Kathmandu's long-running jazz festival is back. Surya Nepal Jazzmandu, now in its 22nd edition, runs from 29 October to 4 November, slotting neatly between Nepal's two biggest festivals, Dasain and Tihar — so visitors get live music stacked on top of the country's most colourful festive season.
Eleven acts from the US, Brazil, Switzerland, France, Australia, Singapore and Nepal are on the bill. The headliner is Tito Puente Jr, son of the Latin jazz pioneer, whose album Got Mambo? mixes classic mambo rhythms with a modern edge. He'll be joined on stage by a large ensemble including Nepali sax players Pravin Chettri and Inap Raj Shrestha and Swiss pianist Manon Mullener.
Mullener is worth catching in her own right. She started piano at four, trained in Havana as a teenager, won the Swiss Jazz Award, and has two albums out — Reflejos (2019) and STORIES (2024), recorded in New York. Also flying in: Brazilian guitarist César Haas, an Eastman-trained professor at Washington State University who blends Brazilian traditions with contemporary jazz, and the Kevin Saura Group from Nice, mixing funk grooves with bebop and blues-rock. Australian saxophonist Nick Aggs returns to Kathmandu for the eighth time with a new quartet featuring his brother Ant Aggs on keys.
The local line-up is just as interesting. Kathmandu's own Cadenza Collective — whose drummer and singer Navin Chettri co-founded the festival in 2002 after a trip to an Australian jazz festival — headlines the home crowd. Kanta dAb dAb fuses sitar, bass and percussion into something distinctly Nepali yet modern, while the Hot Club of Patan reworks 1930s gypsy jazz à la Grappelli and Reinhardt, plus covers of Nepali pop classics by Narayan Gopal. Rounding things out are eastern classical performers including khayal vocalist Jonisha Poudel, a violin-and-tabla duo, and a Gandharva ensemble — a nod to Nepal's traditional travelling minstrels, once nicknamed 'walking newspapers' for carrying news from village to village.
Why go? Jazzmandu is one of Asia's most unlikely festival success stories: a homegrown event that has run almost every year since 2002 and now pulls top-tier international musicians to the Himalayas. It's a rare chance to hear Latin jazz, Swiss piano trios and Nepali folk fusion in the same week, all against the backdrop of Kathmandu during Dasain and Tihar, when the city is decorated, festive and at its liveliest. Timing your trip around the festival means you can pair nightly gigs with daytime exploring — Patan's squares, Thamel's cafés, mountain viewpoints on clear autumn days.
Original reporting: Nepali Times
