jazz road tours

Jazz artists, take your music to places it's never been. Jazz Road Tours offer grants of up to $15,000 to develop tours into communities across the country.

Jazz Road Tours supports small, three- to six-site tours at an array of venue types, often in rural communities and other areas traditionally undeserved by the genre.

This artist-centric grant program—designed to support approximately 50 tours each year—is made possible with funds from the Doris Duke Foundation with additional support from the Mellon Foundation.

Program Priorities:

1. Providing jazz artists financial assistance for performances/tours that increases their ability to earn income by connecting with a diversity of communities in traditional and non-traditional venues
2. Giving artists business development tools to advance their careers beyond subsidies and grants. The goals are rooted in equitable pay and artist-centric programming as core values. South Arts believes that artists should receive fair pay for their time, work, and expertise, and that allowing artists (as opposed to venues/agents) to control engagements offers a unique level of creative autonomy and ownership; these goals are discussed below as well as in the Supplemental Questions document uploaded with this application.

Key components of Jazz Road Tours

• An artist may apply for a three-to-six site tour comprised of connected (contiguous) dates at an array of venue types anywhere in the U.S and its territories.
• Jazz Road believes that through a logical route of tour dates, the artists will experience the continuity and momentum of repeat engagements, solidify developing music, and establish band identity/sound through working with the same personnel over the course of the tour.
• Jazz Road also will prioritize applications that include engagements in rural areas or that reach typically underserved communities, especially those that lack opportunities to present live jazz.
• Applicants that make a compelling case for how the tour will impact their careers in new ways are more competitive.