SECOND WAVE OF HEADLINERS ANNOUNCED FOR THE 2025 TD WINNIPEG INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL
The TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival announces headliners Madeleine Peyroux, Jimmie Herrod and George Colligan, and Richard Bona at the Desautels Concert Hall
(February 20, 2025 - Winnipeg, MB) Jazz Winnipeg is proud to unveil the second round of headliners for the 2025 TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival, taking place June 17-22, 2025 at various venues in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The second wave of headlining artists for this year’s festival will grace the Desautels Concert Hall at the University of Manitoba. Acclaimed jazz singer-songwriter, Madeleine Peyroux takes the stage on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. Then on Saturday, June 21, 2025, the perfect pairing of vocal artistry and instrumental genius showcases singer Jimmie Herrod and pianist George Colligan, a former University of Manitoba Jazz Studies piano professor. The festival wraps with musical legend Richard Bona who brings his unparalleled virtuosity on the bass guitar and soulful vocals on Sunday, June 22, 2025, presented with the support of Michael Nesbitt.
“We’re excited to be bringing a diverse array of truly world class talents to the spectacular new Desautels Concert Hall at the University of Manitoba ,” said Jazz Winnipeg’s programming director Zachary Rushing. “It’s a new venue for us this year and is easily accessible to all of our patrons through public transit and ample parking. The hall is an acoustically pristine environment for music, and thanks to generous support of patrons like Michael Nesbitt, allows us to bring in artists that exemplify top-tier musical excellence.”
“Our audiences will make lifelong memories with the return of previous festival headliner Madeleine Peyroux as she presents songs from her newest record, will discover the once-in-a-lifetime vocal talents of Pink Martini singer Jimmie Herrod as he presents a bespoke show with George Colligan, and will be dancing in their seats to the deep bass grooves of Richard Bona, who brings a whirlwind of globally acquired musical virtuosity to this stage for one evening only,” says Rushing.
Known as the unofficial kick off to the summer festival season, the TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival continues to be a celebration of musical diversity and unity, bringing together artists from across the globe and offering festival-goers an unforgettable experience. This year’s event promises to be one of the most exciting yet, with performances from these world-class artists who are sure to deliver unforgettable performances, each bringing their own unique sound and style to the stage.
TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival tickets for Madeleine Peyroux, Jimmie Herrod and George Colligan, and Richard Bona are on sale now as of Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 12:01AM on Showpass. Ticket prices range from $49-$69 (plus service fees).
Previously announced is a new all-star trio consisting of Béla Fleck, harpist Edmar Castañeda and drummer Antonio Sánchez. More information found here. Tickets are available via Ticketmaster.
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About Jazz Winnipeg
Jazz Winnipeg is a charitable, non-profit organization promoting the art of jazz through concert presentations and community engagement including the annual TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival. Donations are tax deductible and gratefully accepted through our website at Jazz Winnipeg or at CanadaHelps.
Here is a link for your viewing pleasure of Jimmie Herrod receiving the coveted America’s Got Talent Golden Buzzer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sgk1sNUJR8
2025 TD WINNIPEG INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESITVAL HEADLINING ARTISTS BACKGROUNDER
ABOUT MADELEINE PEYROUX
“Let us advance our mortal bodies up
Where hearts and minds will go
Let’s walk, let’s roll.”
So sings Madeleine Peyroux on the upbeat title track of her captivating ninth album - Let’s Walk - the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s most assured, courageous work to date. Powered by the distinctive, honeyed croon that delivered her from the Paris streets to concert halls, these ten unabashedly personal songs, all co-written by the versatile Peyroux, deftly interweave jazz, folk, and chamber pop, with themes ranging from the confessional to the political, from whimsy to yearning.
For the ardently civic-minded Peyroux, Let’s Walk continues the scintillating conversation with her audience – and with the world at large. “This music is part of a dialogue,” she says. “That’s what art is. It’s engagement, community. I believe more than anything in getting together with 2 people and listening to music and conversing. Music is the only way I’ve ever built community.”
Let’s Walk was a long time coming, but well worth the wait. Following Peyroux’s 2018 album, Anthem, the enforced isolation of the global pandemic made any real-time community gathering impossible. From a creative standpoint, however, Covid offered Peyroux a silver lining: she seized the opportunity to hunker down with longtime collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Jon Herington (Steely Dan, Lucy Kaplansky). The pair reflected on the seismic era at hand and wrote and re-wrote in what Peyroux calls “a shadow of reckoning.” When multi-Emmy-and-Grammy-winning producer Elliott Scheiner (Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles) heard a sampling of the new material, he mandated “no covers” for the album. The longtime studio veteran knew the time was ripe to highlight Peyroux’s incisive, often topical lyrics meshed with Herington’s ear for melody and arrangements.
