The TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival takes over the Exchange District for six days every June. The 2026 edition ran June 16 to 21, and Jazz Winnipeg, the organisation that has run the festival since 1989, posts each year's dates and lineup at jazzwinnipeg.com well before the first set. What trips visitors up is the money. This is really two festivals sharing one name, and only one of them costs anything.

Free at Old Market Square, ticketed everywhere else

Everything programmed at Old Market Square is free for the whole run. No wristband, no gate, nobody checking a pass at the edge of the lawn. You can walk up at seven in the evening on any of the six days, stand at the back, and leave when you want to. That is unusual for a festival of this size: more than 30,000 people came through the 2026 edition.

The square is at 275 Bannatyne Avenue, north of Portage Avenue, and the stage is the Cube, an open-air structure about twenty-eight feet on a side with a metal mesh curtain that draws back to expose the concrete stage behind it. Seating is limited to what the lawn in front gives you, so bring a folding chair or something to sit on. Food and drink vendors set up on site during the festival, along with a market of local makers.

Programming at the square runs to a theme a night. In 2026 the week opened on swing and closed on the blues, with groove, global and Latin evenings and a night given over to women in jazz in between; that closing Latin night started at 4:30 in the afternoon and ran to midnight. The themes are chosen fresh each year, but the rhythm of the week holds. Afternoons and early evenings belong to the free stage, and the later you go, the more likely you are in a room you paid to enter.

Those rooms are the other half of the festival, and they move. The Fort Garry Hotel at 222 Broadway hosted the International Jazz Showcase in its Club Room in 2026, and the headline bills went to the Burton Cummings Theatre, but the venue list is rebuilt around each year's lineup rather than inherited. Ticket prices and on-sale dates come out with that lineup, which is a reason to check the festival's own schedule instead of assuming last year's venue and last year's price.

Festival week sits close to the solstice, so plan for light rather than dark. The sun does not set until about 9:40 and the sky holds its brightness past ten, which means an eight o'clock set at the Cube is played in broad daylight and the stage lighting only starts to count in the last hour of the night. It also means you will be standing in an open square in full sun if you arrive for the late afternoon slots. A hat is more use than a jacket until the sun is actually down.

For dinner without leaving the block, Amsterdam Tea Room and Bar is at 103-211 Bannatyne Avenue and Peasant Cookery is at 283 Bannatyne, both a short walk from the square along the same street. Amsterdam takes bookings by phone rather than through a reservation site, so call it rather than turning up at eight expecting a table.

Where to stay for jazz festival week

Our three-bedroom home is in Crescentwood, south of the Assiniboine River. Portage and Main is nine minutes away by car, 3.9 km, and the Exchange District picks up north of that corner, so the square is a short drive and you are not sleeping above a street that stays loud until two in the morning. On a six-day festival, that difference is worth more on the fourth night than the first.

Without a car, the BLUE rapid transit line runs from Osborne Village, east of us, into downtown along Portage Avenue. Fares go on a peggo card or in cash to the driver; the cash fare was $3.45 in 2026, and winnipegtransit.com carries the current one. Corydon Avenue is ten minutes on foot south of our door, and by the third week of June its patios are open.

June fills the central neighbourhoods. The jazz festival sits at the front of a summer calendar that keeps going through Folklorama, and rooms near downtown go early for all of it. Our Airbnb listing shows which dates are still open.

Before you go: Jazz Winnipeg confirms each year's dates, lineup, venues and ticket prices at jazzwinnipeg.com, and the ticketed venues change from one year to the next. Check there before you book travel around a particular night.