The 38th Annual Earshot Jazz Festival is doing what it has always done: filling more than a dozen Seattle venues with music that spans the full spectrum of jazz, from classic straight-ahead performances by international masters to new commissions from the most adventurous voices in the Pacific Northwest scene. Earshot has built its reputation over four decades specifically by refusing to treat these two things as separate. The internationally recognized artist performing at Town Hall Seattle and the Seattle-based avant-garde ensemble debuting new work at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute are both on the same festival program, given equal billing and equal institutional support, because Earshot has always understood that the live jazz ecosystem is only healthy when the local scene and the global one are in genuine dialogue rather than competition.

This year, that dialogue has a centennial dimension that gives the entire festival an additional layer of historical weight. John Coltrane and Miles Davis, born within months of each other in 1926, have anchored 2026’s global jazz calendar in ways that no other anniversary has. At Earshot, their music has threaded through the programming all month long, with tributes that range from note-faithful live performances of “Kind of Blue” and “A Love Supreme” to original compositions inspired by their legacies performed by Seattle musicians for whom this music is not history but foundation. The festival’s final days are where that programming reaches its culmination, and the venues hosting it this week are some of the most distinctive rooms in the Pacific Northwest live music landscape.

With the festival closing on Sunday, October 25, here are the venues most directly connected to the centennial tributes and the Pacific Northwest spotlight programming running through the end of the week:

Earshot Jazz Festival is exactly the kind of event that The Improv Café exists to celebrate: a festival that takes live jazz seriously enough to spread it across an entire city for more than three weeks, that treats the local scene with the same institutional respect it gives to international headliners, and that uses the centennial of two of the most important musicians in jazz history as an opportunity for genuine musical engagement rather than simple tribute. The performances running at Town Hall, the Royal Room, the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, and the Black and Tan Hall this week are not recreations or revivals. They are live musicians, in 2026, bringing their own lives and their own understanding of this music into contact with material that Miles Davis and John Coltrane created and left for exactly this purpose: to be played, transformed, and passed forward.

The festival closes Sunday, October 25. If you are in Seattle, the remaining days of the 38th annual Earshot Jazz Festival are not to be missed. Complete schedule and tickets at earshot.org/festival.