FAQs on 19th Edition Festival

CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival 19^th Edition

FAQs

Will the 19th Edition festival go on in 2021?

Will the Festival return downtown?

We are committed to making every effort to move forward in downtown Rochester and also explore expanding the Festival with programming at Rochester Institute of Technology.

When will the lineup be announced?

At this time we are planning to announce our 19th Edition 2022 lineup in March 2022. 

When will you announce the venues?

We will announce venues in March 2022 when we announce the lineup. 

When will Club Passes go on sale and will the prices be the same as announced for the original 19^th edition in June 2020?  

We hope to put Club Passes on sale in October 2021. Pricing has not yet been established.

Are my headliner tickets still good for the new dates?

No, the two headliner shows booked for June, Spyro Gyra (June 22) and Puss N Boots (June 18), have been canceled and refunds for the full face value of the tickets have been mailed to all ticket holders who responded to our emails and completed a refund request form.

• An email has been sent to all ticket-holders with this information.
• If you did not receive an email, you chose to opt-out of receiving our emails or your email address has changed.
• If you have a new email address please sign up for our emails here.
• If your USPS mailing address has changed, please email us immediately at info@rochesterjazz.com and let us know your new mailing address.
• If your USPS mailing address has changed and you do not have email, please call the office at 585-454-2060 and leave a message with your name and new mailing address.

I received a credit for 19th Edition headliner tickets purchased for shows that were canceled. May I request a refund for those credits?

Yes, you may request a refund for 19th Edition headliner shows that were canceled. Please send us an email to info@rochesterjazz.com with your name and address and we will mail you a check.

I have a Club Pass but will not be able to use it in 2022.  Can I get a refund?

No. If you cannot use your Pass in 2022, you may use it at the Festival in 2023. It is also sharable and you may choose to transfer it to someone else. 

Why was the Festival moving to a different location if it could take place in 2021?

In February we had reached a critical junction as we explored how to potentially present a festival in 2021, secure programming and put together the plethora of logistic arrangements. We didn’t know what the future will bring. We did know that the Festival could not go on, as usual, this year and that the way we work and how we live have changed. Everyone’s collective health has always been our top priority.  So if we were able to deliver a festival this year and if public health guidelines allowed us to proceed this summer, we would need a larger footprint that would provide for more distancing to protect people’s health and ease people’s concerns.  

Why RIT?

The RIT campus has many advantages that will help us meet anticipated health guidelines during this pandemic:

• Ample flexible space for distancing.
• A wide array of venue options.
• More than $8.2 million in campus upgrades to create an environment that is safe and clean during the pandemic including the installation of more than 3,000 air purification units throughout the campus, thousands of touch-free towel and hand sanitizer dispensers, and hundreds of sheets of polycarbonate barriers.
• Plenty of space for parking.
• It is located just 6 miles and less than 15 minutes from downtown Rochester.
• Experience dealing with large crowds drawing tens of thousands of people a day.
• RIT has successfully navigated public health safety during this pandemic for large numbers of students, faculty, staff, and the public with a less than one-tenth of one percent COVID-19 positivity rate.

Why were the dates of the festival moving?

There are several reasons.

• Moving to late July and early August, which was six weeks later than our original dates in June, would allow more time for people to get vaccinations.
• It would give us additional time to plan. Typically by this time of the year we have our lineup almost complete, many headliner tickets have already been put on sale, and a range of key logistics are in place. With the pandemic uncertainty, we have been unable to accomplish these key processes.
• This time slot would allow us optimal use of RIT’s space since it will be in between semesters.

If you have any other questions that we have not answered here, please email us at info@rochesterjazz.com. We will post responses to this page.

Updated May 3, 2021