The Jazz Network Foundation
Jazz-Off Detroit
Featuring young saxophonist Stephen Grady, Jazz-Off is a competition, educational model, and intergenerational forum designed to make jazz visible, rigorous, and alive.
Competition transformed into community
Jazz-Off Detroit is one of Bill Foster’s most visionary concepts: an intergenerational platform for excellence, mentorship, education, and civic renewal through jazz.
Musicians earn their place through performance. There is no favoritism or reliance on insider access. Participants must stand out through merit, discipline, artistry, and presence—values that reflect the democratic and responsive spirit of jazz itself.
Jazz-Off Detroit · Bring Your Instrument
Two ensembles, two perspectives
The program was conceived around one ensemble for musicians 30 and under and another for musicians over 30. Seasoned musicians serve as mentors and collaborators; younger musicians bring fresh energy and experimentation. Together, they work to break down generational distance through music.
A cultural symposium
Jazz-Off extends beyond competition into workshops, talk-backs, masterclasses, call-and-response etiquette, jam-session preparation, and public conversations about why jazz matters. It invites audiences to listen more deeply and participants to grow more fully.
Stephen Grady: a young voice in Detroit jazz
Stephen Grady embodies the purpose of Jazz-Off: a young musician developing his voice in direct relationship with Detroit’s history, its elders, and the places where the music took root.
Young Artist Focus · Jazz-Off Detroit
Stephen Grady
As a young saxophonist, Grady became part of a living exchange between generations. His performance outside the historic Blue Bird Inn places emerging artistry directly in conversation with one of Detroit’s most consequential jazz sites.
Remembering the Blue Bird Inn does more than document a performance. It shows how Jazz-Off creates context: a young artist is not separated from the history of the music, but invited to enter it, respond to it, and help carry it forward.
Bill Foster in conversation
Jazz-Off is also preserved through the voices of the people who built it. In this conversation with Stephen Grady’s father, Bill Foster speaks directly about Detroit jazz, community memory, and an era when the music seemed to be everywhere.
This interview makes the Foundation’s history personal. Foster is not only described as an organizer and cultural steward; visitors can hear him explain the environment, relationships, and conviction that shaped decades of work in Detroit.