Free jazz finale on Bishy Road to close the festival

The York Jazz Festival is back for 2026, and its finale is the kind of Sunday that costs nothing to enjoy. On Sunday 4 October, the festival wraps up with a free, family-friendly, open-air event in the Bishy Road car park, running from midday through to 19:30. It is the final day of a festival that takes in the 1 to 4 October across six venues, all within a short walk of each other.

The finale is a joint effort, put together by the Bishopthorpe Road Traders Association (BRTA) in partnership with the festival and funded by the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority's Vibrant and Sustainable High Streets Fund. On the bill you will find the Fergus Quill Sextet and Dennis Rollins, among other artists, with local businesses on hand serving food and drink. Quill is a British composer, musician, vocalist and band leader who plays the double bass and leads Ferg's Imaginary Big Band, a Leeds-based jazz ensemble of around 25 musicians; he picked up the Musicians' Company Tina May Jazz Award in 2022 and was named Young Artist of the Month in February 2023, and his new album, The New Atomic, came out on 26 June via Trash City. Rollins, who holds an MBE for services to music, is a British jazz trombonist, bandleader and record producer and the founder of BadBone and Co, with five critically acclaimed albums to his name.

The setting is half the appeal. Bishy Road is the nickname for the northern end of Bishopthorpe Road, a short stretch of about 200 yards that packs in around thirty small shops, a high proportion of them independent. It is an award-winning parade that took the GB High Street of the Year title in 2015, and some of the businesses have been doing the same trade for over a century: a butcher, a fruiterer in Fruitique, a fish shop trading since 1911, and a pharmacist that dates back to 1901. The street has a long history of its own, from the two Chinese laundries that stood here in the 1930s to the Tour de France passing through in 2014 and the regular Gay Pride procession.

If you want to take a bit of that history home, there is a new book called Bishy Road: a York shopping street in time, put together by the Clements Hall Local History Group and on sale in local shops and at Clements Hall for £5. It runs through the history of the street's businesses with customer stories, more than 60 photographs, maps and interview excerpts, and sales go towards research into the shops along Nunnery Lane in Clementhorpe and South Bank. You can pick up a copy at Pextons, Frankie and Johnny's Cookshop or The Trafalgar Bay in Nunnery Lane, or order by post if you cannot find one in town.

As a whole, the festival keeps things compact, with all its venues within a 17-minute walk of one another, so it is easy to drift between them. The finale on Bishy Road is the natural full stop to that, turning a car park into a stage for an afternoon of free jazz and food on one of the city's most independent streets.