Edgefest 30:
Freedom at the Edge

The Kerrytown Concert House will host Edgefest 2026, its 30th annual four-day festival of new music, improvised and composed. This milestone year carries a theme as expansive as the art form itself: Freedom at the Edge. With freedom as its unifying spirit, Edgefest 2026 gives space and support to a pluralistic and deeply inclusive mosaic of innovative artists and composers, local and international, young and emerging alongside seasoned and established, who will bring their music and collaborations into performance spaces and classrooms throughout the Detroit, Ypsilanti, and Ann Arbor area. Together, they will revive and generate new artistic energy, inspired by the very freedoms and principles enshrined for Americans 250 years ago.

Edgefest presents world-class cutting-edge jazz, creative improvisation, and category-defying music too often overlooked in the commercial marketplace. Often celebrated as America’s only truly original native art form, jazz becomes a living vessel for those founding ideals.

Founded in 1997, Edgefest is an award-winning annual avant-garde jazz and creative new music festival with a unifying purpose: to explore new music created by today’s composer-performers from the United States and beyond. Under the guidance of founder Dave Lynch, it began as a single-day event and is now a major 4-day festival that includes collaborations and educational outreach. For the last two decades it has been directed by KCH founder Deanna Relyea.

The thirtieth anniversary edition of the festival covers a broad territory, encompassing musicians from all over the country, representing several generations and stylistic orientations, with a variety of combinations from solo recitals to larger ensembles, featuring various instruments not often heard in more mainstream jazz such as the cornet, cornetto, or bass and sopranino saxophones. In what may be a record for a jazz festival, there will be at least six concerts that will feature the bass clarinet.

Prominently featured will be Chicago born saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell, one of the great innovators in creative music of the post-Coltrane, post-Ayler era. Having begun his musical studies as a teenager, he played in an Army band in Germany (where he jammed with Albert Ayler) and after returning to Chicago further developed his skills at Wilson Junior College where he encountered many of the musicians with whom he would work in the years to come, including Malachai Favors and Joseph Jarman. He was an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), where he played in the organization’s famed Experimental Band led by Muhal Richard Abrams. In 1967 he co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC, originally the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble) and this group, with its motto “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future,” has carried the message of the AACM all over the globe for half a century. In 1969 the AEC relocated to Europe where it performed and recorded prodigiously. A few years after their return to the US, Roscoe Mitchell moved to Bath, Michigan, on the encouragement of his friend, composer David Wessel, who had begun teaching at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Although Mitchell was not on the faculty, he began to mentor several music students from Detroit and Pontiac, among them Tony Holland, J. Spencer Barefield, Jaribu Shahid, and Tani Tabbal. In 1974 with these young musicians, he established the Creative Arts Collective (CAC), patterned in spirit and bylaws after the democratic, self-reliant Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in Chicago a decade earlier. With the support of the university administration they were able to practice, perform, and organize concerts on campus, even using the Planetarium, bringing in artists from all over the country to work with CAC members. In 1978, Barefield and Mitchell co-founded a new version of CAC in Detroit, which had an enormous impact on the development of creative music in the Motor City, presenting more than a hundred concerts at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 1980 Mitchell founded a working group, The Sound Ensemble with Barefield, Shahid, Tabbal, and trumpeter Hugh Ragin that toured and recorded extensively. A historic reunion of the CAC and Mitchell took place in Nickelsdorf, Germany during a four-day Konfrontationen festival in the summer of 1984, which included CAC members who were on tour. Holland, Shahid, and Tabbal performed as part of Faruk Z. Bey’s Griot Galaxy (released as the album Opus Krampus), while two days earlier Holland and Tabbal were joined by Barefield in a trio (released as Live at Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen). Mitchell played with three different instrumental groups, culminating with two performances by a sixteen-piece orchestra of festival participants, The Roscoe Mitchell Creative Orchestra, with the participation of Barefield, Bey, Holland, Shahid, and Tabbal, conducted by Mitchell and Anthony Braxton. The culminating set of the festival will be a CAC reunion with Mitchell’s Detroit collaborators, the second one at the festival, following the 2016 edition that also included the newly reformed Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose studio recording made during their Ann Arbor stay, as well as the festival performance were preserved on the highly acclaimed double CD We Are on the Edge.

Mitchell will also play in the Diego Riviera Court at the Detroit Institute of Art on Friday, October 9, at 7:00 p.m. with Tony Holland, J. Spencer Barefield, Jaribu Shahid, and Tani Tabbal. Mitchell will also perform with the University of Michigan’s Creative Art Orchestra led by Marcus Elliot, as the featured soloist in a composition written by Michael Malis, commissioned by the festival.

As Mark Stryker wrote in The Detroit Free Press, “if you’ve got an ear for adventurous music that doesn’t care much for the constraints of genre, labels or convention, then you should be in the audience for Edgefest.”

Edgefest Schedule

Education & Outreach

Two-day residency at Scarlett Middle School, Ann Arbor

Edgefest Parade – Noon on Saturday

Wednesday, October 7

6:00
Christian Bush: “For Roscoe"

7:00
Hannah Marks
“Feed the Fire” Quartet

8:00
Oluyemi Thomas Trio

9:00
Northwoods Improvisers

10:00
Roscoe Mitchell / Thomas Buckner / Ursel Schlicht / Damon Smith

Thursday, October 8

5:00
A Conversation with Roscoe Mitchell – moderated by Marc Hannaford
Creative Arts Orchestra – featuring Roscoe Mitchell, with a world premiere by Michael Malis, directed by Marcus Elliot • at Ann Arbor Community High School

7:00
Ken Kozora - Birds of a Feather

8:00
Dimensionality

9:00
Teiku

10:00
Michael TA Thompson Quintet

Friday, October 9

6:00
Andrew Bishop, solo saxophones, bass clarinet, & flute

7:00
William Hooker Quartet

8:00
New Origins Trio

9:00
Stein / Smith / Shead Trio

10:00
Fay Victor's Herbie Nichols SUNG

Saturday, October 10

2:00
Junk Jazz

3:00
Vinny Golia / Ken Filiano / Michael TA Thompson

4:00
Amir ElSaffar's New Quartet

7:30
Craig Taborn, solo piano

8:30
Roscoe Mitchell – with featured Detroit-area artists and guest Tani Tabbal, percussion