The concerts will take place in the venue and on the streets, in the Affori, Bovisa and Dergano neighbourhoods.

MILAN HAPPY JAZZ FEST is the first festival in Italy dedicated to the origins of jazz, created and promoted with the support of the Municipality of Milan among the city’s cultural program “Milan Lives in the Neighbourhoods”. It is a project that focuses on different areas of the city and brings culture and live entertainment to its territory, thanks to funds from the Ministry of Culture.

The main protagonist of the four days is the jazz music of the ’20s and ’30s called ‘happy music’, thanks to its joyful and engaging character, that makes you clap your feet and hands to the rhythm of the fiery syncopation of wind instruments and percussions.

The Festival will feature on its 4 stages inside the venue, Spirit de Milan,  more than 90 jazz musicians coming from France, Germany, England, Holland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, United States and Italy. Spirit de Milan, a Milanese club with a vintage taste that has been offering hot jazz concerts for amateurs once a week for years, will be the main venue of the Festival. The grand opening concert of the Happy Jazz Fest on Thursday 15th September will be performed by the Original Prague Syncopated Orchestra, the first historic hot jazz revival band, active in Prague since the ’70s.

The live concerts will not be limited inside the premises of the former crystalware factory of Spirit de Milan, but will be heard also on the streets of Affori, Bovisa and Dergano with itinerant concerts. The program – which is realized with important partners such as MondoMusica, Banda d’Affori and the associations BovisAttiva, Via Dolce Via and Allegro Moderato – also boasts music therapy workshops and music masterclasses about early jazz instruments, for both adults and children. On Saturday 17th September, kids of all ages are called to enjoy the show “Good morning Mr. Gershwin”, curated by MondoMusica and hosted at the public library in Via Baldinucci in Dergano-Bovisa. The concert/lesson is based on the book “The skyscrapers of music” by Susie Morgenstern, and George Gershwin’s story will be told through music and words.

Among the guests of the festival – invited by the artistic director Mauro Porro – the festival will host the Bratislava Hot Serenaders, widely considered the best ensemble in the world of hot jazz, the Jazz à Bichon with their hot jazz mixed with a Gallic twist, the New York Classic Jazz 4, the greatest exponents of American hot jazz, the Roaring Cats from Holland, the young group of German musicians Jungle Jazz Band, the British International Hot Star Band, and the Italian talents of the genre such as the Chicago Stompers, the Hot Gravel Eskimos and the Oliver River Jazz Band. Bands and soloists will bring to the stages various instruments of the past, their joy and a great desire to make the audience happy.

On Friday 16th and Saturday 17th September, two social dinners will be enlivened by the Banda d’Affori and a brass band in Dergano (with Via Dolce Via) and Piazza Schiavone (with BovisaAttiva).