Chicago's south side Chosen Fest Picnic and Festival with DJs, still free to kids under 12 Chicago offers, surprisingly enough, many opportunities to catch exciting, accomplished and emerging music across genres, with oodles of concerts free of charge, meaning they have to funded by others than attendees. Our extraordinary summer events season launched last weekend with the city-sponsored, all-free 34th Annual Chicago Gospel Festival in Millennium Park and I'm psyched for the 36th Annual Chicago Blues Festival next weekend (planning to … [Read more...]
Youssou N’Dour on stage & screen, PoKempner photos
Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner's images from the Chicago Jazz Fest, as featured in my previous post, and these from Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour's rousing who two weeks earlier, exhibit how he's dealing straightforwardly and creatively with the screen backing musicians at the Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park. Giving us eyefuls to enjoy. Here's what we can see -- as PoKempner proves, without post-production; the double images are the videographers' superimpositions -- when visually-conscious, kinetic performing artists are … [Read more...]
Flyover country? Nonsense in jazz, politics, crime fiction
There's no such thing as "flyover country" -- except in the minds of careless or ignorant people who ought to know better. For instance: Jazz lives throughout the US and the world, not only in New York City; Illinois presidential race voters chose Hilary Clinton by a wide margin (due largely to Democratic bastion and jazz hub Chicago) although the man who beat her nationally does not seem to have much on-the-ground experience with anywhere except his own properties, and yes, the capital of the Midwest has crime fiction writers to … [Read more...]
Patti Smith’s New Year’s Eve vow: “We must not behave!”
Ushering in 2017 with Patti Smith and band at Chicago's Park West New Year's Eve was inspiriting for us of a certain age and artsy disposition. Grey-haired but loose and limber -- funny, fierce, profane and poetically incantatory -- Smith celebrated her 70th birthday in the city of her origin as if for all boomers and our progeny. At the Riviera Theatre on Dec. 30 she performed the whole of Horses, her winning 1975 debut album; on the 31st, backed by her four-man Nuggets, she offered a mixed bag including Debbie Reynold's plaintive "Tammy," … [Read more...]
Chicago’s free summer music cornucopia – Deutsch, PoKempner photos
With a 10th annual Latin Jazz festival produced in the neighborhood Humboldt Park by the Jazz Institute of Chicago and dynamite downtown concerts with headliners such as Nigerian juju star King Sunny Adé and Afro-Cuban progressive Eddie Palmieri put on by DCASE, the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Chicago's free summer music programs are well underway. Add the Museum of Contemporary Arts' weekly Tuesdays on the Terrace shows, conceded that Chicago's unparalleled Blues Fest is already over (as is Taste of Chicago, … [Read more...]
Daley bad for Windy City’s music?
Contrary to my paean to Richard M. Daley's support of Chicago's music and arts, Chicago Tribune rock-crit Greg Kot writes of the Mayor's treatment of the local music scene as a "second class citizen." It's true the City has messed with club venues -- Marguerite Horberg of established the multi-genre Hot House years back and now runs the progressive culture initiative Portoluz regaled me last weekend with tales of fire inspectors evacuating theaters mid-show over petty infractions and other harrassments; Kot reminds us of Chi's … [Read more...]
You’ve heard live jazz ? Tweet using #jazzlives
Let's prove jazz lives. Tweet about live performances using hashmark #jazzlives, detailing who and when in 140 characters.Jazz fests rage across America in the next couple of weeks starting Aug. 29-30 with NYC's Charlie Parker fest, picking up Sept 4 through 6 -- Tanglewood, Chicago, Detroit, the Angel City Jazz Fest, LA's Sweet & Hot Music Festival, the Vail Jazz Party, Philadelphia's Tony Williams Scholarship Jazz Festival plus some fests with jazz-influenced acts, rhythms and improv such as Jazz Aspen Snowmass, Seattle's Bumbershoot, … [Read more...]
hail Studs Terkel, Jazz Age Chicagoan
A talker and listener, actor-dj-writer-oral historian, good humored realist and pragmatic idealist, Studs Terkel (1912 - 2008) stands as an American cultural patriot, who enjoyed as rich if not untroubled a life as genuinely democratic artist might hope for over the course of the 20th century -- earning Roger Ebert's thumbs up as greatest Chicagoan. Studs was hugely enthusiastic about music, loving blues as well as jazz, gospel, rootsy folk, the Great American Songbook, the soundtrack of the labor and Civil Rights movement, classical stuff too … [Read more...]