There is a particular quality to summer evenings at the Théâtre de Verdure in Nice — the light thickens to amber, a salt-edged breeze moves in from the Baie des Anges, and the open-air theatre fills with the low murmur of an audience settling into something it cannot quite anticipate. It is the right place, in other words, for music that refuses to announce itself simply.
On 23 July 2026, that music belongs to Kassa Overall. The New York-based drummer, MC, singer, and producer takes the Scène Théâtre de Verdure as part of Nice Jazz Festival — one of the oldest and most consistently adventurous jazz gatherings in Europe, held each summer in the gardens of the Cimiez hill and, as here, at the Verdure stage in the heart of the city.
A Festival With Deep Roots
Nice Jazz Festival has been running since 1948, which makes it one of the founding institutions of European jazz culture. Miles Davis played here. Nina Simone played here. The festival has always understood that jazz is not a museum exhibit but a living argument — between tradition and disruption, between composition and chance. It is against that long backdrop that the programming of an artist like Kassa Overall reads not as provocation, but as continuity.
Overall trained as a jazz drummer — rigorously, in the conservatory sense — before building a practice that pulls hip-hop production techniques, rap cadences, and avant-garde experimentation into the same room. The result is music that does not sit comfortably in any single category, which is precisely the point. His albums layer live drumming over fractured beats, his own voice moving between sung melody and rapped verse, electronics arriving and departing without warning. The seams between genres are not hidden; they are the subject.
'Mêlant l'expérimentation avant-gardiste aux techniques de production hip-hop afin de déplacer le point de rencontre entre le jazz et le rap vers des territoires encore inexplorés.' — Nice Jazz Festival on Kassa Overall
The Stage Itself
The Théâtre de Verdure — the 'green theatre' — sits within the Jardin Albert 1er, Nice's oldest public garden, a long ribbon of plane trees and fountains that runs between the old town and the Promenade des Anglais. The stage is open to the sky. Sound travels differently here than in a sealed concert hall: it disperses upward, into the warm night, which suits music built on space and silence as much as on density and noise.
For a performance by Kassa Overall, that architecture matters. His live sets are not reproductions of studio recordings; they tend to expand, to test the limits of what a drummer-producer-MC can hold together in real time. The physicality of the drumming anchors everything, even when the electronics drift furthest from any recognisable centre.
The Côte d'Azur in late July is, of course, at full summer intensity — the city crowded, the sea warm, the days long enough that darkness does not arrive until well after nine. An outdoor concert becomes part of the evening rather than an interruption of it. One moves from dinner in the old town, through the garden, to a seat under the open sky, and the transition is seamless.
For those who follow contemporary jazz seriously — or who follow the conversation between jazz and hip-hop that has been one of the most generative in recent music — Kassa Overall at Nice Jazz Festival is the kind of booking that rewards attention. It is not comfortable music, and it is not meant to be. But on a warm July night, with the Mediterranean somewhere just beyond the treeline, discomfort of that particular kind is its own pleasure.
Tickets and full programme details are available at nicejazzfest.fr.