For the last several weeks, Penny Tyler of the Jazz Institute of Chicago has been putting in long hours planning the 1988 Chicago Jazz Festival.
That`s the 1988 Chicago Jazz Festival. As in next year. There`s no telling how much time she and the others involved in putting together the world`s largest free outdoor jazz festival have devoted to this year`s extravaganza, which begins Wednesday in Grant Park, but one suspects it has become a pretty grueling avocation.
Tyler becomes a bit harried around this time of year, shuttling between home and Andy`s, the jazz night spot of which she is part owner, and fielding phone calls from musicians, agents and newspaper writers much like Andre Dawson shagging fly balls.
”I`ll have to call you right back,” she informs her caller
breathlessly. ”I`m on the phone with Dexter`s agent.”
Dexter, of course, is Dexter Gordon, saxophonist extraordinaire, Oscar nominee for Best Actor in Bertrand Tavernier`s ”Round Midnight” and an 11th- hour booking for the last night of the fest, replacing the ailing Woody Herman.
Back on the line, Tyler says, ”Actually, he`s not even Dexter`s agent-he`s his attorney and he and his wife want to stay at the Ritz-Carlton so he calls me, for God`s sake. What am I supposed to do about it? So I said, `Well, um, yeah, it certainly is a nice hotel. Good luck!` ”
Gordon`s appearance is particularly welcome under the circumstances, according to Tyler. Ill health has plagued Gordon too over the last few years and scheduling conflicts have kept him away. ”We`ve wanted him from the very beginning,” says Tyler. ”He hadn`t been playing at all until the movie came along, and it`s especially great to have him now at the height of his popularity, when he`s well and playing better than ever.”
But back to the future for a moment. Tyler and the 14 other members of the Jazz Institute`s festival committee-including Neil Tesser, drummer Wilbur Campbell and Downbeat magazine editor Art Lange-already have begun keeping a running list of possible musicians and nightly themes-such as this year`s Art Blakey tribute on Sept. 5-for 1988`s 10th annual festival. ”We have our first real meetings in October,” says Tyler, ”but a lot of the ideas we come up with the year before. We`ve already made overtures to Quincy Jones for next year, because he has such deep Chicago roots, but he already knows he`s not going to be available. Can you believe it?”
The festival cost is up to about $450,000 this year, a hefty sum but even more so considering that Kool once underwrote almost half the festival`s costs until dropping its sponsorship two years ago as part of a revamped advertising strategy. The other half still comes from the city, by way of the hotel-motel tax. The festival now relies on several sponsors chipping in $30,000 or $40,000 apiece to replace the Kool money.
Lining up the musicians, settling the question of fees, finding out what sort of equipment will be needed-the committee handles all those chores. It then passes along the necessary information to Keith Fort and his minions at the Mayor`s Office of Special Events. The production manager for the festival, Fort is responsible for sound, lights, staging, musical instruments, tents, vehicles and labor.
”The hardest part is probably putting the personnel together,” says Fort, explaining that along with following the city`s minority and gender hiring guidelines, he needs people who can pull together in a crunch.
”You`ve got 7 to 9 union stagehands, there are 4 Teamsters, about 12 to 15 sound engineers, a security crew of about 30, management and staff about 10. All in all, about 100 people when all`s said and done, and that`s excluding regular city employees like electricians and the maintenance army.” Anyone who has attended the festival recently has an inkling of just how difficult Fort`s job must be, if only in the area of sound. There are usually three sound engineers onstage and a few more operating the house sound console in the tower at the back of the seating area.
Grant Park is a big place to fill-hence the additional speaker towers on the grass-and last year the festival expanded with a second stage, ”Jazz on Jackson.” Overall, says Fort, ”It`s a very complex system because the noise constraints are pretty severe. We`re not allowed to blow out that big high-rise just north of the bandshell. In the past we`ve had kind of rock `n` roll systems, where you just stack up speaker boxes on the stage and blow the sound out from there, but you have to get the volume so high that half of it goes straight up in the air.
”Anyway, they got some complaints from those residences, so (the city`s Department of) Consumer Services went up there with a volume meter,” says Fort. ”The volume level actually got louder the higher up the building you went.” The current system includes ”delay towers,” speaker towers using the same sound signal as those on stage but with an electronic delay to compensate for the few milliseconds it takes for the sound from stage to travel to the grass.
The delay towers go up first, over this weekend, with Fort`s crew working around the symphony rehearsal and performance schedule. ”Then on Monday morning at about 6, we`ll hit the bandshell like a ton of bricks and set the whole thing up in two days,” says Fort, nonplussed.
