Hanoi has temples, French villas, street food and a thousand years of history. Now, the Vietnamese capital is exploring whether jazz-shaped by local sounds, spaces and stories-can become another reason for visitors to experience the city and return.
The inaugural Hanoi Jazztival 2026 has come to an end after just a few days, but its ambitions stretch much further.
Organizers envision it becoming an annual fixture in the Vietnamese capital, one capable of building a lasting audience, nurturing a new generation of musicians, attracting visitors and eventually becoming part of Hanoi’s cultural memory.
The idea can be expressed in one simple sentence: “September in Hanoi means a jazz festival.”
If that association becomes embedded in the public imagination, Hanoi will have created something that cannot be built from concrete but can nevertheless become an invaluable asset for a city.
From physical infrastructure to cultural memory
Hanoi Jazztival 2026 is envisioned as an annual cultural event in the Vietnamese capital.
In the 21st century, a city’s competitiveness is no longer measured only by infrastructure, skyscrapers or the speed of its transport network.
Increasingly, another question matters: How does a city make people feel when they live there or visit?
A livable city needs parks, schools, hospitals and efficient transportation. But becoming a place people want to return to requires things that are much harder to construct: identity, memories, experiences and stories.
That is where cultural industries can play a larger role.
Their value goes beyond selling tickets to a concert or commercializing a piece of art. At a broader level, cultural industries can turn creativity into economic and social value through music, cinema, design, performing arts, fashion, food, architecture, media and tourism.
A single concert may generate ticket revenue. A festival can persuade a visitor to stay another night, eat another meal, enter a museum, buy something designed locally, stop at a bar and tell friends about the city after returning home.
Cultural value can therefore have a life far longer than the ticket that first created the experience.
Hanoi Jazztival is being developed as an annual event connected to the capital’s cultural industries strategy and its commitments as part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.
Significantly, the festival is not confined to a single theater.
Activities have spread across venues including the garden of the Hanoi Opera House, the Octagonal House, 22 Hang Buom Street and the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, demonstrating how jazz can reach broader audiences when music becomes intertwined with the city itself.
When jazz meets Hanoi
Hanoi is a city of contrasts that somehow coexist.
There are the narrow streets of the Old Quarter and modern glass buildings, communal houses and pagodas, French colonial villas, aging apartment blocks and new creative spaces.
There are people drinking iced tea on the sidewalk and young urbanites spending an evening in an upscale wine bar.
These experiences may appear unrelated, yet together they form Hanoi.
Jazz has the ability to enter a city in much the same way.
Listeners do not necessarily need to understand chord structures or remember the names of different jazz schools to connect with the music.
Visiting an unfamiliar city works similarly: people may know little about its history yet find themselves drawn to a street, the smell of food or the light at the end of the day.
Emotion can come before knowledge. Jazz can work that way too.
For veteran Vietnamese saxophonist Quyen Van Minh, who has spent decades helping jazz take root in Hanoi, the city’s cultural foundations offer fertile ground for creating something new.
A milestone came in 1994, when his ambition to bring jazz closer to younger audiences began to take shape.
Having spent 73 years closely connected with the capital, Minh sees Hanoi’s thousand-year cultural heritage as a foundation from which musicians can create contemporary work.
“In me is an entire landscape of memories,” he said.
Although he has never composed a piece specifically about the Red River, Minh said he has always felt that the development of jazz in Hanoi is closely connected to it - a river carrying layers of the city’s history.
“From that foundation of heritage, we inherit tradition and use it to think and create new values worthy of the city’s transformation,” he said.
Finding a Vietnamese language for jazz
A single concert may generate ticket revenue, but a festival can encourage visitors to stay in Hanoi for another night and experience more of the city.
For Minh, listening to jazz is about feeling improvisation rather than simply following melody.
Vietnamese audiences have traditionally been accustomed to songs with lyrics, which provide an immediate route into a song and its story. Jazz often asks for a different kind of listening.
Minh believes that trying too hard to understand every musical detail can sometimes interfere with the emotional experience.
