Dirty Dozen Brass Band at Smith Center for the Arts | November 5, 2026
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band — GRAMMY winners, New Orleans brass legends, nearly 50 years of musical gumbo — are coming to the Smith Opera House in Geneva on November 5. Tickets from $29 go on sale April 10.
Solid Sound at MASS MoCA | June 27, 2026
Day 2 of Solid Sound at MASS MoCA is where the festival finds its rhythm — and for those who missed the sold-out Friday, Saturday noon is your best entry point into one of indie music’s premier weekends.
BEATrio: Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, Antonio Sánchez at Kleinhans Music Hall | April 24, 2026
Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, and Antonio Sánchez each rewrote the rulebook for their instruments. BEATrio brings all three to Kleinhans on April 24 — genuinely rare music from three musicians at the absolute top of their craft.
Lee Ritenour at Buffalo State PAC | April 24, 2026
Grammy-winning jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour — “Captain Fingers” — brings his fluid fusion style to Buffalo State Performing Arts Center on April 24. Forty albums in, the technique is still breathtaking.
Maria Schneider
Maria Schneider has won seven Grammy Awards, been named an NEA Jazz Master, and earned honorary doctorates from both the Eastman School of Music and the University of Minnesota. For a composer who grew up in Windom, Minnesota (population 4,000), her path through Rochester to the pinnacle of American jazz composition is one of the […]
Carla Bley
Carla Bley was one of the most important composers in the history of jazz — a visionary whose work reshaped the boundaries of large-ensemble writing, free improvisation, and artist independence over a career spanning six decades. Though born in Oakland, California, Bley spent nearly five decades living and working in Willow, New York, a hamlet […]
Spyro Gyra
When saxophonist Jay Beckenstein and keyboardist Jeremy Wall started hosting Tuesday Night Jazz Jams at a Buffalo club called Jack Daniels in the early 1970s, nobody could have predicted what would follow. By 1974, those loose sessions had crystallized into Spyro Gyra, a jazz fusion ensemble that would go on to become one of the […]
Vijay Iyer
Vijay Iyer was born in Albany, New York, in 1971 and raised in Fairport, a suburb of Rochester — a geography that placed him squarely within the creative corridor of Upstate New York from the very beginning. The son of Tamil Indian immigrants, Iyer began violin training at age three under the Western classical tradition […]
Ron Carter
Ron Carter is the most recorded bassist in the history of jazz — a distinction verified by the Guinness Book of World Records, with over 2,200 recording sessions to his name. His path to that extraordinary career began at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in […]
Jack DeJohnette
For more than half a century, Jack DeJohnette was one of the most important drummers in jazz — a musician whose vocabulary behind the kit expanded what was possible in improvised music. Born August 9, 1942, in Chicago, he would eventually make his home in the Woodstock, New York area, where he lived and created […]