No one was shot at any jazz festivals held throughout the U.S. over Labor Day weekend, unless artists and audiences captured by photography count. Marc PoKempner was among the expert photogs creating views of the sounds at the 36th annual Chicago Jazz Festival. Marc is especially good incorporating into his compositions the huge video image projected behind artists […]

The 36th annual Chicago Jazz Festival (mostly free) kicked off Wednesday with a trolley tour of neighborhood clubs. Marc PoKempner captured performers’ and crowds’ spirits in his images: The Jazz Festival continues tonight — Saturday — with headlining vibist Gary Burton receiving JJA Jazz Awards for his playing and Best Book of the Year — Learning […]

The Promontory, a large, flexible, shiny new performance hall in Chicago’s upswinging Hyde Park neighborhood (home to the Obamas) opened for music last weekend with the South Side Big Band, directed by veteran composer/arranger Tom Tom Washington. It’s an audacious attempt to restart commercial entertainment in an area that for decades has mostly been served […]

Chicago is relatively new in bringing jazz to its many small, diverse parks but the Neighborhood Nights experiment,  conducted by the Jazz Institute of Chicago, works just fine, as drummer Michael Zerang’s Blue Lights in Logan Square last Sunday proved. Last of these free shows is Saturday (tomorrow) at 1 pm at Woodson Regional Library […]

Evanston Il’s cross-genre club Space showcased drummer Billy Martin’s lively, upbeat Wicked Knee brass band last night, and the neighborhood tavern Beat Kitchen hosted its weekly exploratory jam by Extraordinary Popular Delusions the night before. I’ve barely scratched the surface but clearly Chicago’s got a broad range of performance venues fun to poke into, considering the bookings. Billy Martin, the man at the tubs […]

I’m aghast at The New Yorker’s rip-off of Sonny Rollins’ good name and great heart to slag jazz in the guise of “humor.” A Daily Shouts piece, bylined “Django Gold” (surely a pseudonym) purports to be “Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words” and controverts the very essence of the art form this grand hero has embodied for more than half […]

Saxophonists Mars Williams and Ken Vandermark played like wild beasts before a tight and determinedly transgressive troupe recalling little-known but regionally influential multi-instrumentalist/bandleader Hal Russell (1926-1992) last night in Millenium Park’s swanky Pritzker Pavillion (the one designed by Frank Gehry) as part of the city’s free Made In Chicago: World Class Jazz series. With bassist Kent Kessler, percussionist […]

While Hypnotic Brass Ensemble was tearing it up in the midst of its Bad Boys of Jazz tour in Soria, Spain, the eight brothers’ patriarch held forth on the first of four free Neighborhood Nights concerts presented by the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

Charlie Haden, who died July 11 at age 76, was the man who anchored the free flights of many musicians to the foundations of music: rhythm and harmony. This photo by Enid Farber shows how I felt about being around him, Dewey Redman and Edward Blackwell (not pictured; the saxophonist is Branford Marsalis, but the occasion […]

Jazz above and beyond established conventions of jazz in and around NYC last month was super abundant — and I’m going to miss a lot about this scene when I move base of operations to Chicago in mid-July. In the past 30 days I heard:  The Eric Dolphy Freedom of Sound 2-day conference/concerts at Montclair State […]

The National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters of 2015, announced today, are musicians Carla Bley, George Coleman and Charles Lloyd — all personal favorites who provoked my earliest interests in jazz going beyond “jazz.” So here are listening recommendations — and my special shout out to Jazz Master Joe Segal of Chicago’s Jazz Showcase  (receiving the A.B. Spellman Award […]

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”JiuiRjN7E0uAO2UaM8RXMF3k9kToOBIP”] Saxophonist and pianist Charles Gayle has one of the largest, most urgent and original saxophone sounds to be heard since the 1990s. That was 20 years after he moved from Buffalo to NYC and started playing on the streets, then was “discovered,” promoted and booked by Michael Dorf, operator of the original Knitting Factory. […]

If saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler, icons of bust-loose and beautiful improvisation, were alive today . . .they’d be pleased by and maybe attending the festival and concert in their honor this week in Montclair, NJ and Brooklyn. Dolphy died of undiagnosed diabetes in 1964, and Ayler either jumped or was pushed into the […]