WDET to Broadcast the 2020 Detroit Jazz Festival in its Entirety Labor Day Weekend
Labor Day weekend is always one of the biggest weekends for music in and around Detroit, in large part because that’s when the Detroit Jazz Festival takes over Hart Plaza each year. But because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, audience members won’t be heading downtown to watch the festival in person this year. But there’s good news — the show will go on. WDET is returning as a live broadcast partner of the Detroit Jazz Festival for the first time since 1999. WDET will provide a wall-to-wall, uninterrupted broadcast of more than 40 hours of festival performances over Labor Day weekend Sept. 4-7. Chris Collins is the president of the Detroit Jazz Festival. He told Stephen Henderson on Detroit Today that the festival has been working on contingencies for months. “The ‘Pandemic Pivot’ — it’s a new dance, we’re all working on it,” jokes Collins. “When we talk about WDET returning as a broadcast partner, I mean, what a perfect fit,” he continues. “This is why public radio is so important and is worth everybody’s support…We wanted to make sure this was truly free and available to everybody and the answer to that was WDET, our public radio partners… If people don’t have online access or whatever, they can listen on the radio and they can listen with everybody else. It was a very important part of our design.”