Downtown Wilmington’s N.C. Jazz Festival is reaching for the high note in attendance this year as the city’s economic development officials continue to court new tourists and residents.

Played right, the annual three-night event could increasingly help define downtown’s “sense of place” and also convince more outsiders to relocate there, the festival’s president hopes.

Now entering its 36th year, the N.C. Jazz Festival – to be held Feb. 4-6 at Hilton Wilmington Riverside – comes on the heels of a successful 2015 event. Again this year, event organizers are selling the vast majority of tickets to jazz lovers from outside the region and state, many of whom return to the festival again and again.

Last year’s festival attracted 150 patrons who paid $200 or $225 to attend two or three days of the event, respectively, as well as general-admission attendees who came to hear specific performers. 

“We’ve probably filled 1,300 seats over the three nights,” said Sandy Evans, the festival’s president since 2007. “It’s tight, especially Saturday night.”

By mid-January, Evans and her volunteers had already snagged 165 patrons for the 2016 event and scored the biggest sale of e-tickets ever. They now expect their largest audience in nearly a decade. 

“I am amazed,” Evans said as she ticked off New York, Ohio, Tennessee, South Carolina and Arizona as just some of the states from which this year’s audience hails. 

The preponderance of non-local attendees is good news for the festival as well as for downtown boosters, based on data from Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit arts and culture group.

The organization’s 2012 study of arts’ impact on communities surveyed 182 regions representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia and found that a typical event attendee spent $24.60 in addition to the cost of admission. The survey also found that non-admissions spending by non-locals was more than twice that of locals ($39.96 versus $17.42). Generally, arts and culture travelers are more likely to stay longer, use overnight lodging and to spend $1,000 or more during their stay, the survey found.

Evans said spending by N.C. Jazz Festival attendees is generally much higher than reported in the study because about 80 percent of them come from outside New Hanover County and performances occur at night. “They have the whole day each day and just spend more money,” she said.

Visitors from nearby communities like Shallotte and Ocean Isle Beach help too. “They come and stay the whole weekend at the hotel so they don’t have to drive home at midnight,” Evans explained.

It’s not just the dollar boost to the local economy that helps, but the favorable impression of the “Wilmington and Beaches” region that is formed during the festival and shared with others, she added.

One regular, Jerry Kline of Alexandria, Virginia, calls the N.C. Jazz Festival “the classiest festival that I know of.” Kline, a retired journalist, raved about the Wilmington event to his brother-in-law, who, with his wife, starting flying in from Madison, Wisconsin, to attend. The 2016 event will mark the couple’s third visit.

“We like the little shops and we eat in very nice restaurants,” Kline said of his own experience. “I think it [Wilmington] would be a very nice place to live, actually … easy to get around, very pretty.”

Geoff Browne, a former automotive parts sales manager in Mesa, Arizona, praised the Wilmington festival’s professionalism.

A fervent jazz aficionado, Browne has attended multiple festivals around the country and calls Wilmington’s “the best-attended and best-managed classic jazz festival in the United States. Period.” 

While the San Diego festival occurs shortly after Wilmington’s, “They don’t get the attendance,” he observed.

But Browne cites a challenge facing the N.C. Jazz Festival: the ability to draw a younger audience to replenish the ranks of older attendees. 

“That’s probably the problem that every one of these jazz festivals have,” he said.

To address the issue, Evans began building some grace notes into the scale of the festival’s programming.

Inching it away from Dixieland and other classic forms of jazz favored by older audiences, she brought in a regional sextet with a more modern sound and an 11-year-old prodigy, jazz violinist Jonathan Russell.

The following year, Russell and some adult performers began conducting music clinics for youth from area middle and high schools, enhancing their knowledge and passion while making their parents more aware of the annual event.

“It’s vital to the survival of these festivals,” said Adrian Cunningham, a 38-year-old Australian who plays sax, clarinet, and flute at a variety of global events and is one of about a half-dozen international artists who have displayed their talents at the Hilton. 

In smaller communities like Wilmington, “The tradition of jazz is difficult. It doesn’t have that attraction [for] young people as it does in the cities … for whatever reason,” he said by phone during some down time at a gig in Copenhagen.

Today, about 35 percent of the attendees at the N.C. Jazz Festival are 50 or younger.

In addition to performing, Cunningham is also serving as Evans’ music director this year, putting together sets of musicians during the last two days of the event, for seven sets each night. 

This year’s Thursday night opener includes Jazz Manouche (“Gypsy Jazz”), a Big Band tribute, piano bebop, a Ladies of Jazz tribute and traditional jams. Friday and Saturday evenings will feature six or seven performers in each of the sets organized by Cunningham. Also on Saturday, event patrons will be treated to a music-soaked brunch.

Evans hopes that this year and beyond, the festival will attract even more visitors downtown and become a genuine “place-making” feature that helps boost tourism and business.

With both millennials and boomers eyeing digs in City Block Apartments, Sawmill Point and other new addresses in the Port City, “Those people will want to know what’s available culturally in town,” Evans said.

She also hopes the festival will help persuade some outsiders who like what they see to relocate permanently. “We’ve had people discover this area through us,” she said.

General-admission tickets to the festival cost $15-$60 and can be purchased online at ncjazzfestival.com/2016-festival.

The 36th annual N.C. Jazz Festival at the Hilton Wilmington Riverside Feb. 4-6 includes a lineup of concerts, a musical brunch and workshops. This year’s performers include Bria Skonberg, Nicki Parrot, Adrian Cunningham, Dion Tucker, and more. Tickets range in price for two- or three-day patron passes and tickets for the individual night concerts. Info: ncjazzfestival.com