Vanport Jazz Festival

Portland, Oregon is the place to be for jazz this August.

This event celebrates the historic community of Vanport and its contribution to Oregon’s jazz scene. The 2021 headliners Gerald Albright, Marion Meadows, Tahirah Memory, and Sheila E.

The Vanport Jazz festival is held near the site of a flood that occurred in 1948. It was catastrophic for the community of nearly 40,000 African American workers living in the public housing project built in that location.

In fact, African Americans were restricted to that neighborhood due to Oregon’s ‘real estate code of ethics’ at the time.

They had come to Portland to work. During the second world war, the city recruited hundreds of thousands of workers from all over the country. They needed laborers in the city’s shipyards. There was a shortage of housing in the city so they built Vanport, a segregated city for the newly arrived workers.

The Columbia River flooded in 1948 on Memorial Day, wiping out homes and displacing almost half of the population. It was a disaster.

The community came together and some of them opened jazz clubs in Vanport, creating jobs and a place to gather for many of the displaced people.

The result was a vibrant jazz culture and over the years the club attracted some of the biggest names in jazz. Portland was placed firmly on the map as a true jazz city.

One of the legacies of this scene is the Vanport Jazz Festival. They celebrate the musicians who moved to Oregon to work and ended up creating art. This annual festival invites jazz aficionados both local and international to discover the legacy and experience the revival of jazz in Vanport.

Aug. 7, Colwood Golf Center, Portland

This year the festival brings cultural revival to the Vanport area, welcoming nationally renowned artists and breathing new life into Portland jazz.

The festival brings the hottest smooth jazz to the Northwest, featuring celebrated artists as headliners as well as a collection of rising jazz stars.

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