The International Festival of the United States of America’s national UNESCO Celebration celebrates the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s endeavors to understand, preserve and convey the best of humanity; and will bring together prominent leaders and a number of artistic performances that will highlight and promote the diversity of Houston, the sounds of jazz music, and the basic ideas and principles of preservation through the eyes of cultural diversity, identified in UNESCO conventions. Fest USA’s national UNESCO Celebration of cultural diversity and jazz coincides with UNESCO’s Slave Route Project, concentration on the theme, “Assume the past, understand the present, build the future together.” Through jazz, millions of people have sung and still sing today their desire for freedom, tolerance and human dignity.” Music and jazz in particular, is an international language that represents freedom because of its origin – growing out of slavery. 

 

Special Guests include: The Honorable Eliot Minchenberg, Director of Office/UNESCO Representative to the United Nations Headquarters, UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador and Artist of Peace, Multiple GRAMMY award winning icon Marcus Miller, The Honorable Judy Cheng-Hopkins, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Consul General Hirofumi Murabayashi of Japan, Mayor Sylvester Turner, City of Houston, Zion Escobar, Executive Director of Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, Herbie Hancock Institute/HSPVA Jazz Ensemble, and more.