Black Sea Jazz Festival Batumi: dates, tickets, line-up

Georgia’s flagship jazz festival is held on a tennis court. In recent years the Black Sea Jazz Festival has taken over the courts inside Batumi’s seafront boulevard for three nights in a row, gates at 19:00, and in 2026 tickets ran 120-440 GEL depending on the night and the zone. It has been going since 2007, and once the dates are out it is the single best reason to point a Batumi beach week at a specific week rather than “sometime in summer”.

Which is where most people trip up. The festival moves, and not by a few days. In 2026 it opened on 10 July, in 2023 it ran 28-30 July, and the 2020 and 2022 editions were held in August. Book flights in March on the assumption that it is “always mid-July” and you can miss it by a month.

What the festival actually is

It is produced by Eastern Promotions, with TBC Concept as presenting partner; in 2026 Mastercard was general sponsor. TBC Concept has been behind Georgia’s jazz calendar since 2011, which is why the same bank turns up on the Tbilisi Jazz Festival, Jazz & Wine in Kakheti and the Winter Jazz Festival too.

The word “jazz” in the name is historical. The bill long ago spread into soul, funk, R&B, disco and hip-hop, and the roll call of past headliners reads accordingly: Robert Plant, Quincy Jones, Lauryn Hill, Chris Brown, Snoop Dogg, Jamiroquai, Kool & the Gang, George Clinton, Al Jarreau, Lisa Stansfield, Sergio Mendes. If you are picturing a purist bebop weekend, recalibrate. This is a festival that has had a Led Zeppelin singer and a West Coast rapper on its stages.

It also used to be much longer. The tenth edition in 2016 ran ten days, 15-24 July, and remains the biggest in the festival’s history; today the format is three nights and done. The edition numbers decode easily once you know where the gap is: 2016 was the 10th, 2019 the 13th, 2020 the 14th, and then 2022 came back as the 15th - the numbering points to 2021 as the year that was skipped. The run reached the 19th in 2026. One missing summer, and the count has trailed the calendar by a year ever since.

When it happens, and when the dates appear

Three nights in a row, and lately in July - though that is a habit rather than a rule:

• 2020 - 21-23 August (14th edition, doors at 20:00, an all-Georgian bill in the post-lockdown summer)
• 2022 - 12-14 August (15th)
• 2023 - 28-30 July (16th)
• 2024 - 26-28 July (17th)
• 2025 - 11-13 July (18th)
• 2026 - 10-12 July (19th)

Dates and headline names surface in late spring, later than is convenient. The organiser’s 2026 announcement went out on 4 June; the 2025 card presale ran 3-9 June; the 2024 presale closed on 18 June. Plan on knowing both the dates and the bill by mid-June, not in May.

The 2027 dates were not out when this was written on 24 July 2026, and any site already naming them is guessing. Two channels matter: the organiser’s events page at tbcconcept.ge and the ticket platform tkt.ge; the Batumi city listings at batumievents.com usually mirror them within a few days. The standalone blackseajazz.ge address still floats around in old articles, but it is dead: the certificate is broken, and what does load is a leftover page from a different festival.

The venue, and the part of the night most people skip

The main stage sits on the Batumi Tennis Courts on Ninoshvili Street, inside the seafront boulevard park. It is open air, it is central, and it is a short walk from the sand, which makes the logistics unusually easy: you can be swimming at 18:00 and inside the gates when they open at 19:00. Headliners come on late, so nobody is missing a beach afternoon for this.

Tickets split into a general standing area and a VIP zone, and here is the bit worth knowing: in both 2024 and 2025 the VIP pass also carried entry to the nightly jam sessions at the festival club, the ones that start after the main stage goes dark - in 2025 those club doors opened at 23:00. The club was Iveria Beach in 2024, Take 5 in 2025 and 2026, and in 2026 Philip Lassiter and his band played there all three nights. The main stage is a show; the club is where the musicians actually stretch out. If you care about the playing rather than the spectacle, that upgrade is the one that pays for itself - just read the current year’s ticket terms instead of assuming the jam sessions are bundled in again.

Check the venue each year rather than assuming, too. In 2023 the whole festival moved to STAGE 17 at 34 Rustaveli Street, away from the courts entirely.

Tickets: what you pay, and the discount you probably cannot get

Sales go through tkt.ge, the Georgian ticketing platform, on a dedicated festival page (in 2026 it was tkt.ge/BlackSeaJazzFest2026). There is no separate festival box office online.

