Depending on your point of view, the Chicago Jazz Festival provides:
A. A glorious way to spend Labor Day weekend — for free.
B. A rare opportunity to sample a broad swath of jazz, from traditional to avant-garde.
C. A musical gathering that doesn’t come close to living up to its potential.
I’d argue that the 37th annual event, which runs Thursday through Sept. 6 at the Chicago Cultural Center and Millennium Park, merits all those descriptions. For though our city’s most high-profile jazz fest features top musicians playing one of the country’s finest outdoor venues — Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion — the festival’s achievements, alas, are counterbalanced by its limitations.
What we get to hear, in other words, is well worth savoring. What doesn’t happen, however, prevents the Chicago Jazz Festival from ranking alongside the biggest and best counterparts in North America and beyond.
Having attended the precursor to the Chicago Jazz Festival — the Duke Ellington celebrations that impresario Geraldine de Haas presented in Grant Park starting in 1974 — I’ve watched the festival evolve from its pre-history.
Very. Slowly.
Change does not come easily to this fest.
What follows, then, is one devoted listener’s view of the good, the bad and the unfortunate of the Chicago Jazz Festival (see accompanying story for recommendations and other details).
The good
Programming always has been the strong suit of the Chicago Jazz Festival, and it is again this year. Booked, as always, by a committee from the nonprofit Jazz Institute of Chicago, the fest will present artists famous and obscure, most eminently worth hearing.
Not surprisingly, this year’s 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) will play a role in the event.
“It’s obviously our biggest theme,” says Mike Reed, chairman of the programming committee and a widely admired drummer and presenter in his own right (he created the Constellation new-music club on North Western Avenue and serves as producer of the Pitchfork Music Festival).
There are AACM celebrations “going on the whole year — there was one back in spring,” adds Reed, referring to a massive event April 26 at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall.
“From the festival side of things, we had to be sure we had a strong showing for this. We’re probably one of the only (major) festivals that could present the Experimental Band,” says Reed, referring to the groundbreaking unit Muhal Richard Abrams created in 1962, setting the stage for the emergence of the AACM three years later.
“Bringing that back to Chicago — that’s monumental.”
It is indeed. It’s also characteristic of the Chicago Jazz Festival, which has been fearless in putting AACM artists and other adventurous souls on its main stage, to the delight of some listeners and the consternation of others. Bravo for that. Art should challenge us.
Several AACM figures will appear through the course of the event, including Douglas Ewart and Inventions at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Pritzker Pavilion and Adegoke Steve and Iqua Colson at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 6 at the Jazz and Heritage Pavilion. But the historic event will be the festival’s closing show: the Experimental Band at 8:30 p.m. Sept. 6 at the Pritzker Pavilion.
The ensemble will be led by founder Abrams, 84, and staffed by no less than Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers, George Lewis, Thurman Barker and Reggie Nicholson, among others.
Also of great interest: To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great composer Billy Strayhorn, Jeff Lindberg’s Chicago Jazz Orchestra will perform newly commissioned arrangements of Strayhorn compositions by Tom Garling, John Hollenbeck, Steven Bernstein, Gordon Goodwin and Edward Wilkerson Jr.
“Because it’s Billy Strayhorn’s centennial year, we wanted to do something different,” says Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago.
Meaning that the programmers wisely refrained from booking a set of overly familiar repertoire, instead following in the Chicago Jazz Festival’s noble tradition of commissioning new work.
Add to this performances by singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, trumpeters Marquis Hill and Dave Douglas, pianists Henry Butler and Fred Hersch, saxophonist Chico Freeman with guitarist George Freeman (Chico’s uncle), and saxophonists Mark Turner and Jane Bunnett, and you have an important gathering of leading jazz musicians.
The bad
Presentation always has been the nemesis of this festival, starting with its long tenure at the inadequate Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park. Notwithstanding decades of complaints, the festival didn’t move out of Petrillo until 2013, when Chicago Cultural Commissioner Michelle Boone transformed the event by shifting it to Millennium Park.
Suddenly main stage performances at the Pritzker Pavilion unfolded amid first-rate acoustics. The very design of the place — which encourages connectivity between performers and audience — persuades even casual listeners to pay attention, rather than to talk.
Unfortunately, the three side stages at Millennium Park — the Von Freeman Pavilion, the Jazz and Heritage Pavilion and the Chicago Community Trust Young Jazz Lions Stage — have been less acoustically welcoming. The concrete floors at these places have yielded harsh and sometimes deafening sounds, with only small bands faring passably well here.
Then, too, many of the Jazz Festival sets have been diminished by emcees who talk too much. Who wants to hear festival programmers sharing their deep thoughts on jazz?
As I’ve suggested before, the microphone ought to be handed to musicians, so they can introduce their colleagues. Isn’t the festival supposed to be about them?
The unfortunate
When used well, the massive LED screen on the Pritzker stage can augment the meaning and context of a performance. It certainly did as Wadada Leo Smith and friends performed excerpts from his “Ten Freedom Summers” in 2013. While the musicians played, stunning abstract images flickered behind them.
Too bad that’s the exception to what we usually see: Godzilla-sized projections of performers who are strangely dwarfed and overshadowed by images of themselves. Because the cameras typically spotlight the wrong musician at the wrong time, the behemoth screen has become a distraction at best, a weird spectacle at worst. Though listeners on the lawn clearly benefit from the visuals, the screen’s placement on stage diminishes the concert experience for anyone in the formal seating area. Can nothing be done?
Finally, the 37th annual Chicago Jazz Festival continues to ignore the musical landscape it’s intended to serve. Rather than make the city’s clubs and concert halls a part of the festival, encouraging listeners to catch performances outside the shows at Millennium Park and the Chicago Cultural Center, the event excludes the institutions that drive Chicago’s famously robust jazz scene.
Imagine how much richer this event would be if performances were presented under the festival’s banner at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Old Town School of Folk Music, University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts and other superb listening environments? Imagine how wide a range of talent we could hear if the sensibilities of an array of programmers became a part of the festival.
If World Music Festival Chicago can do it, if the Montreal International Jazz Festival can do it, why can’t Chicago’s Jazz Fest?
Why not make an already enjoyable festival better?
Twitter @howardreich
