Hyde Park Jazz Festival reinvents itself amid pandemic
Sep 21, 2020 at 2:30 pm
Normally at this time of year, music lovers would be getting ready to flock to dozens of performances – indoors and out – at the 14th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
But the pandemic has forced executive and artistic director Kate Dumbleton and colleagues to reconceive the event, which will emerge Sept. 26 and 27 in a new and intriguing form.
For the festival’s first day, some of Chicago’s most admired jazz musicians will perform from 4 to 9:45 p.m. Sept. 26 at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. But there will be no audience, the music instead streamed live on the festival’s website.
The festival’s second day, Sept. 27, will feature shows on mobile stages and pop-up concerts across Hyde Park. So though the number of sets will be significantly reduced from past years, the festival’s embrace of Hyde Park will remain.
Putting all this together “was actually pretty tricky, because all of a sudden, all of my strategies for programming the festival with 34 concerts were collapsed into 6,” says Dumbleton.
“So I had to think about all the things I was thinking about with those 34 concerts: style and gender and age and the different histories we’re trying to represent. It was actually really stressful.”
That’s easy to believe, considering some of the variables involved: getting permission to convene musicians in the Logan Center, preparing for the health protocols involved and dealing with new kinds of red tape.
“There’s a lot of licensing involved in streaming performances, and so we also ran into some complexity around that, because some of these licenses are expensive and very time-consuming to get,” explains Dumbleton.
“For example, we had intended to have (singer) Dee Alexander with the Metropolitan Jazz Octet, but we just couldn’t navigate the licensing of the compositions. … So we had to change that group.” Instead, Alexander instead will perform with a small group she calls The A-Team.