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 somehow dart off to the Printers Row Lit Fest, simultaneously at the opposite end of the Loop) as … [Read more...]
Digging Our Roots videos, speakers inspire engagement
Billy Branch watches Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson II; photo by Alan Frolichstein Nearly 100 Chicagoans (maybe some visitors?) watched Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and other heroes of the blues on videos at the Cultural Center Thursday night (5/23/19), with harmonica star Billy Branch and WDCB program host Leslie Keros telling stories and participated in lively interplay with knowing attendees. It was the fifth Digging Our Roots: Chicago's Greatest Hits "listening session" this spring, co-presented by the Jazz … [Read more...]
Jazz community upends Englewood’s bad rep
The 18th annual free Englewood Jazz Festival in south side Hamilton Park last Saturday (9/16) affirmed the best of Chicago's grassroots culture, promoting an opposite image of this challenged neighborhood as a dangerous place -- unless one fears powerful, creative music that speaks as directly as dance rhythms to its family of listeners. Produced on behalf of the Live the Spirit Residency by saxophonist Ernest Dawkins -- current AACM Chicago chairperson, Park District music teacher and every-Sunday star at Norman's Bistro, who led … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz Fest expanded review & Deutsch photos
My DownBeat review of the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival held over Labor Day weekend in and spilling out of Millennium Park, highlights the best I heard -- including the specially organized big band led by trumpeter Jon Faddis, making big fun from his mentor Dizzy Gillespie's fresh-as-fire arrangements dating 60 to 70 years back. (Gotta wonder what a music fan raised on the past decades' pop, country and rap but who never heard anything like this would make of the power of 16 players so synced in rhythm, tune and spirit, partying with … [Read more...]
Jazz/Improv Chicago: Wide-ranging talents, free fests, PoKempner pix
Chicago's jazz/improvised music scene contains multitudes, last week ranging from the wild yet earnest Liberation Music Collective to veteran piano sophisticate Michael Weiss in trio, as two of Marc PoKempner's photos document (and more of his vision, focused on links between local music and politics -- Obama included -- is on exhibit titled "Harold's Got the Blues" for the next month at the restaurant Wishbone). The Liberation Music Collective, a young ensemble led by bassist-vocalist-lyricist Hannah Fidler and trumpeter-conductor Matt … [Read more...]
Dr. Richard Wang, enabler of AACM experimentalists, RIP
In his first college teaching job at Wilson Junior College during the early 1960s, trumpeter Dick Wang encountered a cadre of exploratory young Chicago musicians who would soon form the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). He encouraged them. He introduced Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Ari Brown and others to the writings of Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg; he instituted weekly a "head-knocking" jam sessions for these players, and cheered on their efforts to … [Read more...]
A Great Migration suite from trumpeter Orbert Davis: Audio interview
Orbert Davis -- trumpeter, composer and leader of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, has been commissioned by the Jazz Institute of Chicago to write and perform a suite about the Great Migration for the 38th annual free Chicago Jazz Festival. "Soul Migration," for octet, will be heard Sept 1 at 8 pm in Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavillion. With the composition in progress, Orbert spoke about it with me at his home studio, demonstrating with some synthesized samples and even improvising a theme. Thanks to Collin Ashmead-Bobbit for recording the … [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...]
Announcing eyeJAZZ.tv & Happy 45th b’day AACM
eyeJAZZ.tv, a wave of guerrilla video music-news clips being initiated by the Jazz Journalists Association, has posted its first example -- my brief production from last week's 45th birthday concert of the AACM featuring composer-saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, flutist and AACM chair Nicole Mitchell (no relation) and saxophonist Ari Brown, at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. … [Read more...]
Best American city for jazz? Chicago
I'm a Chicago homie -- long removed but never really gone -- so don't expect objectivity, but a recent visit proved my native metropolis is #1 in America and maybe everywhere for its active, creative, meaningful, almost-economically-viable, neighborhood-rooted, exploratory and world class jazz. I say this even as my dearly adopted New York City kickstarts as freshly energized a fall season as any I recall.Jazz is the lifeblood of Chicago in a way it ain't in NYC, at least not right now. Jazz-soul-blues is Chicago's street music. Chicago's … [Read more...]
Michelle Obama refutes jazz as boys’ club
There are "powerful reasons . . .we ought to consider" for why musicians and listeners "tend to be a brotherhood," according to a self-described "middle-aged white male swing-to-bopper." He's identifying, not justifying . . .Then the First Lady upsets the paradigm. She brings her daughters to the gig.I've got pressing deadlines, but luckily several lengthy, thoughtful responses to recent blog postings, so here's one of a series by correspondents of Jazz Beyond Jazz. Paul Lindemeyer ia a multi-talented reeds musician/big band … [Read more...]