The chairs go down on Civic Square this Friday evening. Soul Almighty opens at 7. The Taichung Jazz Festival Celebration Big Band follows at 8:30. Then the schedule runs ten nights, most of them free, ending Sunday the 25th.
This is not a ticketed outdoor show. The main stage sits in the middle of the city’s civic plaza, near the Calligraphy Greenway. People bring mats. Folding chairs are allowed if they do not block the view behind them. Food trucks line the edges. The city culture bureau runs it. Twenty-three sets in total.
Saturday brings the Alessio Menconi Trio from Italy, then Huang Rui-feng’s band with Taiyu singer Li Zhu-xin. Sunday has a Japanese group, Suga Dairo’s Journey to the West with local players, followed by the Alfredo Rodriguez Trio. Later in the week T-SQUARE appears, along with the Yu-Ying Hsu Trio and others. The last three nights start earlier, at 5:30.
Three indoor ticketed concerts sit alongside the free nights. One already happened on the 10th. The remaining two are the 18th and the 23rd at the indoor hall nearby. Those sell through OPENTIX. The outdoor shows do not.
Taichung has run this festival long enough that the local musicians treat it as the annual checkpoint. The big band is built from the city’s own youth training program. The international names come in for a night or two and leave. What stays is the habit of standing in the square after dark listening to horns.
Official schedule lists the full run. If you go on a weekday, the crowd thins. On the weekend the mats overlap.