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The Year-Round Source for Monterey Bay EventsFriday May 18, 2012Monterey Bay Weather

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    Monterey Jazz Festival


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    The Monterey Jazz Festival is a nonprofit organization, dedicated to perpetuating jazz. Providing year-round Jazz Education Programs, showcased in their annual Next Generation Jazz Festival. The organization is pleased to present the world's best jazz entertainment in the Monterey Jazz Festival, the longest running jazz festival in the world. Held every September on the Monterey Fairgrounds site where the Festival was first presented in 1958. The Monterey Jazz Festival began as a dream for founder Jimmy Lyons and his co-founder and colleague, Ralph Gleason. It was a dream of a "sylvan setting with the best jazz people in the whole world playing on the same stage, having a whole weekend of jazz." That dream became reality in 1958, with the first Monterey Jazz Festival bringing in artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Lewis, Shelly Manne, Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, Ernestine Anderson, Harry James, Max Roach, and Billie Holiday. Every year since then, every third full weekend in September sees the same caliber of talent grace the now nine stages on the Monterey Fairgrounds, as the Monterey Jazz Festival presents the best jazz performers in the world for a three-day celebration of the best in jazz.