The Red Deer Community for Jazz Music exists to create, support and promote live jazz music in Red Deer. Founded in 2022, we are an incorporated non-profit organization that not only runs events, but we also help promote any and all other jazz related events in Red Deer.

For 3 consecutive years, we’ve run our trademarked annual Red Deer Jazz Festival. In total we’ve run around 20 events and created over 100 paying jobs for musicians and others in the music industry.

In total, we’ve accumulated over 1500 volunteer hours at the RDCJM. Everything done at the Red Deer Community for Jazz Music on an organizational level, is done as a volunteer. We believe in providing fair compensation for musicians that we hire for our events, and if we paid ourselves for operations, we would simply not be able to run events or pay musicians.

Our organization is a 100% grassroots startup and despite applying for funding, we have no funding from the City of Red Deer, the provincial goverment or federal goverment. We’re very fortunate to have Border Paving help us by sponsoring the SwingTime AllStar Jam.

We’re very fortunate to have had the opportunity to developed significant relationships with other organizations here in Red Deer, including the Velvet Olive, Downtown Red Deer, Central Alberta Chamber Orchestra – CACO, Red Deer Blues Society and The Red Aces.

Looking forward to 2025, we’re excited to continue to develop these relationships and make new ones. In Red Deer, we need to band together to overcome the challenges our performing arts communities face. The current situation is that there isn’t much funding, and costs continue to rise. However we have a number of people who are commited to working together to find solutions. Please reach out if you would like to help, we need more people to step up and get involved.

Next year, we also have a TV series that will be released on Telus Optik about our community, and we’re excited to be able to share the stories of the people that have built our community.

As always, stay tuned for the latest updates. Take care everyone and enjoy your holiday season!

~RDCJM