By Howard Reich
For jazz lovers, it’s one of the most eagerly anticipated weekends of the year: the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
As always, the historic neighborhood will come alive with the music, which will play in several venues from 1 p.m. to midnight Saturday and 1 to 9 p.m. Sunday.
Read MoreBy Izzy Yellen
In its 12th year, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival continues to program a diverse lineup of jazz artists. Over the course of the two days, the event will showcase over 30 acts at various venues in Hyde Park while embracing countless styles, traditions, and innovations.
Read MoreBy Howard Reich
Last year, the Orchestre National de Jazz in France invited drummer-impresario Mike Reed to compose a suite of pieces dedicated to Chicago, where he’s based.
Read MoreBy Bridget Vaughn and Kyle Oleksiuk
On 73rd Street and Paxton, toward Merrill, at least one hundred people marched: past cars, over puddles, into alleys and across the block. As they marched, they held bundles of herbs in the air, played percussion, danced, and waved flags. This scene was the beginning of the Back Alley Jazz Festival—and the man at the front of the crowd, who rode in a mint-green Pedicab and wore a sash that read “Grand Marshall,” was Jimmy Ellis, a saxophonist who has been playing in Chicago since 1948.
Read MoreBy The Chicago Community Trust Staff
By seven o’clock in the evening on a muggy Saturday in July, the backyard of Zenja Vaughn’s house at 7343 S. Paxton was filled to capacity. Visitors brought lawn chairs and coolers, or balanced plates of jerk chicken and ribs from a food truck on their knees as they waited, eyes fixed on the concrete parking pad. Folks who didn’t fit crammed into the alley to watch through the open gate, or peered over the fence from the house next door. The attraction, the headliner of the day’s Back Alley Jazz festival, was vocalist Maggie Brown and her ensemble.
Read MoreBy Howard Reich
At first glance, the lineup for the 12th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival suggests a bulging array of styles and musical idioms.
For any event that features singer Dee Alexander and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, vibraphonist Thaddeus Tukes and the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band, harpist Brandee Younger and pianist and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran clearly encompasses a wide swath of artistic territory.
But as always with this intelligently programmed festival – which will run Sept. 29-30 at multiple Hyde Park locations – underlying themes and messages will drive the proceedings.
Read MoreIn its eleventh year, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival drew large crowds two weekends ago. The free two-day festival offered music lovers ten venues to hear some of the best local, national, and international music on the planet.
Read MoreArts Journal: Jazz Beyond Jazz
Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival in the first days of fall (Sept. 23 & 24th) which were unusually hot, is an exceptional event, curated for creative artistry, local and otherwise, drawing a highly diverse crowd to a fair that mixes popular and specialized performances at a range of boutique venues.
Read MoreBy Mark Corroto
Even though the 11th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival is on the books and the music is no longer audible, the spirit of the weekend endures. What has become an annual rite and celebration of music, culture, and maybe above, all the spirit of Chicago's South side, is a bucket list experience that you can repeat yearly. The two-day celebration features thirty- five performances at thirteen different venues in and around the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. If you do the math, that's sixteen hours of music. Kind of like an ultra-endurance event for the ears.
Read MoreBy Howard Reich
Two world premieres, one piano colossus, a brilliant look at Thelonious Monk and a couple of vibraphonists swinging hard in a house of worship.
Read MoreThe 11th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, populating a dozen varied venues amid the picturesque splendor of the festival’s namesake neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, proved as stimulating as ever this time around (Sept. 23–24). Programmed for the sixth year by the astute, visionary Kate Dumbleton—and assisted by music manager Carolyn Albritton, managing director Olivia Junell and stalwart new operations manager Dave Rempis, among others—the HPJF is unlike any other festival in its intensity and pace.
Read MoreThe 11th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival kicks off tomorrow with a typically packed schedule of diverse sounds, focusing on some of the city's most important and creative forces while making room for a selective smattering of national and international attractions. In this week's paper I highlighted a couple of duo performances by Nick Mazzarella & Tomeka Reid and Andrew Cyrille & Bill McHenry, but naturally there's much more that's worth your time.
Read MoreBy Christian Belanger
Up next in our series of interviews with notable, in-the-know locals: Kate Dumbleton, executive and artistic director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, which starts Saturday.
Read MoreBy Howard Reich
In 2007, when a group of South Side visionaries launched the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, they hoped to bring long overdue attention to a neighborhood rich in jazz history.
Read MoreBy Zach Long
Marking the tail end of summer music festival season (and September's second big jazz-oriented event), the Hyde Park Jazz Festival brings Chicago's best performers and some talented visitors to the South Side neighborhood. Spread out over the course of two days and taking place at various venues, the festival is packed with worthwhile performances, but it can be difficult to decide what to see, even if you frequent Chicago jazz clubs. To make the decision as easy as possible, we've picked our five favorite performances on the Hyde Park Jazz Festival lineup, including a set from local drummer Makaya McCraven and a hotly anticipated collaboration between bandleaders from Chicago and Mali.
Read MoreHyde Park Herald
By Evan Hamlin
Thelonious Monk, a musician whose personality was as enigmatic as his music was influential, will be celebrated at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Sept. 23 – 24, in honor of his 100th birthday.
Four events will be held in tribute of Monk’s visionary style. The first will be a lecture by University of California, Los Angeles Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History Robin Kelley. Kelley’s lecture will draw on information from his acclaimed 2009 book on Monk titled “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.”
Read MoreHyde Park Herald
By Neil Tesser
Offering a sort of drum roll for the upcoming Hyde Park Jazz Festival, GRAMMY® Award-winning journalist and jazz aficionado Neil Tesser shared his understanding of improvisation as it relates to what he described as “a truly American artform” with residents and visitors at Montgomery Place, 5550 South Shore Drive on Thursday, Sept. 14.
Read MoreBy Howard Reich
Many musicians have performed for students at Smith Elementary School, on East 103rd Street, but none quite like the visitors who appeared Monday morning.
For they brought with them music of their homeland: Mali.
They came to Smith in the company of eminent flutist Nicole Mitchell, who years ago worked as a teaching artist there and at other Chicago Public Schools. Mitchell left Chicago in 2011 to teach at the University of California at Irvine, but she has returned to this city often and long has dreamed of collaborating with Malian counterparts.
Read MoreOne feature of the Hyde Park Jazz Fest that has quietly distinguished it over the last few years is the prevalence of dynamic duos, whether the pairings are new or seasoned, improvised or driven by tunes. Notable among this year’s terrific offerings is the first local performance by alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella and cellist Tomeka Reid since the release of their superb debut album, Signaling (Nessa).
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When I attended this year’s Winter Jazz Fest in New York, no set gave me greater pleasure or made me think as much as a performance by endlessly inventive drummer Andrew Cyrille and often-overlooked tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry, who played music from their excellent 2016 album, Proximity (Sunnyside).
Read MoreThis annual fest showcasing Chicago's rich jazz scene includes some great out-of-town headliners in the two-day lineup of its 11th iteration, among them trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and the duo of drummer Andrew Cyrille & Bill McHenry. As usual, though, locals provide most of the heat: to name just two, veteran saxophonist Ari Brown leads a group with Oliver Lake, and flutist Nicole Mitchell debuts a collaboration with Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko.1 PM, multiple venues, $5 suggested donation per show, $125 Jazz Pass available for priority seating at all shows. For the full lineup, see hydeparkjazzfestival.org, all ages.
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