The San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival isn’t the region’s biggest music festival, but it might well be the most interesting and innovative. Set for Oct. 1-4 with two days in Tijuana, one in San Diego and one in Escondido, it’s a fascinating cross-cultural event that features prominent jazz musicians from the region and beyond.
The fest is largely the brainchild of San Diego Jazz Ventures executive director Daniel Atkinson, who started the Athenaeum Jazz series at La Jolla’s Athenaeum Music & Arts Library 30 years ago. “I always had it in the back of my mind that I’d love to do a festival,” Atkinson says.
In the wake of the pandemic, Atkinson renewed his efforts to get a festival off the ground. It finally took root with three-day binational programs in 2024 and 2025. This year they’re adding an extra day on the streets of Tijuana, to go along with Thursday’s opening party at the East Village venue Quartyard, and Saturday’s all-day, indoor-outdoor program at California Center for the Arts in Escondido.
The Friday and Sunday events on Avenida Revolución in Tijuana are both free. Thursday’s opening bash requires an online RSVP, with donations requested but not required. Saturday’s agenda includes a couple of free outdoor programs, plus a ticketed show in the California Center’s theater featuring four of the festival’s top acts ($45-$90).
We spoke with Atkinson by Zoom last week for our latest installment of our “Five Questions” series.
How did the festival get started?
I’ve been active in producing jazz here in San Diego for the past 37 years. Right around the time I began the Athenaeum series in La Jolla, another organization was just winding down its activities. It was called San Diego Jazz Festival, and they produced the last international jazz festival in San Diego in 1984. The principals of that organization went on to found and produce San Diego Street Scene for many years.
Fast-forward to 2020. During the pandemic, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my future. I thought, this is the time to try to start something new that will have a binational scope built into its mission. We produced some concerts in 2021 and 2022, and then an initiative called World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana came up. It was a yearlong celebration of anything related to design in both of the cities, cross-border initiatives being the priority. My board and I decided to do the festival in 2024 as part of World Design Capital. That was the immediate impetus for doing this when we did it, although it was always in our mind that we wanted to do something that was binational.
Can you tell me about some of the musical highlights in this year’s lineup?
Well, since I put it all together, I’m excited about all of it! But I’m very excited about bringing Mingus Dynasty back to San Diego. I presented their premiere in 2018, and through the process of presenting them in Tijuana that year, I met my current partner in the festival, Julián Plascencia, who played a big role in making that concert possible (Plascensia is general manager of the Tijuana restaurant Caesar’s and is part of a prominent Baja restaurant family). We had Mingus’s own legacy band, which was founded and organized by Mingus’s widow, playing the music of “Tijuana Moods” (a 1962 Charles Mingus album) in Tijuana for the first time. That was something incredibly magical. So we’re bringing the magic back this year, and we’re doing it right on the street on Avenida Revolución, in a block that I’m sure Mingus walked down in the ’50s.
Another highlight this year is the different performances by Danilo Pérez with the SDSU Jazz Ensembles and the La Covacha Big Band from Ensenada. I learned from his agent that he likes to come to a place and work with ensembles that are native to that place. Given our binational location and region, I thought, let’s do two different bands, and see what the approach to the music will be in two different settings — one in a formal concert hall (in Escondido), the other on the street in downtown Tijuana. Danilo is the director of the Global Jazz Institute at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which integrates other kinds of world music genres into jazz and vice versa. He’s also the cultural ambassador of the Republic of Panama, which is his native country. So he’s a jazz diplomat in a way that I think harkens back to Dizzy Gillespie.
What can you tell me about Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band from New Orleans and the Binational Youth Ensemble?
(The youth ensemble includes players from both San Diego’s Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and the Instituto Contemporáneo de Música de Baja California.)
The day after the last year’s festival ended, I got an email from Brian Blade saying, “Hey Dan, I’d like to bring the band back to San Diego, and my availability is the first week of October of 2026.” So this is a gift. I had him perform at the Athenaeum a few years ago, and of my 37 years programming jazz there, I would rank it among the top three concerts I ever presented. I think it’s an absolutely outstanding band. It’s been around for 29 years with almost the same personnel. And finally, the name of the band has our mission statement in it, which is fellowship.
The Binational Youth Ensemble is an original creation of the festival. One of my essential collaborators on the Baja side is Ivan Trujillo, who is a trumpeter and band leader. One of his initiatives is this after-school program called Instituto Contemporáneo de Música (in Ensenada). And of course I have known (San Diego’s) Gilbert Castellanos for decades, and used to be on the board of his Young Lions Jazz Conservatory. So it seemed like a natural to have them play some music together. Logistically, it’s a little complicated, but we’re doing it. That’s kind of the whole festival, I guess: It’s logistically complicated, but we’re doing it.
Is it the hope that attendees will see events in their own country, or is it ideally an event where fans can cross the border and experience the festival on both sides?
The answer is all of the above. People are going to go where it is convenient to them, where they feel comfortable, and in some cases, where they just legally can be. But we encourage everyone to go to everything, because even though the bands are the same on some of the days, the context is really different, so you get to see the bands from a different perspective. I’m particularly excited about that with Brian Blade, for instance, because I think he’s going to pivot in a totally different way to the (street) audience on Revolución from what he does in the concert hall in Escondido.
We have great cooperation from the Mexican consulate in San Diego, for making things smoother in terms of transit. You can either drive or park and walk, and the location is not far from the border. It’s the block of Revolución where Caesar’s Restaurant is, so it’s easy to just say to a driver, “Take me to Caesar’s.” Both the Friday and Sunday events are free and open to the public. You can come and leave whenever you want. There’s food and drink available all around, so people can make a real day out of it.
You started in 2024 under the previous U.S. administration, and last year you were under the current one. Has there been a difference in how things have worked in presenting the festival since the change?
For the most important thing, which is getting people to and from (the events), there hasn’t been a big difference. In our first year, through one of our partners, we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that was a big boost to our 2024 budget. We haven’t had federal support for the festival since then … (Among private donors), Joan and Irwin Jacobs have been incredibly generous in making this entire thing possible.
One of the things I’m proud of this year is that we have support from both District One of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, which is Paloma Aguirre’s district that runs from the border up into up to Market Street in downtown, and from District Five, Jim Desmond’s district in Escondido. It’s a wide political spectrum between the two of them, and both see the value of being involved in this event. I think the fact that people who live here in the border region understand that the U.S. and Mexico are inextricably intertwined and involved with one another. It’s not something that’s going to go away, and it’s a good thing.
