The Denton Arts and Jazz Festival celebrates its 35th year with a move to the North Texas Fairgrounds this September.

Courtesy of Denton Festival Foundation

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The 2026 Denton Arts & Jazz Festival lineup is here, and there’s a lot to get into.

The Denton Festival Foundation announced the full lineup for the free festival weekend, which is less than a month away on Sept. 11-13 at the North Texas Fairgrounds.

On the opening night, Tom Braxton and Lin Rountree open the headliner run. Braxton is a Billboard-charting saxophonist out of Lubbock; Rountree — the self-billed Soul-Trumpeter — has racked up 24 Billboard-charted singles, five of them hitting No. 1.

“This isn’t the kind of jazz where you just doze in and out,” says Kevin Lechler, executive director of the Denton Festival Foundation, the nonprofit behind the festival. “It’s lively, it’s upbeat and they’ll have enough back-and-forth between them that’s going to make it electric.”

Saturday night belongs to the Grant Sabin Trio. Sabin plays Delta blues the old-fashioned way — biting slide guitar that recalls Gary Clark Jr., vocals with the kind of lived-in rasp you’d expect from Spoon’s Britt Daniel and lyrics to match. He’s shared stages with Los Lobos, John Fogerty and Booker T. Jones. That resume speaks for itself.

Brave Combo closes it all down on Sept. 13. The Denton-based nuclear polka band has two Grammy wins and 30-plus years of experience turning festival crowds into joyful, sweat-soaked chaos. Their set pulls from salsa, cumbia, cha-cha, rock and more. It always ends in chicken dances, conga lines and a crowd that has fully let go. Look up last year’s closing set footage. It gets wild.

The headliners are only part of the picture. Across five stages, the full lineup features longtime festival staples like Fingerprints, Bobby Falk and Brasuka on the festival’s main stage. Elsewhere, the Pan Tones will be on the Courtyard Stage — they have a habit of playing recognizable themes from Studio Ghibli films on flutes and somehow pulling it off. The relentlessly committed Joe Tucker will roam the River Stage, and the Strung Up Sisters and the Denton Tarantinos are set toe play the Festival Stage. Suffice to say, there’s a lot going on across three days.

In case you missed our earlier coverage: the festival has moved to the North Texas Fairgrounds (2217 N. Carroll Blvd., Denton) this year — a venue that longtime locals may recognize as the same grounds that hosted the festival back in its Spring Fling days — up a month from its usual October weekend. We went deep on the why earlier this year. In short: it wasn’t an easy call, but it was a necessary one. And the new venue brings some genuine upsides: more room, better stage separation, food trucks making their debut and School of Rock setting up an instrument petting zoo in the kids’ area.

Through all of it, one thing stays the same.

“A new home and a new experience,” Lechler says. “But the same free festival Denton has loved for generations.”

The festival still needs volunteers, sponsors and arts vendors to make 2026 happen. Check the full lineup on the festival’s website and get involved while there’s still time.

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Preston Barta has been a journalist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area since 2010. He has contributed to several media outlets, including 92.1 KTFW, the North Texas Daily, Fresh Fiction, and the Denton Record-Chronicle. As a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, he is actively involved in media critique.