As we circled the globe looking for the best of jazz, I admit, I was surprised to find a trend fostered by the French language; it seems that most romantic language lends itself to this passionate music. From New Orleans, LA in the United States to Marciac, France, here are the best of the best:

Coming in at, perhaps, the most popular and best known is the New Orleans Jazz Festival in Louisiana which this past year featured such superstars as The Neville Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, Tim McGraw, and Santana. The best of the U.S. can arguably be summed up with the New York Jazz (running now) and San Francisco Jazz Festivals, creating a cross-continent tour to keep you entertained. Usually mid-October through November 30, the forthcoming San Francisco Jazz Festival brings the best and brightest to the beautiful Golden Gate setting for epic and intimate concerts at venues throughout the city.

Head north from your U.S. tour to Montreal then south to Havana (as you can’t get there from the U.S.) to finish a North America tour including Canada’s Montreal Jazz Festival starting June 26 at the Place des Arts, and The Havana International Jazz Festival. Design by Cubans and… Canadians (apparently, yes really), first time and returning visitors to the Havana Festival get to know Cuban culture while experiencing the best of Latin and international jazz; be sure to bring some of that Montreal experience with you and you’ll fit right in.

From the U.S. to Europe, the Montreux Jazz Festival kicks off in early July starting you at the foot of the Alps on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, in a region known for its unique climate and quality of life as “The Swiss Riviera”. Wrap up Europe with time in France at the Jazz in Marciac summer festival which has just tapped Wynton Marsalis with his Septet, Quintet and friend Richard Galliano. From Marciac to Paris for the ongoing Paris Jazz Festival in beautiful Parc Floral.

Not found in a specific place so much as being throughout the Caribbean, the annual Jazz Party at Sea is a Week long Jazz Cruise featuring the likes of the Cyrus Chestnut Trio and Harry Allen Quartet. With 30 top musicians playing in various combinations on different nights, you get to know them personally in intimate settings granting the possibility of joining an amateur jam

I’d be remiss without adding a local favorite; the Fillmore Jazz Festival in San Francisco, CA this Independence Day weekend. Say hello to Brooks for me.

Not enough? Find your local jazz festival with Zvents or any one of our local partners. For more Jazz news and music, give Jazziz a read or visit All about Jazz.

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Google, today, released MyMaps, a feature that allows users to personalize a map with content from 3rd party applications such as local weather, cheap gas prices, photos from Yahoo! Flickr, or videos from YouTube.

While using Maps, we thought you might enjoy seeing things going on in your neighborhood and getting a birds of view of what to do. Add Zvents’ local event search to Google Maps to discover things to do near you or where ever you might be traveling. With Zvents, your map dynamically updates with popular events from our millions of fairs, festivals, activities, concerts, classes, and shows. The application supports our natural language search engine enabling you to define what and/or the time frame of events that should be displayed and by simply dragging the map, you can literally browse your options.

I centered on Seattle, Washington and found a Hairspray Movie Premiere at 5th Avenue Theatre on Monday, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast playing at the Tacoma Musical Playhouse, and a Shakespeare Festival on the water at Luther Burbank Park. Moving the map south though I find Kelly Clarkson playing Rose Garden Arena just down the road in Portland, Oregon. Sure, she’s coming up to Seattle in a couple days anyway but I’m anxious to see her

You might say we’ve put event search on the map.

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With Summer well on its way fairs and festivals from Boston to San Jose, we’ve partnered with Google to release schedules of summer events through Google Calendar.

A wonderful scheduling and organization platform, Google Calendar helps you keep track of life’s important events. With the launch of a new Calendar Gallery yesterday, Google has made available to you various schedules and things to do, in particular, Summer events. Leveraging Zvents’ events in Chicago as well as those available through our partners in San Jose, Detroit, and Orange County California, we have your summer stocked with art fairs, music festivals, celebrations and block parties to keep you entertained.

From the start, we wanted our Google Calendar™ web-based calendar service to take all the work out of “managing your calendar,” and a key piece of that was making it easy to search among public calendars for interesting events – whether it’s a local children’s story hour or the San Antonio Spurs schedule – and add them to your personal calendar with one click.

Beyond the themed event calendars available through Google’s gallery, hundreds of unique events and schedules are already, readily accessible and easily added to your Calendar with the click of a button. Whether you want the summer planned or prefer to pick and choose what’s right for you, Google Calendar will organize your life, and we’ll be here, helping you discover things to do.

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We’ve had our heads down for weeks; prepping what I think is the best Movie experience online. As your search engine for things to do, it was obvious to us that while discovering festivals, concerts, and dance and cooking classes satiates most of your desires, we all take time out to catch a movie at the local Cineplex. So, building on the experience you’ve come to love from Zvents, we rolled out a tremendous cinema database promoting almost a million movie show times at more than 7,000 theaters throughout the United States and Canada.

Theaters are automatically sorted by distance from you, ensuring relevant options as you search for movies by genre, actor, rating, or city. We’ve left no film uncovered, with the latest in action and animation to more selective tastes for fans of the classics. So find your films, become a critic, and Discover Movies.

Oh, by the way, make an event of that night at the movies. We’ve added restaurant recommendations near your favorite theaters leaving you no excuse but dinner and drinks on that date!

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