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 […]
Salsa dura and NYC jazz hot
My new City Arts column cites Chris Washburne‘s SYOTOS band, Arturo O’Farrill and Bobby Sanabria as avatars of Latin American music’s essential excitement, so well depicted by the 4-part PBS documentary “Latin Music USA” (viewable online). But let’s not forget Eddie Palmieri is still in his prime (and coming to the Blue Note jazz club […]
Eddie Palmieri sets Jazz at Lincoln Center afire
Eddie Palmieri, the genius and prophet of Afro-Caribbean jazz, showed Herbie Hancock, maybe Wynton Marsalis and certainly the roaring audience at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall a thing or three last weekend. His band La Perfecta II, reconstituting the instrumentation and compositions for mambo, cha-cha and pachanga dancing Palmieri introduced in 1961, blew the […]
Benefits of aficionado-programmed fests
The best thing about the Chicago Jazz Festival is that it’s curated by an independent committee of people (mostly from the Jazz Institute of Chicago) who really love music, rather than being overly influenced by promoters, booking agents and managers representing a few big name artists who are trying to fill blank dates during their […]