Album opener “Find True Love” came to Peyroux during the George Floyd murder trial. Like “Let’s Walk,” “Find True Love” is an irresistible entreaty to join a journey. First stop: New Orleans. “I was searching for solace in the American landscape,” Peyroux says. “I was imagining the first step toward healing, if there could be a future worth living for.” Herington’s pulsing, finger-picked acoustic guitar, interwoven with Andy Ezrin’s shimmering keys, propel Peyroux’s message of steadfast hope in the face of encroaching darkness. Says Peyroux: “The ideas in this song let me imagine a place where I can become a better me.”
An astonished Peyroux says the title track came to her in a dream – including “the words, the rhythm, and the form” – a rarity for her. “The lyric refers to mass mobilization of marchers for civil rights around the world,” Peyroux says. “A voluntarily unified action in support of a humanitarian ideology. Herington fleshed out “Let’s Walk” with gospel textures, organ, and a steady, infectious beat, enlisting buoyant harmonies from Grammy-winning artist Catherine Russell (David Bowie, Rosanne Cash), along with vocalists supreme Cindy Mizelle (Bruce Springsteen) and Keith Fluitt (Patti LaBelle, Michael Jackson). Their churchy call-and-response with Peyroux’s burnished lead elevate “Please Come On Inside” and “Blues for Heaven” into a revival of emotion.
“How I Wish” is Peyroux’s response to the horrific murders – over a period of three months in 2020 – of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. This melancholy, minor key waltz acknowledges her privilege, and her anguish. “2020 was the year I woke up,” she says. Immersing herself in the work of such writers as Cornel West, she was struck by West’s repeated references to Black musicians as “Love Warriors,” responding to oppression with game-changing music: Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Marian Anderson, to name a few. “These are my teachers and my heroes,” Peyroux says. “African American music has been the one constant, true path in my life.”
One such mentor was Dan William Fitzgerald, aka “Showman Dan,” for whom Peyroux wrote a rollicking ode after her longtime friend passed away in 2017. As leader of the Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band, the American-born expat took a very young, inexperienced Peyroux under his wing to perform across Europe, as she says, “on the street, in the underground, the 3 public square, jazz clubs, restaurants, and private homes of dukes and duchesses.” Like many Black artists before him, Fitzgerald found he could get more artistic traction in France than he could in his homeland and conveyed his love of street theater to Peyroux, who’d moved with her mother to Paris at age 12.
While in Paris, Peyroux noticed the custom of bourgeois parents buying an apartment for their grown children. For the satirical “Et Puis,” the bilingual singer assumes the role of that young adult as one “both blissfully ignorant of their privilege and consciously disgusted by its injustice.”
For “Nothing Personal,” Peyroux bravely grapples head-on with sexual assault – both her own, and others. She reflects that the perpetrator should “learn every aspect of the consequence of their actions and be party to recovery in whatever way is welcome by the victim.” Herington’s mournful, insistent piano and acoustic guitar recall the intensity of “Plastic Ono Band,” with Peyroux’s painful-yet-resolved vocals intimate and beautifully unadorned.
Peyroux changes gears with the playful, Caribbean-flavored “Me and the Mosquito,” and rapid-fire spoken-word album closer, “Take Care.” The former, inspired by Hank Williams’ hilarious classic “Fly Trouble,” offers perhaps the most humanist treatise ever on what Peyroux calls “the elusive singular mosquito which can ruin a night’s sleep.” For the latter, Peyroux “prayed to the spoken-word genius of Linton Kwesi Johnson” to deliver a heartfelt advisory re: avoiding the pervasive toxins in food, clothing, and modern culture in general. “I don’t recommend a morose existence,” she recites over Herington’s ska-flavored guitar and sampled marimba, “life is an art and perspective needs distance / But ya gotta get lean and scrappy and fight / If you’re gonna begin to get livin’ right.”
When the road beckons this spring, Peyroux’s community of loyal fans is in for a treat. Thanks to serendipitous delay, her collaborators Herington and Scheiner, and the very perspective she shares in “Take Care,” the spare, slow burning Let’s Walk material will be set free in venues around the world, effortlessly dovetailing with Peyroux’s beloved versions of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits (to name a few) classics. As she learned in her busking years, a great song can wield powerful magic, and inspire the best in any type of crowd. With Let’s Walk, Madeleine Peyroux takes full ownership of that magic.
ABOUT JIMMIE HERROD
With “a voice like a beacon of hope” (Seattle Times), vocalist Jimmie Herrod brings singular power and expressivity to his globe-trotting career as a singer, songwriter, and entertainer on stage and screen. Herrod first came to worldwide prominence as a finalist on the NBC nationally broadcast television show, “America’s Got Talent,” earning the rare “Golden Buzzer” recognition from actress Sofia Vargara and returning the following year on the AGT All-Stars series.
As a solo artist, Herrod has appeared to critical and audience acclaim with the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and with the symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Houston, and Oregon, including as a featured soloist for the globally televised PBS “Joni Mitchell Songbook” concert at The Kennedy Center with the 4 NSO, where he shared the stage with musical luminaries like Renee Fleming, Lalah Hathaway, Raul Midon, and Aoife O’Donovan.
