Toronto Jazz Festival 2026: Three Sides of the City's Biggest Jazz Weekend (Maya Killtron & Ibrahim Maalouf, Duck Society, Joseph Funk)

Every June the Toronto Jazz Festival takes over the city — big ticketed halls, an outdoor stage in a park, and free pop-up stages on the sidewalk. The 2026 edition ran June 19–28, and across it I shot three sets I keep coming back to for how little they had in common: a roughly 1,500-capacity music hall, an outdoor stage that survived a blackout, and a Yorkville street corner that stopped traffic. Same festival, three completely different vibes.

That range is really the whole point of a festival like this — and, if I’m honest, the reason I love shooting it. One weekend asks you to work a dark, haze-filled theatre, then an open-air tent, then a curb in full daylight. Here’s how all three went.

Maya Killtron opens for Ibrahim Maalouf — Danforth Music Hall

The biggest stage of my festival, and it was already packed — for the opener. Toronto’s Maya Killtron is a classically trained violinist who folds funk, jazz, disco and roller-boogie into her own thing, and she’s only recently started weaving the violin back into her live show — so watching her move between a bowed electric violin and full-voiced vocals felt like catching something new. She’s spent years as a backup vocalist and touring musician for Juno, Polaris and Grammy winners; here she was out front, filling the Danforth on her own.

Her band was worth the ticket on its own. On bass was Tyler Emond — one of the busiest players of the entire festival, with three separate sets across the weekend — a multi-instrumentalist and composer who took Humber’s Oscar Peterson Prize, tunes his double bass in fifths, and moves between Afro-Maqam, classical Arabic, jazz and pop.

On saxophone and keyboard was La-Nai Gabriel, an award-winning Toronto composer and producer who won a 2024 Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Music. Two people you’d headline a bill around, playing the opening slot.

And the name they were opening for tells you why the hall was full early: Ibrahim Maalouf. The French-Lebanese trumpeter — born in Beirut in 1980, raised in Paris — plays the quarter-tone trumpet, a four-valve instrument his father, Nassim Maalouf, invented so the horn could bend into the microtones of Arabic maqams. He’s racked up fifteen international competition wins and a Victoires du Jazz award, and in 2022 he became the first Lebanese instrumentalist ever nominated for a Grammy, for Queen of Sheba. The Danforth was his Toronto stop — a maqam-trumpet star headlining a hometown-feeling hall that an opener had already filled.

Duck Society and the blackout — OLG Village

Across town, under string-lit trees on the outdoor OLG Village stage, Duck Society — an eight-piece Toronto jazz-fusion collective of horns, keys, guitar, bass and percussion — brought a set of all-original music that folds funk, soul and hip-hop into modern jazz. They were featured through the festival’s “Jazz Up Next” program for emerging Greater Toronto artists, and they earned the moment the hard way.

Because the power went out that night. The act before them had to play through it with no power at all — on a tiny speaker they’d hauled in themselves — while the stage sat dark. It came back on roughly halfway through Duck Society’s set, and the second it did, the place detonated. The adrenaline was sky-high and all eight of them played their hearts out, like they were making up for the blackout in real time. Then, with about five minutes of set left, the city extended the curfew by another thirty — the band and the whole crowd erupted, and the energy only got crazier as the music kept going.

Standouts from the set included “Peacetime Warfare,” “New Beast” and “I Whisper Your Name” — the kind of originals that landed even harder for having been rescued from a dead stage.

Joseph Funk turns a sidewalk into a stage — Sidewalk Sessions

On paper this was the hardest set of my festival to shoot — no stage, no lighting rig, no pit, just a trio on a sidewalk in broad daylight. But it brought me back to my roots: street photography and long exposure, working with whatever the corner gave me. For the festival’s Sidewalk Sessions, Joseph Funk — a Toronto trumpeter and flugelhornist, University of Toronto grad, and 2025 Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival Artist of the Year — set up his trio of trumpet, upright bass and drums for two open-air sets: the first at Avenue Road and Bloor, a few steps from the ROM’s crystal, the second further into Yorkville.

At the first stop the sidewalks filled up. At the second, deeper into Yorkville, they overflowed into the street itself — the crowd spilling off the curb until traffic slowed and cars stopped. One of the quietest streets in the neighbourhood turned into one of the busiest, and everyone turned to look: dog walkers, old couples, diners out on the restaurant patios, shoppers, even travellers wheeling suitcases. One person sat down on the ground to sketch the band in her notebook; when the sets ended, Funk stayed to talk to the kids who’d gathered at the front.

Three sets, three completely different vibes: a packed hall that turned out for an opener, an outdoor stage that came back from a blackout swinging, and a sidewalk that brought traffic to a crawl. That spread — and being able to shoot all of it — is exactly what a festival like the Toronto Jazz Festival is for.