Over the past year, the Kennedy Center has beefed up its hip-hop programming with conversations, concerts, and special guests including luminary lyricists, trendsetting DJs, and scholars who have impacted the culture in some way over the past 50 years. Now, the center is rolling out a new offering: the Hip Hop & Jazz Festival, part of a new Hip Hop & …. series that will pair hip-hop with an intersecting genre or musical discipline each year.

For this inaugural festival, the Kennedy Center will celebrate the “dynamic relationship between hip-hop and jazz” with listening sessions, performances, dance parties, and panel discussions.

The festival kicks off March 27 with a special edition of the Kennedy Center’s Hip Hop Listening Sessions. The event will bring together a handful of DJs, radio personalities, and producers to discuss and play classic hip-hop songs with jazz samples — ranging from Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” to Kendrick Lamar’s “For Free? (Interlude).” The conversation will be moderated by D.C.-born singer, rapper, and producer Kokayi.

The programming also features a handful of live performances, including a concert by pianist and producer Robert Glasper that will honor the legacies of jazz legend Duke Ellington and the late hip-hop producer J Dilla; two performances by Igmar Thomas’s Revive Big Band (Thomas is the former bandleader for Ms. Lauryn Hill and Nas, and members of this supergroup have 13 Grammys between them); and a collaborative show with the “God MC” Rakim, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (the Grammy-nominated son of John Coltrane). The shows — including a late-night “Duke x Dilla Afterparty” — will take place in the Kennedy Center’s concert hall or the “Club at Studio K.”

“As two of America’s greatest art forms and vital genres within the Black music continuum, they have transformed global culture,” Simone Eccleston, who directs the Kennedy Center’s hip-hop culture and contemporary music programming, said in a press release.

The center is dedicating this festival to Meghan Stabile, a promoter, entrepreneur, and founder of Revive Music Group, who died of suicide in 2022 at age 39. “It’s an organic hybrid. Jazz is in hip-hop’s DNA,” Stabile told the Boston Globe in 2012.

Eccleston says Stabile was a “creative genius” and that it’s humbling to dedicate the Kennedy Center’s first Hip Hop &… festival to someone whose “legacy lives on through all of us.”

Hip Hop & Jazz runs from March 27-April 19 at the Kennedy Center. Tickets for the Revive Big Band shows on March 29 are on sale now; tickets for the rest of the events go on sale on Jan. 18 for members and Jan. 22 for the general public.