Chicago stories will unfold at 13th Hyde Park Jazz Festival
by Howard Reich
Jun 07, 2019 at 9:00 am
Why does groundbreaking jazz thrive in Chicago?
The great performers who live and tour here of course set the standard, but there’s another key factor at play: the audience.
Chicago listeners have been encountering jazz innovations for well over a century and long ago developed a taste for the avant-garde. Ragtime music first reached the wider public during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; jazz progenitor Jelly Roll Morton came here as early as 1910 and settled in during the Roaring Twenties; improvisational genius Louis Armstrong made his greatest, groundbreaking recordings in Chicago at the same time; the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) reinvented the music starting in 1965; and so forth.
Though these artists experienced varying degrees of financial reward (or deprivation), they found in Chicago a public willing to entertain revolutionary concepts.
And that happens to be an important theme of the 13th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, which will run Sept. 28-29 in venues throughout the historic neighborhood.
“When I was at Tim Black’s centennial, one of the guests during the symposium said that he was interested in celebrating the great history of Chicago listeners,” recalls festival executive and artistic director Kate Dumbleton, referring to a celebration of Chicago historian Timuel Black’s 100th birthday last year.