Norah Jones, winner of nine Grammy Awards, among the artists featured for Jazzaldia

Pat Metheny, Abdullah Ibrahim, Kenny Barron, and Enrico Rava are among the great musicians already known by the public of the jazzaldia which they will repeat next July, in which the festival from San Sebastian will feature long-awaited names, such as that of the New Yorker Norah Jones and the British Joss Stone and Nubya Garcia. Another goal achieved is the return after many years of the Japanese pianist Yosuke Yamashitaas well as the performance of the American singer-songwriter and guitarist Ben Harper, which will premiere at this 58th edition of the festival, five days of music from July 21 to 25.

american guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lagethe South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazothe young Austrian pianist David Helbock and the Spanish Rocio Marquez They are also part of the programming of paid spaces.

the tickets for these spaces -the Kursaal auditorium, the Plaza de la Trinidad, the San Telmo Museum and the Victoria Eugenia theater- They are on sale from this Thursday, a program as early as the one in 2020, which was also announced in December and which ended up completely disrupted due to the pandemic. Jazzaldia will seek this year for the edition to end “very high” with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and with one of the “great voices of soul”, whom they have “pursued” for a long time, the young singer Joss Stone.

And after many years, he has also managed to get me to attend the Festival Norah Jones, who on Saturday the 22nd will be the protagonist in the Kursaal auditorium, where the pianist Kenny Barron, one of the musicians who has performed the most times at this summer event, will play on the 21st. Ben Harper, another of those desired, will do so on the 23rd; Pat Metheny, along with two young musicians, on the 24th; and Rocío Márquez & Bronquito on 25. Martín has spoken of the Huelva-born cantaora as a woman who, although she “comes from flamenco”, is “absolutely open to any type of influence and experience”.

This next 2023 will be “the Euskadi-Japan year” and, for this reason, on the 58th Jazzaldia will program a piano cycle in the cloister of San Telmo, in which Yosuke Yamashita, “one of the most universal musicians in that country”, will offer two concerts: one dedicated to standard themes and compositions his own and another on “his particular and passionate vision of the classical repertoire” with works such as Ravel’s “Bolero” and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue”. Kento Tsubosaka and Hakuei Kim, as well as Eri Yamamoto, already well known in the city, complete a cycle that Martín has described as “exciting and of the highest musical quality”.

This Thursday, tickets for the JazzEñe cycle, organized by the SGAE, although the choice of the eight Spanish groups, which will offer their concerts at the Victoria Eugenia, will not be known in detail until April. In this presentation, the posters of the illustrator Roskow have been unveiled, who already painted those of the 2017 edition and who, on this occasion, has resorted to digital drawing to shape a sketch from years ago that has ended up being transformed into a jazz trio, whose members also star in a separate bill.