Learning to appreciate jazz, he said, can require patience and repeated listening, although some classic jazz melodies can captivate audiences immediately through their rhythms and distinctive scales.
He also sees significant potential in combining Vietnamese traditional music with jazz.
The pentatonic scales found in Vietnamese folk music have similarities with the five-note pentatonic system widely taught in international jazz education.
That overlap inspired Minh to compose jazz pieces drawing on the scales and folk melodies of Vietnam’s different ethnic communities.
American saxophonist David Carlos, who has lived and worked in Hanoi and Da Nang for four years, has also observed a distinctly Vietnamese jazz language beginning to emerge.
He pointed to combinations of instruments, song forms and, notably, the tonal nature of the Vietnamese language as elements capable of producing striking melodic changes.
But Vietnam’s jazz scene still faces a practical constraint: there are not enough jazz musicians.
The shortage makes it difficult to organize regular weekly performances, Carlos said. He hopes more jazz clubs will emerge to provide musicians with places to perform and develop.
While young talents are increasingly exploring their own musical directions, he sees training and collaboration with musicians in Vietnam as a priority, with Vietnamese students potentially gaining more opportunities to discover and build careers around jazz.
Jazz as a window into modern Vietnam
Singaporean researcher Stan BH Tan-Tangbau offers another perspective on what makes Vietnamese jazz distinctive.
Tan-Tangbau spent nearly a decade completing a book on Quyen Van Minh and Hanoi’s jazz scene.
To him, jazz in Vietnam represents a distinctive cultural phenomenon because the music provides a way of observing the country’s historical and cultural transformations beyond what conventional historical accounts can capture.
It brings an international musical language into contact with the personal experiences of Vietnamese artists living through different periods.
That interaction may ultimately be more important than trying to reproduce the jazz cultures of cities already famous for the genre.
People’s Artist Tan Minh, director of the Thang Long Song, Music and Dance Theatre, argues that the assets of a city are not limited to what can be seen in its architecture and monuments. They also include what people can hear and feel.
People’s Artist Tan Minh, director of the Thang Long Song, Music and Dance Theatre.
Hanoi already has the heritage of ancient Thang Long, the Old Quarter and traditional musical forms such as xam, ca tru and hat van, alongside a contemporary urban culture.
The objective, he said, should not be to artificially turn jazz into a Hanoi “specialty.”
Instead, the challenge is to create a way of experiencing jazz that carries Hanoi’s own identity.
“We don’t need to make jazz like New York, Paris or Tokyo,” Tan Minh said. “When Vietnamese materials meet the improvisational spirit of jazz, when international artists meet Vietnamese artists amid Hanoi’s heritage, we create something the world has never had.”
From a festival to an ecosystem
That ambition goes beyond Hanoi Jazztival itself.
Between 2026 and 2030, plans call for the festival to develop into an annual event with a fixed place on the city’s cultural calendar.
The longer-term vision includes a Hanoi Jazz Week, artist residency programs, experiences combining heritage, food and jazz, and a network of performances operating throughout the year.
The concept reflects a broader change in tourism.
Modern travelers are increasingly interested not simply in what there is to see, but in what there is to experience.
A historic monument can remain in the same place for centuries. The experiences surrounding it, however, need to keep evolving.
An annual festival can function as a cultural clock, creating a particular moment each year that people anticipate - and potentially travel back to experience again.
For Hanoi, the opportunity is therefore larger than building a successful music festival.
It is about turning an event into an ecosystem, an ecosystem into a cultural brand, and that brand into a form of soft power for the city.
The first Hanoi Jazztival cannot answer whether that vision will succeed. But it has offered a glimpse of what the answer might look and sound like: Vietnamese musicians and international artists improvising together, jazz moving beyond concert halls into heritage spaces, and a city using music to tell a new story about itself.
The ultimate ambition, as Tan Minh put it, is for visitors one day to be able to say simply: “I came for Hanoi Jazztival.”
Vietnamnet.vn
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