The Jazz Weekend

Every Memorial Day weekend, Jacksonville stages one of the largest free jazz festivals in the country, closing its downtown core and filling multiple outdoor stages with three days of headliners and rising names, the river breeze working the crowds, the food rows running the city's canon per its eating pieces, and not a ticket in sight for the general lawns. The jazz weekend is the river city's right week, and its scale-to-price ratio may be the best in American festivals.

The festival's form rewards the wanderer, stages spread across the downtown blocks and riverfront so that the correct method is the circulating stroll, chairs and blankets deployed and redeployed, a headliner committed to each evening and the afternoons spent sampling, brass bands to fusion to the piano competition that has launched careers for decades and remains the connoisseur's fixture. The premium seating sells for the front-of-stage faithful, per the money logic of these pages, and the lawns lose remarkably little.

The weekend doubles as the city's downtown at its best, the riverwalks connecting the stages, the river taxi of the city's water piece running late schedules, the restaurants and breweries of the urban core at full festival strength, and the museums holding weekend hours for the mid-afternoon retreat. Rooms downtown book ahead at festival rates under the standing rules, with the beaches' lodging, twenty minutes east, running the pressure valve and adding the morning swim.

Book the downtown or beach base by spring, commit to one evening headliner per night and drift the rest, and carry the folding chairs like the locals, who treat them as festival citizenship. Take the piano competition once with full attention. The city spends the year being driven past, per its own pieces in these pages, and one weekend a year it turns its whole downtown into a bandstand and lets everyone in free, which is the sort of civic self-assurance this magazine crosses states for.