Traversing many musical styles and genres in many languages, including jazz, pop, funk, and his own original songs, Herrod has headlined concerts at the The Luxor Theater (Las Vegas), New Jersey’s South Orange Performing Arts Center, and Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, and has since 2017 toured with world-pop band Pink Martini as a featured vocalist. With two EP’s under his belt – his debut “Falling in Love and Learning” and 2022’s “Elated” – Herrod’s singular style and unique voice is poised to make an ever larger impact in the world of music and entertainment. Recent appearances include a star turn as Angel in the world premiere symphonic version of the musical “Rent” at The Kennedy Center, where his performance was lauded by Maryland Theatre Guide as “ebullient” and by Broadway World as “moving, textured, and sensitive,” and his 2023-24 season includes a return engagement with the Oregon Symphony, debuts with the Bozeman and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras, and a planned solo tour.
Herrod is an alum of the Cornish College of the Arts and Portland State University.
ABOUT GEORGE COLLIGAN
“One of the best kept secrets in jazz….” - Chris Hoven, All About Jazz
George Colligan is widely regarded as one of the great jazz pianists of his generation, with an international reputation as a multi-instrumentalist (piano, drums, trumpet, organ, keyboards), composer, accompanist, teacher, bandleader, and blogger (jazztruth.blogspot.com). A winner of the 2015 DownBeat Critics Poll for keyboards, Colligan has a long-standing association with jazz legend Jack DeJohnette, including a recent U.S. tour with “An Evening with Jack DeJohnette and Savion Glover.” He has also led his own trio, featuring jazz luminaries Buster Williams and Lenny White, on tours across the U.S. and Canada.
As an in-demand accompanist, Colligan has appeared on over 130 albums, performing alongside jazz icons such as John Scofield, Cassandra Wilson, Don Byron, Ravi Coltrane, Chris Botti, and many others. As a bandleader, his prolific output includes 36 albums, with his most recent release, King’s Dream (PJCE Records, 2022), spotlighting collaborations with faculty and alumni from Portland State University (PSU).
Colligan, a former New York City resident for 15 years, now resides in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Full Professor at PSU. His academic and artistic contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including two Region Arts and Culture Council grants, a South Arts Jazz Road grant, and a PSU Faculty Development grant. He has received the PSU College of the Arts Dean’s Council Award for Research, Scholarship, and Creativity (2020) and was named Researcher of the Year by the PSU College of the Arts in 2021.
Over the years, Colligan has performed, recorded, and toured with an extensive list of jazz greats, including Lonnie Plaxico, Gary Bartz, Benny Golson, Miguel Zenón, Tom Harrell, Steve Coleman, Eddie Henderson, Vanessa Rubin, Dave Weckl, Michael Brecker, Nicholas Payton, Sheila Jordan, the Mingus Big Band, Al Foster, Lee Konitz, and many others. His artistry continues to enrich the jazz world through both performance and education.
ABOUT RICHARD BONA
“Imagine an artist with Jaco Pastorious’s virtuosity, George Benson’s vocal fluidity, Joao Gilberto’s sense of song and harmony, all mixed up with African culture. Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you Richard Bona!” – Los Angeles Times
Richard Bona is a Grammy-winning musician, one of the most accomplished international bass players, composers and multi-instrumentalists. With his unique sound and vocal gift he is continuously representing his African origins. Bona’s music addresses the continent’s traditions, culture, beauty and issues. His purpose, and the way he connects with his audience has turned him into a staple name in world, jazz and Afropop music.
He is currently producing and recording for Latin and Brazilian artists in the realm of pop, Brazilian songbook, Flamenco and Caribbean music.
Richard Bona has toured, composed, recorded, and created musical forms of art with the greatest: Herbie Hancock, Harry Belafonte, Steps Ahead, Quincy Jones, Chick Corea, Buena Vista Social Club, Cesária Évora, Sting, Mike Stern, Pat Metheny, Stevie Wonder, Bobby McFerrin, Chucho Valdés, George Benson, Oumou Sangaré and many more. Along the diverse notable collaborations Richard has also taught Jazz Improvisation at NYU and is constantly teaching and mentoring young talents throughout the world. He’s also a TED speaker and ambassador for various non-profit projects.
He is highly involved in developing better music business practices and ethics. His Signature Series collaboration with Italian-based MARKBASS has positioned him as one of the most creative and best-selling bass amp and bass guitar tailor-made manufacturers in the world. Constantly touring around the world and exploring new musical directions, Richard continues to redefine his sound, while still performing live. He’s currently working on new Afrobeats, Afropop, Latin and Flamenco projects throughout Europe, the US and Latin America.
RECOGNITION:
● Golden Melody Award for Best Instrumental Recording Album – Sedar (China – 2017)
● The Bonafied album certified Gold (Poland – 2013)
● The SACEM Jazz Grand Prize (Grand Prix Jazz SACEM) (2012)
● Honoree of the Antonio Carlos Jobim Award, Montreal International Jazz Festival (2010)
● Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary World Music Album – Tiki (2006)
● Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Performance – As It Is (2002)
● Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album – Speaking Of Now (2002)
