Telluride Jazz Festival 2026 announces its full two-day August lineup featuring The Disco Biscuits, Lettuce, Don Was, Robert Randolph and more
The Telluride Jazz Festival has announced its full lineup for 2026, and the 49th edition of the festival is bringing one of its most conceptually ambitious programs to date. Set for August 7 and 8 at Telluride Town Park Campground in Telluride, Colorado, the two-day event is built around a theme of “Tradition and Evolution” and features 12 acts spanning jazz, funk, jam, and far beyond. Tickets are on sale now at telluridejazz.org.
For a festival founded in 1977 inside a former silver mining town tucked into the San Juan Mountains, this year’s lineup reads like a mission statement. The Telluride Jazz Festival has never been a purist event. It has always understood that the music’s most vital energy lives at genre borders, and the 2026 bill reflects that ethos with precision. This year also introduces an expanded two-stage format, pairing the long-running Main Stage with a new Foundation Stage dedicated to showcasing traditional jazz and its deepest roots.
The Disco Biscuits Unplug and Lettuce Honors a Legend
Headlining Friday night, August 7, The Disco Biscuits will perform their third-ever “Powered Down” set, a format that strips the jamtronica quartet’s elaborate MIDI production system down to intricate acoustic renderings of their catalog. The format is rare. The Biscuits have only done it twice before, and bringing it to Telluride for the first time makes this one of the more genuinely distinctive headline slots in the jam scene this summer.
Closing the weekend on Saturday, August 8, Lettuce will perform a live tribute to Miles Davis’ 100th birthday. It is a fitting assignment. The New York-bred funk outfit has carried Davis as a touchstone throughout their career, releasing their 2017 EP Witches Stew as a direct tribute to his landmark 1970 album Bitches Brew, covering “In A Silent Way” and other works from his electric era. Lettuce bassist Erick Coomes has described the impact of the band’s live shows in terms that would feel right on a Telluride stage: “some of these shows we’ve played over the past couple years have been so amazing, it’s like you go home a different person.” A Miles Davis centennial tribute, in the Rocky Mountains, from a band this locked in, will be something to witness.
A Supporting Bill Built for Depth
The rest of the lineup is no afterthought. Don Was and The Pan-Detroit Ensemble bring their ongoing traveling tribute to the Grateful Dead’s ‘Blues for Allah’ to the Main Stage on Friday, the 50th anniversary year of that album. Sacred steel guitarist Robert Randolph, whose live performances operate somewhere between gospel revival and rock spectacle, appears on Saturday. Trumpeter, producer, and composer Theo Croker represents the forward edge of contemporary jazz, while Adrian Quesada’s Trio Asesino brings cinematic Latin flavor. The organ trio supergroup DTF: Deitch, Teitel and Fribush, formally launched on Jam Cruise 22, rounds out the bill alongside the festival’s Foundation Stage additions: Endea Owens and The Cookout, Voodoo Orchestra, and the CU Boulder Thompson Jazz Combos. Sunday programming extends the weekend with a Jazz Brunch in Mountain Village. At 49 years old and counting, the Telluride Jazz Festival has earned the right to curate without apology. This year’s lineup does exactly that.
