The Mildura Jazz, Food and Wine Festival

A long-running weekend

The festival's exact age is hard to fix. Listings from the mid-2010s variously described it as thirty, thirty-four and thirty-five years old, which would place its beginnings around the late 1970s or early 1980s. A jazz publication of the period called it one of the longest continuously running jazz festivals in the country.

The format was consistent across those years. The festival ran over four days on the Melbourne Cup weekend in November, and it treated the whole town as a venue. Published listings mention music in clubs, bars, cafes, restaurants, churches, wineries and streets, with the larger events set beside the Murray River.

Food, wine and the regional setting

Pairing jazz with local food and wine made sense in Sunraysia, an irrigated district known for its fruit and vines. The festival's name made the point plainly: the music came with what the region grew, and audiences were moving between tables and stages.

Who presented it

By the mid-2010s the festival sat within Arts Mildura's annual program. The 2014 edition was presented by Arts Mildura in collaboration with the Mildura River City Jazz Club, and Australian Jazz Net wrote that year about a resurgence since the move under that organisation's umbrella. The site also carried coverage of the 2015 festival.

We could not confirm whether the festival continued under this name after those years, so this page makes no claim about its present status.

Jazz in Mildura more broadly

The festival was not the town's only link with the music. The Mildura River City Jazz Club was a named partner in its later years, and Sunraysia Daily reported in December 2024 that the Australian Jazz Convention, described as the world's longest-running annual jazz event, had come to Mildura for its 78th gathering.