Ribble Valley's anticipated June Jazz Weekend is coming to St Mary's Centre

The Ribble Valley June Jazz Weekend is set to get underway on Friday, offering a mix of fresh, young jazz performers and seasoned entertainers when it comes to St Mary's Centre.

The event, which is being held from June 5th, 2026, until June 7th, 2026, will start off with a performance from The Swing Commanders & Maisie Riley before Veronneau, the Olive Cuttill Quintet, the Jack Yerkess Quartet and the Vernon Gallery Big Band grace the stage on Saturday. Preparations are ongoing for the event’s organisers – the Ribble Valley Jazz & Blues Club – who are finalising the remaining few details before the event gets underway.

“It's going great,” Gayle Knight of Ribble Valley’s Jazz & Blues Club said. “We're obviously in the last week now before the event, so we're just dealing with little details now. We're looking forward to it,” Knight finished.

After hosting the Ribble Valley Jazz and Blues Festival over the early May bank holiday weekend and attracting 15,000 people in previous years, this year’s event will be a little different for the Jazz & Blues club. Instead of running a big festival spread across the borough with fringe events, the Ribble Valley June Jazz Weekend will take place at one venue – St Mary’s Centre – offering a more scaled-back weekend of live music.

“Obviously in previous years we've done events that have involved all the pubs and coffee bars in the town and have been big public open events. So this is on a much different scale, a much smaller scale, and it's intentionally that way. We just decided that with a few things that happened last year, we just needed to regroup and just put on an event that was purely back to the roots, really, of the Jazz and Blues Club. So yes, it will obviously have much smaller audiences, but that of course is intentional, because we can only have audiences the size of the venue now,” Knight stated.

When quizzed on the Jazz and Blues Club’s need to “regroup”, Knight explained the reasoning behind the decision to run a scaled-down event this year.

“We had the unfortunate loss of our chair last year, but we also had last year's festival that didn't attract the same numbers that it had in previous years, because we had tougher competition from other festivals,” Knight said. “It was earlier in May as well (the festival last year). So we just decided, after being awarded some Arts Council funding, that it was better to focus on re-establishing the organisation and looking back at the roots and how it originally was formed and evolved and just taking this year to just take that reflection, really,” Knight added.

The weekend will come to a close with the Clitheroe Pop Choir, Aaron Liddard and the James Morton Groove Den featuring Dennis Rollins on Sunday. The Groove Den is the brainchild of James Morton, a heavyweight in Bristol's music scene. Morton is one of the most exciting saxophonists of his generation, performing with the likes of Pee Wee Ellis, Fred Wesley and The New JB's; George Clinton; The Herbaliser; Kasabian; and Pendulum.

“I mean, to get people of that calibre to come up to Clitheroe, it is really good,” Knight stated. “And so we're quite honoured that we're just a little stopping point on some of these bands' big tours,” Knight finished.

The Ribble Valley June Jazz Weekend will get underway on Friday at Clitheroe’s St Mary’s Centre, starting with The Swing Commanders & Maisie Riley.