For 2026 the Batumi city events listing put the range at 120-440 GEL, depending on which night and which zone, checked on 24 July 2026; the ticket platform itself does not show prices until you open the sales page, so that listing is the readable source. The recent series is jumpier than you would expect: 100 GEL for a single standing night in 2019 (200 GEL VIP, 250 GEL for a three-night standing pass, 500 GEL for the VIP pass), 100 GEL in 2023, from 80 GEL in 2024, from 170 GEL in 2025, then that 120-440 GEL band in 2026. The cheapest recent entry was 2024, the highest floor was 2025, and 2026 came in below it - so treat each year as its own number rather than extrapolating a trend. By European festival standards all of them are cheap for three nights of international touring acts.

The discounts are the part to plan around, because most visitors cannot use them. The advertised 25% during a short presale window and the 20% that follows are tied to a TBC Concept card, and the brand changes: a TBC Concept Visa debit card in 2024 and 2025, Mastercard World Elite in 2026. Do not open an account on the strength of this page - check which card the current year’s terms actually name. Arriving from abroad without one, you pay the list price, so budget the undiscounted number rather than the headline “from” figure. Our page on prices in Georgia puts those lari figures in context against everything else you will spend.

What recent editions looked like

The best way to judge whether a future line-up will suit you is to look at the pattern of the last few years.

2026 (19th, 10-12 July). Built around the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth. The opening night was the Miles Davis Centennial Celebration with M.E.B., the Miles Electric Band, led by Davis’s nephew, the drummer and producer Vince Wilburn Jr., with the bassist Darryl Jones and the trumpeter Keyon Harrold alongside him; a Georgian review afterwards described a set that ran from the acoustic years into the electric 1980s and treated the catalogue as a laboratory rather than a tribute. Eric Benét, the American R&B singer, took the second night; the funk collective Ghost-Note, whose players have worked with Prince, Herbie Hancock, Kendrick Lamar and Snarky Puppy, closed it. Philip Lassiter ran the Take 5 club after-parties on all three evenings.

2025 (18th, 11-13 July). Ledisi opened, the bassist Vincen Garcia and Next Movement took the middle night, and Sister Sledge closed. VIP pass holders got the nightly jams at Take 5.

2024 (17th, 26-28 July). Philip Lassiter opened, the Swiss drummer Jojo Mayer brought his band NERVE, and The Jacksons - the family group Michael Jackson came out of - closed the run, with jam sessions at Iveria Beach.

2023 (16th, 28-30 July). Marcus Miller headlined the middle night, Brooklyn Funk Essentials closed, and the jam sessions ran at midnight on the beach.

Read those four years together and the formula is clear: one legacy name people recognise from the radio, one contemporary funk or fusion band that musicians come for, and one soul or R&B voice. Nobody is booking a straight-ahead acoustic quartet for the main stage.

Building a trip around it

High summer is the top of the season on the Adjara coast, and the festival week is not the moment to improvise accommodation. Rooms in central Batumi go early and prices firm up; if you want to walk home from the courts at one in the morning, book something in the old streets by the boulevard rather than out towards the new districts. Our Batumi city guide breaks down which part of town suits which kind of trip.

Getting there is straightforward. Batumi has its own airport with summer routes, and Kutaisi is the cheap alternative, a couple of hours away by bus; our Georgia airports guide compares them. From the capital, the fast train is the sane option, laid out in Tbilisi to Batumi.

Daytimes are yours, because nothing starts before seven in the evening. The obvious pairing is the sea itself - the beaches around Batumi get better the further south you go, towards Kvariati and Sarpi. On a cloudy afternoon the Batumi Botanical Garden on Green Cape takes up three hours easily. And if you have energy left after the club sets, Teatro and the rest of the city’s nightlife run until dawn anyway during festival week.

Is it worth planning a trip around?

Honestly, it depends on which traveller you are.

If you are already thinking about Batumi in high summer, then yes, without hesitation: a single night costs less than a decent dinner for two and puts you in front of an act that would fill a mid-size hall in Berlin. Buy at least one night.

If you are flying in specifically for a named artist, wait. The bill lands in June, and non-refundable flights bought in February are a bet on a line-up that does not exist yet. Watch the organiser’s page, book when the names are out, and accept that the good hotels will already have moved.

And if what you want is deep, serious jazz for three days straight, be clear-eyed. This is a coastal summer festival with a broad popular bill and a great club programme behind it. Get the pass that includes the jam sessions, treat the main stage as the warm-up, and you will have exactly the festival you came for. If the festival window does not suit your calendar at all, our guide to the best time to visit Georgia covers what the coast is like in the shoulder months, when the boulevard is quieter and beds cost half as much.

One more comparison, if the sea and the international names are not really what pulls you: the country’s other big July event is Art-Gene, the folk festival at Tbilisi’s Ethnography Museum - three or four evenings in the second half of the month, village ensembles and craft stalls on a hillside, and a ticket that costs a fraction of a night on the tennis courts. Same summer, opposite trip.