can exist and evolve all year round.

Quotes about Vinterjazz:

“Vinterjazz is one of the important annual gathering points for the jazz community, which both increases awareness of jazz and provides a lot of fantastic concerts. This is also the case in Aarhus, where many of the city’s organizers support the initiative. The selection is incredibly broad, so there has been something for everyone. It is also great to see how jazz has been presented throughout the city, from the large concert halls to the small, crafty places. Fortunately, this emphasizes that jazz is alive and well” – Gorm Askjær, Aarhus Jazz Festival

“Vinterjazz is a fantastic platform. We can see that during Vinterjazz the activities are being stepped up – and the nationwide concept helps to increase the visibility of local concert organizers. It is now rare for live jazz to reach the national media. That is why Vinterjazz is a concept that both venues and organizers welcome with open arms. Regardless of whether it sells tickets or not, Vinterjazz draws national attention to an exciting part of Danish music life.” – Martin Røen Hansen, Godset, Kolding

“Vinterjazz is a welcome festival that creates national cohesion, and which helps to lift jazz and communicate all its shades. We follow the spirit of the festival and experiment with curation, try to create artistic clashes between jazz genres and art forms, and we work from the basic essence of jazz – never standing still and being in constant change.” – Martin Aagaard Jensen, Radar, Aarhus

“We had a larger audience than expected, and I’m pretty sure that it was a bonus to consider our February program as part of the nationwide program. I consider ‘Vinterjazz’ to be a good brand that gets noticed.” – Johannes Neergaard, Kedelhuset, Silkeborg

“Vinterjazz creates awareness of jazz. In other words, it has the same function as the Copenhagen Jazz Festival does in the summer. By putting up a festival umbrella, you create curiosity, press interest and increased audience awareness of a genre that, apart from a few big names, has paradoxically low audience numbers in relation to the enormous talent it contains. The music thrives as a result of [the festival’s] understanding of how to get the audience and the press talking. Not just in the summer in Copenhagen, but also across the country in February during Vinterjazz.” – Thomas Michelsen, music editor at Politiken

Vinterjazz 2027 takes place from January 29 to February 28 across the country.