The founder and artistic director of the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest is retiring after 36 years, handing the eight-stage downtown festival he started in 1990 to successor Christian Vela.

When the last set ended Sunday in Plaza de César Chávez, the downtown San Jose park went quiet on a festival that had filled it, in one form or another, since 1990 — and quiet on the man who built it. Bruce Labadie, founder and artistic director of the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, told KGO's Tiffany Liou that this 36th edition was his last.

The origin story he tells is a place story. Walking a dead downtown decades ago, Labadie recalled, he and his collaborators decided the cure was a jazz festival. "We said San Jose is so dead. We need to do something," he told ABC7. The first festival, in 1990, had a single stage and drew roughly 10,000 people to the plaza over two August days, according to San Jose Jazz's own history. Year two, he added a couple more stages. This month's edition ran August 7–9 across eight stages and roughly 80 acts in venues around downtown, with Patti LaBelle and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue among the headliners.

Labadie self-funded the first two festivals out of pocket before sponsorship arrived, Metro Silicon Valley reported in its account of the event's beginnings — a detail that squares with how small the thing started and how large it got. Beyond the festival, he spent years booking the Mountain Winery in Saratoga and Montalvo Arts Center, and ran San Jose's Music in the Park; the city named him a Cornerstone of the Arts, its top honor for an arts administrator, in 2019.

The handoff has a runway under it. Labadie is turning the artistic director role over to Christian Vela, an East San Jose native who grew up biking down to the festival as a kid and who spent more than a decade at SFJAZZ before working the festival's production in recent years. "It's a super great privilege to be the steward of something that has been built so well by Bruce Labadie," Vela told San José Spotlight, adding that he wants to widen the festival's Latin programming beyond salsa into cumbia, Cuban music and Chicano soul. Vela formally takes over in September.

He inherits a stable institution — the parent nonprofit, San Jose Jazz, reported about $3.3 million in revenue in its most recent federal filing — and a downtown mid-reinvention, with the plaza itself the subject of a conservancy's redevelopment plans. What someone walking through Plaza de César Chávez next August will notice is the same eight stages, and a different name programming them. "It's time to turn it over to somebody else," Labadie said.