Check out what's planned for the Scranton Jazz Festival starting Aug. 2

The headline acts for this weekend’s Scranton Jazz Festival are a band that has performed at the Super Bowl and for U.S. presidents and a Grammy-winning saxophonist playing with local artists.

The 19th annual festival is Friday through Sunday. There will be around 80 acts. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is Saturday’s main stage headliner at the Scranton Cultural Center. The Scranton Jazz Festival Big Band with saxophonist Joe Lovano caps off Sunday at the Ritz Theater and Performing Arts Center.

Kurt Sodergren, drummer and a founding member of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, said the well-known swing band will play a little something from all of their albums, excluding Christmas records.

“You’ll get a pretty good retrospective of the band,” he said.

Sodergren’s current favorite on the set list is “The Ghost of Smokey Joe,” from their 2009 album of Cab Calloway music.

“I like it because it's got a little bit of everything,” he said. “It’s got a great story. It’s got a kind of a cool funeral dirge on the drum and the arrangement goes in all sorts of different directions and it kind of showcases everybody in the band.”

Tickets for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s 7:30 p.m. show start at $30.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was part of the '90s swing music revival, including the 1996 movie “Swingers.” They have performed in the Super Bowl halftime show and played for three U.S. presidents. They’ve been all over television and movies, including the late night talk shows, “Despicable Me,” “Phineas and Ferb," “Friends,” "So You Think You Can Dance," “Dancing With The Stars” and “Christmas in Rockefeller Center.”

On Sunday, Lovano will be playing with the local musicians of the Scranton Jazz Festival Big Band. He’ll explore his own work and the band’s.

“I’m not going to be able to tell you too much until we play,” Lovano said. ”Well, because you can’t predict the future. You address the future all the time, in the moment of now.”

Lovano won the 2000 best large jazz ensemble album Grammy Award for “52nd Street Themes” and has other nominations. He’s released nearly 40 albums as bandleader or co-bandleader.

Lovano said long-running festivals have “a certain feeling” that fuels ideas.

“When you walk onto the stage and you have an audience of people that come there for a reason. They want to dig some music and be enlightened. And maybe have them come with an awareness that they are going to be taken somewhere they might not know where they are going,” he said. “That is what jazz is about, about improvising and playing in a spontaneous fashion with the spirits of the music.”

Tickets for the 6 p.m. show start $15.

Scranton Jazz Festival Big Band leader Marko Marcinko is the festival’s artistic director. Scranton has a New Orlean’s atmosphere during the festival, Marcinko said.

“It's just a real great meet and greet social sort of atmosphere that's a lot of fun,” he said.

The free Jazz Walks on Friday and Saturday are spread through restaurants, bars and other spaces downtown. Trolley service will ferry festival fans around downtown on Friday and Saturday, from 6 to 10 p.m.

For the first time, the festival is spilling into the street, with the 100 block of Penn Avenue shut down for some performances. Another new venue is the recently opened Christopher A. Doherty Pocket Park at Linden Street and Wyoming Avenue.

See scrantonjazzfestival.org for tickets, schedule and map.

The Festival encompasses a lot of styles. “Let's say you are not the biggest fan of jazz music, I’m sure there are going be to other things on the map, blues, world beat music, funk, some R&B. You’ll hear some other music that you will really like,” Marcinko said.

Saturday's schedule starts earlier this year with the Interactive Arts Marketplace’s free performances, art vendors and children’s activities on Courthouse Square. It runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“It's a great thing to bring the kids down to,” said Sarah Effertz, executive director of the festival. Last year’s attempt at the marketplace was washed out by rain.

Jazz brunches are Sunday at Bartari, Hilton PJ’s 1910 Pub at the Hilton Scranton and Conference Center, Posh, Radisson Carmen’s 2.0 and The Railyard.