The Ottawa Jazz Festival is in the middle of an urgent fundraising campaign to dig itself out of a $400,000 hole that started three years ago and got precipitously worse when the opening weekend of the 2026 event was plagued by rain.
The festival’s goal with its Keep The Music Playing initiative is to raise the entire $400,000 they need this month in order to pay outstanding invoices from the 2026 edition, cover the budgetary deficit and demonstrate how much it costs to run a festival .
“Part of this is a plea to show funders who are underfunding this whole sector what we actually need,” said executive and artistic director Petr Cancura in an interview. “And part of it is also to show the private sector that it’d be great if people stepped up if they care about these festivals.”
Like many Canadian jazz festivals, the financial situation of the Ottawa event became uncertain three years ago when TD Bank pulled its corporate funding after many years sponsoring multiple jazz festivals across the country. The Canadian banking giant retained sponsorship of Montreal’s jazz festival.
“We would definitely, absolutely not be having this conversation if TD was still around,” said Cancura. “If we still had TD, we could well be in a surplus.”
To make matters worse, Ottawa was plagued by rain during the festival’s opening weekend last June, deterring many prospective patrons from showing up. The event ran June 19-28 at Confederation Park and the National Arts Centre.
“We got totally rained out,” said Cancura, recalling the back-to-back thunderstorms that put a damper on attendance to main-stage shows by headliners Wyclef Jean, BADBADNOTGOOD and Hiromi’s Sonicwonder. “That first weekend of weather just destroyed us. It took most of the deficit chunk out of our ticket sales.”
The one rain-free night of that initial weekend found actor Jeff Goldblum on the main stage June 21 with the Mildred Spitzer Orchestra. Goldblum was expected to draw the biggest crowd of the festival, but because it rained just before showtime, the expected throngs failed to materialize.
“It poured until an hour before the show and then the sky was clear but it was too late,” Cancura said. “People stayed home at that point.”
Without a major corporate sponsor, the festival relies heavily on ticket sales, which can be “volatile” because of weather conditions, not to mention the fact that music fans are struggling to pay their own bills. “You can only raise your ticket prices so much or the math just doesn’t work,” Cancura said.
Other factors leading to the budget shortfall include the declining number of government grants available to non-profit cultural events, and the skyrocketing increases in production costs, including fuel, portable toilets, rental gear, hotel accommodations, artists’ fees and more.
Still, in the end, Cancura promised the 46-year-old festival will endure, even if they don’t reach the $400,000 goal.
“It’s not the end of the world,” he said, hinting at a “streamlined” event with more community partnerships. “We’re figuring things out. If we can actually raise something close to our goal, we’re fully confident that we’re good to go.”
Donations can be made at ottawajazzfestival.com .
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