Downtown Topeka, Inc., Visit Topeka, Inc. and Topeka Jazz workshop will sponsor a jazz and food truck festival on Oct. 10. The festival will take place at 9th and Kansas Avenue from 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.

“We’re really focusing on creating events for our city and that’s kind of what this goal is, just to create another event that our community can be a part of,” said Rosa Cavazos, tourism development manager at Visit Topeka, Inc. “It’s great that we’ll have jazz music this time.”

The event will start at 4:30 p.m. downtown. The Augmented Fifths, lead by Craig Treinen, a Washburn jazz professor, will perform at six.  Following their performance, at 7:15 p.m., the New Orleans group, Bonerama, will perform.

Since the overwhelming success of the last food truck festival, Cavazos has been on the lookout for ways to incorporate another food truck festival into Topeka life.

“We just heard a lot of people saying that they wanted to have an evening event and possibly do an adult event, so we figured that incorporating the two events together just made sense,” Cavazos said.

In regards to the last food truck festival, Cavazos said that participants were “really positive about it.”

“There was no way we could have anticipated the number of people that actually came out, but we had over 10,000 people in that weekend come out to Gage Park and it was great to see the park filled and families there and everybody’s just having an awesome time at the event,” Cavazos said.

In order to avoid the problems the last food truck festival ran into, the food trucks will be more spread out, facing different directions and more numerous.

“We do have some of the same trucks that are coming that were at the last food truck festival, but we also have a number of different food trucks that are also coming that we’re super excited about,” Cavazos said.

There will be from 15 to 20 food trucks from all over, including cities like Wichita, Salina, Manhattan, Lenexa and Overland Park. Some trucks may have licenses to sell beer as well.

The food trucks and the free jazz concert promises to be fun for all ages.  For more information, please see the Facebook event “Capital City JAZZ & FOOD TRUCK Festival” or contact Visit Topeka, Inc. at 785-234-1030.