Ottawa Jazz Festival

The Ottawa Jazz Festival is a fantastic event. Tickets are around $ 85.00+ and increase a little each year.
I’ve been a couple of times before and always had an excellent time. Average audience size would be around 300,000+ over the 12 or so days.
It was founded in 1980 and has been growing ever since.
The venue (Confederation Park) is perfect for the event. The last couple of years there has been 8 stages and arond 800 acts performing so it’s a medium sized festival.
Sound and lighting are good and if the weather holds out it makes for a fantastic event.
Suitable for the whole family, I’d recommend it to everyone. ⁸⁄₁₀.

In my opinion this is Ottawa’s most underrated festival.
There are two reasons for that — on the calendar it falls very close to the hugely popular Bluesfest and also coincides with Canada Day festivities and is often missed by people.
Those two factors also make this festival better because it’s a much cheaper option than Bluesfest and on Canada Day you can usually catch a free show in the afternoon at Confederation Park.
The festival is nowhere near the Montréal Jazz Festival but it is growing in size and notoriety. The main stages are at Confederation Park with booths and tickets available there but the festival uses several other venues around town and many of them are free and easily accessible.
I’m not a huge jazz fan but they do get some really funky acts.