It's getting warm outside (finally!) and the mind of Jazz@Rochester turns to thoughts of nine days of live jazz and other music in downtown Rochester—the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, which in about one month will begin its June 10-18 run.

It's high time we start our coverage here...This post previews what's coming here over the next weeks until June 10th when the XRIJF begins. As I can't possibly cover it all (and there are others who cover it), my usual course each year prior to the festival is to lay out my own itinerary for each of the days. I will write a series of posts with my picks for each of the nights, the ones I wish I could work into the schedule, etc., and expanding on the material regarding these artists found at the Festival's own site. In addition to setting up a handy guide for myself during the festival, I hope to provide you with some opportunities to hear and find out more about the artists to guide your own choices during the festival. I will gather these posts into a set of links that will be displayed under the XRIJF logo in the panel to the right to make them easy to find.  I should get going on these shortly after Wednesday's live jazz listings post. 

Let's get to talking about the 2011 Jazz Fest! I encourage you to be vocal in the comments to this and the following XRIJF posts (although please be nice...). What do you think about my choices and what are you going to try to see?  I hope also to start conversations about this year's lineup and artists on the Jazz@Rochester page on Facebook and on the Jazz@Rochester Twitter account (use the hashtag #xrijf to help us all to follow the conversation on the latter). I will be gathering as many of the artists coming to the festival who have Twitter accounts onto a XRIJF 2011 Twitter list (follow the list between now and the festival and please let me know if you know of any I have missed, although I'm just getting started with that). If you're going to be writing about the festival on your own blog, let me know so I can give you some link love and further expand the conversation.

So, go ahead... talk amongst yourselves... We'll see you later on these pages and on Jazz Street!