More than 80 jazz musicians will converge on Tucson next week for the 2023 HSL Properties Tucson Jazz Festival.

It’s the largest lineup in the festival’s nine-year history and possibly one of its most diverse, with artists ranging in age from early 20s to north of 70 and styles traversing modern jazz to old school.

“I try to balance the festival with a lot of different varieties of jazz and artists, young and old,” Executive Director Khris Dodge said, adding that the festival Jan. 13-22 also includes diverse performance spaces from the intimacy of the city’s nearly year-old jazz club The Century Room at Hotel Congress to the open-air rooftop of the downtown Playground Bar & Lounge.

That will be the setting for Grammy-nominated jazz newbie Samara Joy, the 23-year-old New Yorker who launched her career in 2019 with a first-place win in the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. Her months-old Verve Records debut “Linger Awhile” snagged the 2023 Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy nomination and she’s also up for Best New Artist, the only jazz singer among a slate of 10 nominees crisscrossing everything from techno and rap to R&B and world music.

“To have someone with such an amazing voice and to be that young ... it’s really cool,” Dodge said.

At 21, jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker is the youngest headliner on the 2023 lineup. He will share the Fox Tucson Theatre stage Jan. 15 with the Tucson Jazz Institute‘s award-winning Ellington Big Band, comprised of some of Tucson’s most promising high school jazz players.

Whitaker, who opened for Stevie Wonder at the Apollo Theater when he was 10, is bringing his dynamic quintet along for the Fox show, one of three Jazz Festival concerts at the historic downtown theater.

Some other highlights of the ninth annual Jazz Festival:

Tall Tall Trees (aka singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Mike Savino) shines the spotlight on electronic banjo in a Jan. 20 show that pays equal homage to Earl Scruggs and Bela Fleck as it does to Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens, with some soul-searing experimentation to take you out of your comfort zone.

English-born trombonist Elliot Mason is the 2023 festival Artist in Residence. You can see him perform at the Jazz Jam Jan. 14 at Hotel Congress Plaza and the Downtown Jazz Fiesta street party on Jan. 16.

Jan. 21 is going to be a long day for jazz pianist and composer Emmet Cohen, one of his generation’s most dynamic and transcendent artists. Cohen and his trio are set to play a mid-afternoon show at Hotel Congress Plaza and a late-night special concert at the Century Room.

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Black Market Trust is among the 80-plus jazz artists converging on Tucson for the ninth annual HSL Properties Tucson Jazz Festival Jan. 13-22.

The Black Market Trust, a traditional pop and vocal jazz quintet, pulls from the Great American Songbook and infuses those great tunes with a little fire and pizzazz inspired by seminal French jazz guitarist Jean Reinhardt aka Django. Expect folks to make good use of the Hotel Plaza stage-front dance floor when the group plays Jan. 21.

Dodge might want to consider renaming the Jan. 14 TJF Jazz Jam the “TJF All-Star Jazz Jam.” The jam at the outdoor Hotel Congress Plaza includes the Bossa Nova jazz duo Diego Figueiredo and Ken Peplowski, with Elliot Mason, who’s a longtime member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, jazz guitar great Howard Alden and New York City jazz icons Vincent Herring, Jeremy Pelt, Peter Washington, Kenny Washington, Mike LeDonne and Eric Alexander. A handful of Tucson jazz stars — Angelo Versace, Jason Carder, Scott Black, Arthur Vint and Brice Winston — round out the talent.

Jazz trumpeter and Grammy Award-winning film score (“The Woman King,” “Malcolm X”) and opera (“Fire Shut Up in My Bones”) composer Terence Blanchard and his longtime band, the E-Collective, team up with the Turtle Island Quartet to perform his year-old album “Absence,” a collection of songs by the great jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Dodge says this Jan. 20 show is a must-see that will marry jazz and classical music. The Turtle Island Quartet, which fuses jazz and classical, won a pair of Grammys (2006, 2008) for Best Classical Crossover Album.

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"This Too Shall Pass" captured during the Noisemakers's 2018 Summer Tour.

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Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Twitter @Starburch