One of the lesser-known pleasures of the jazz festival is the afternoon sound check for the bandshell, wherein the evening`s musicians sometimes piddle around aimlessly on their instruments but have been known to tear the roof off the sucker. Says Tyler, ”The sound check with Ray Charles turned out to be even better than his evening show. He just flew through all his really neat old stuff at the check, and when it came time to perform that evening he turned the whole thing around and got into this odd kind of country & western thrust-he didn`t do anything he`d done with the band at the sound check.”
She adds, laughing: ”The band didn`t really appreciate it either.”
Fort, a fan of traditional jazz, recalls a wild Sun Ra sound check. ”I thought, `Oh God, not this squeak-squawking stuff.`
”The band stopped, took a short break and then broke into the very best version of `Take the ”A” Train` I`ve ever heard anybody play-including Ellington. They just wailed.
”At the performance, they duplicated that squeak-squawk stuff note-for-note. Unbelievable. And I thought, `Fancy that-it`s actually music.` ”
Of course, the best-laid plans can only do so much about that most dreaded of glitches-rain. ”I don`t even like to talk about that, that . . . dirty word,” says Tyler. ”But as long as we have to, the bandshell has a huge overhang and the rain usually comes from behind the bandshell. So it`s the audience that suffers.
”They`ve got these plastic tarps that they`ll throw over the equipment, and the players too, if they have to. One time they actually did that, with Gil Evans. Gil was under the tarp and his piano was under the tarp and he just went right on.” A little muffled, but undaunted.
”One year we had (salsa bandleader) Eddie Palmieri, and it was just pouring, but that band was so hot there were still at least 4,000 people, some of them dripping wet, some of them just bobbing up and down with their little umbrellas, like castanets.”
What: Chicago Jazz Festival
When: Wednesday through Sept. 6
Where: Grant Park, Jackson Boulevard and Columbus Drive; 744-3315.
How much: Free
CHICAGO JAZZ FESTIVAL LINEUP
PETRILLO BAND SHELL
Wednesday
6 p.m.-Dave Brubeck; 7 p.m.-Brad Goode Quintet; 7:50 p.m.-Janice Borla Quintet; 8:40 p.m.-New Music Songbook; 9:30 p.m.-Irakere.
Thursday
6 p.m.-Bob Stone Big Band; 6:55 p.m.-Joel Spencer Quartet; 7:45 p.m.-Oliver Williams Trio; 8:35 p.m.-Carter Bradford Quartet; 9:35 p.m.-Jazz at the Philharmonic Revisited, with Harry ”Sweets” Edison, Al McKibbon, Flip Phillips, Hank Jones, J.C. Heard, Illinois Jacquet, Herb Ellis and Al Grey.
Friday, Sept. 4
6 p.m.-Ellington Dynasty; 6:50 p.m.-Magic Slim and the Teardrops; 7:40 p.m.-David Dallwitz and the Southern Australia Jazz Group; 8:35 p.m.-Bill Kirchner Nonet with Sheila Jordan; 9:35 p.m.-Wynton Marsalis.
Saturday, Sept. 5
6 p.m.-John Defauw and Friends; 6:50 p.m.-Willie Pickens Trio; 7:40 p.m.-Globe Unity Orchestra; 8:40 p.m.-Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers; 9:40 p.m.-Blakey Alumni Celebration with Woody Shaw, Walter Davis, Julian Priester, Benny Golson, Bill Hardman and Reggie Workman.
Sunday, Sept. 6
5 p.m.-Curtis Robinson Quintet with Lenny Lynn; 5:50 p.m.-Mambo Express All-Stars; 6:40 p.m.-Joanne Brackeen with Gary Bartz; 7:40 p.m.-Stephane Grappelli; 8:40 p.m.-The Leaders: Don Moye, Lester Bowie, Arthur Blythe, Chico Freeman, Kirk Lightsey and Cecil McBee; 9:40 p.m.-Dexter Gordon and the Round Midnight Band with Bobby Hutcherson, Cedar Walton, Buster Williams and Billy Higgins.
JAZZ ON JACKSON STAGE
Friday, Sept. 4
Noon-Darlene Blackburn and the Sun Drummers; 1:30 p.m.-Spaceship Love; 3 p.m.-Colby/Caruso; 4:30 p.m.-Chicago All-Stars.
Saturday, Sept. 5
Noon-Inner Drive; 1 p.m.-New Horizon; 3 p.m.-David Dallwitz; 4:30 p.m.-Irene Reid with Red Holloway.
Sunday, Sept. 6
Noon-Lester Stephens; 1:30 p.m.-Emmanuel Cranshaw; 3 p.m.-Mike Smith Quintet with Nat Adderley.
