Festival International de Jazz de Montréal

Montreal International Jazz Festival
Festival International de Jazz de Montréal at night
Genre	Jazz festival
Dates	June 28-July 7, 2018
Location(s)	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Years active	1980-present
Founded by	Alain Simard
Attendance	2 million
Website
montrealjazzfest.com

The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal (English: Montreal International Jazz Festival) is an annual jazz festival held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Montreal Jazz Fest holds the 2004 Guinness World Record as the world's largest jazz festival. Every year it features roughly 3,000 artists from 30-odd countries, more than 650 concerts (including 450 free outdoor performances), and welcomes over 2 million visitors (12.5% of whom are tourists) as well as 300 accredited journalists. The festival takes place at 20 different stages, which include free outdoor stages and indoor concert halls.

A major part of the city's downtown core is closed to traffic for ten days, as free outdoor shows are open to the public and held on many stages at the same time, from noon until midnight. The "festival's Big Event concerts typically draw between 100,000 and 150,000 people", and can occasionally exceed 200,000. Shows are held in a wide variety of venues, from relatively small jazz clubs to the large concert halls of Place des Arts. Some of the outdoor shows are held on the cordoned-off streets, while others are in terraced parks.

It should not be confused with the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which is the second largest jazz festival in the world after Montreal's.

The Montreal Jazz Festival was conceived by Alain Simard, who had spent much of the 1970s working with Productions Kosmos bringing artists such as Chuck Berry, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and others to Montreal to perform. In 1977, Simard teamed up with André Ménard and Denys McCann to form an agency named Spectra Scène (now known as L'Équipe Spectra), with the idea of creating a summer festival in Montreal that would bring a number of artists together at the same time.

They planned their first festival for the summer of 1979. Unable to secure sufficient funding, their plans were scuttled, but they still were able to produce two nights of shows at Théâtre-St-Denis featuring Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny.