SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival, which debuted last year with nearly $400,000 in seed money from Qualcomm co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs, is returning this fall with another international lineup of artists who will perform in both of the festival’s namesake cities and in Escondido.

To be held the first weekend of October, the 2025 edition will include free concerts in Tijuana and downtown San Diego, and a paid concert at California Center for the Arts, Escondido, for which tickets are now on sale at sdtjjazz.org.

“Last year’s festival really resonated positively with people on both sides of the border,” said festival co-founder Daniel Atkinson. “We are extremely fortunate to have a three-year pledge from Irwin Jacobs that covers a good percentage of our costs, so here we are again.”

The 2025 lineup of performers features four Grammy Award-winning artists. They include Mexico City native and six-time Grammy victor Arturo O’Farrill and Los Angeles bass great John Clayton, along with such leading San Diego artists as trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, flutist Holly Hofmann and pianist Irving Flores.

O’Farrill will reunite with musician and retired Chula Vista librarian Jorge Castillo, the founder of the 18-year-old Fandango Fronterizo festival, which has been held concurrently on the Tijuana side of the U.S.-Mexico border and at San Diego’s adjacent Friendship Park. He and O’Farrill shared a 2023 Grammy win for their live album, “Fandango at the Wall.”

Also performing at this year’s San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival will be Escondido native Gabrielle Cavassa. She is the 2021 winner of the prestigious Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.

The Vaughan competition is part of the 14-year-old TD James Moody Jazz Festival at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. By coincidence, a likely highlight of this year’s San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival will be the Oct. 4 Escondido performance billed as James Moody @ 100.

It will showcase a one-time-only, all-star band that features Grammy-winning Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sánchez, pianist Gerald Clayton and his bass-playing father, John,, drummer Lewis Nash and special guests Hofmann and Castellanos.

Moody’s wife, Linda Moody, helped produce last month’s centennial concert in New York honoring her late husband. She contacted Atkinson a few months ago to suggest the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival consider doing a Moody tribute show of its own. He jumped at the opportunity.

“San Diego was Moody’s home for the last 20 years of his life and he is certainly one of the most prominent jazz artists to ever have lived here,” Atkinson said. “Doing the concert in his honor fits nicely into our mission to celebrate jazz in this region.”

This year’s festival builds on the 2024 debut edition, but with some key pivots. Instead of holding the free outdoor Tijuana concert again on a Saturday night, it will now take place a night later when there is less ambient noise on the streets of Tijuana. And the Friday night opening concert in Escondido is being moved this year to Saturday, the better to accommodate new free outdoor performances prior to the evening show in the Escondido arts center.

“We learned some good lessons last year about scheduling,” said Atkinson, the founder of the nonprofit San Diego Jazz Ventures. He is also the longtime jazz-program coordinator at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla and executive director of the Western Jazz Presenters Network.

Atkinson co-founded the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival last year with Tijuana Blues & Jazz Festival founder/director Julián Plascencia. Their goal, then and now, was to bring multicultural audiences together to harmoniously enjoy adventurous music that knows no borders.

“Out of the 4,000 people who attended last year’s festival, 75 percent attended at no fee,” Atkinson said. “We were inspired by civic jazz festivals in cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Chicago. Most of their events are free and some are ticketed, and the ticketed ones help to subsidize the free ones. That’s the model we’re working on here. And that, of course, requires a lot of philanthropic support to make work.”

2025 San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival lineup

Oct. 2: Irving Flores Afro-Cuban Jazz Sextet, featuring Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, Gilbert Castellanos and Norbert Stachel; Binational Youth Ensemble, featuring students from San Diego’s Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and Ensenada’s Instituto Contemporáneo de Música de Baja California; and more to be announced. Quartyard, 1301 Market Street, East Village. Free; online registration required.

Oct. 4: James Moody @ 100, featuring David Sánchez, Gerald Clayton, John Clayton, Lewis Nash and special guests Holly Hofmann and Gilbert Castellanos; Arturo O’Farrill & The Afro Latin Ensemble with the Fandango Fronterizo Colectivo; Lucía; and Gabrielle Cavassa. California Center for the Arts, Escondido, 340 North Escondido Blvd. $35-$99.

Oct. 5: Arturo O’Farrill & The Afro Latin Ensemble with the Fandango Fronterizo Colectivo; Irving Flores Afro-Cuban Jazz Sextet, featuring Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, Gilbert Castellanos and Norbert Stachel; Lucía; Binational Youth Ensemble, featuring students from San Diego’s Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and Ensenada’s Instituto Contemporáneo de Música de Baja California; and more to be announced. Avenida Revolución between Calle Salvador Diaz Miron (4th) and Calle Emiliano Zapata (5th),Tijuana. Free.

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