As the Chicago Jazz Festival marks its 20th anniversary, running Thursday through Sept. 6 in Grant Park, almost everyone will agree that the event has seen better times.
Formerly a seven-day run of performances that lasted until 10:30 p.m. and later, the festival now is a truncated, four-day affair that closes up shop at 9:30 p.m. And the laughably small budget provided by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events ($182,000 for performance fees this year, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts) assures that the festival will continue to be dwarfed by newer, better-financed counterparts across North America.
Following are 20 unforgettable moments from the event’s 20-year history, demonstrating that the Incredible Shrinking Jazz Festival has a long way to go to recapture its glory days:
Aug. 27, 1979. The first fest alights in Grant Park, modeled on the Duke Ellington tribute concerts that South Side jazz activist Geraldine de Haas had staged there every summer since 1974. Though De Haas receives little credit, her idea of presenting jazz to the masses in downtown Chicago takes flight, with Little Brother Montgomery, Fred Anderson, Ari Brown and the Jazz Members Big Band kicking off a free, seven-day event astutely programmed by the not-for-profit Jazz Institute of Chicago.
Aug. 29, 1980. Charlie Parker as a pop musician? Though Bird’s music might seem a bit rarefied for mass consumption, more than 45,000 jam Grant Park to hear such Parker collaborators as trumpeter Red Rodney and pianist Jay McShann pay homage to the high priest of bebop. Audiences around the country hear the tribute live over National Public Radio.
Aug. 30, 1980. In one of the great coups of the Chicago Jazz Festival, pianist-bandleader Earl Hines re-creates his Grand Terrace Orchestra, a fabled ensemble that helped codify the language of big-band swing in the 1930s. The historic performance epitomizes the virtues of the festival, which begins to present ingeniously conceived programs available nowhere else in the country– thanks to the programming committee of the Jazz Institute.
Sept. 2, 1981. The rising clout and stature of the Chicago Jazz Festival seems unstoppable, with performances by singer Carmen McRae, the Herbie Hancock Quartet (including a little-known young trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis) and Sun Ra and His Arkestra broadcast nationwide on public television.
Sept. 3, 1981. One of the most treasured nights in the history of the Chicago Jazz Festival is an homage to Capt. Walter Dyett, the DuSable High School music instructor who trained some of the greatest musicians in jazz from the ’30s through the ’60s. The all-star lineup features tenor saxophone legends Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan (with trombonist Julian Priester and pianist Norman Simmons), avant-garde violinist Leroy Jenkins with drummer Jerome Cooper and–as a grand finale–an 18-piece DuSable Alumni Band. Tribune nightlife critic Larry Kart writes: “The single most moving night in the festival’s history, this concert found every group playing their hearts out in front of a rain-soaked crowd that wouldn’t have left if Noah’s ark had floated by.”
Sept. 1, 1982. Where else on Earth will you find a double-bill spotlighting Ed Wilkerson’s cutting-edge trio Shadow Vignettes and a de facto reunion of the Austin High Gang featuring cornetist Jimmy McPartland and tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman? The two bands sum up early and recent chapters in the perpetual evolution of Chicago jazz.
Sept. 5, 1982. At age 87, singer Alberta Hunter takes the stage and proceeds “to stop the show,” writes Kart. “One need make no allowances for age because Hunter sings with an authority that would be remarkable in any artist. Blues, cabaret songs, spirituals, raunchy vaudeville tunes –Hunter enthralled the audience with everything she did.”
Sept. 1, 1983. Though cut back to five days and temporarily rechristened the Chicago Kool Jazz Festival (after the tobacco company sponsoring it), the event still stands unmatched as the most creatively programmed jazz festival in the country. How many other mass-appeal events, after all, would feature Lester Bowie’s Roots to the Source band, an outrageous outfit that mixes the energy and musical daring of “free jazz” with bona fide gospel singing from Fontella Bass and David Peaston, as well as Bowie’s trumpet evocations of Louis Armstrong?
Sept. 3, 1983. Sarah Vaughan draws approximately 82,000 listeners, seducing them with nearly operatic versions of “Misty,” “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
Sept. 4, 1983. As if Vaughan’s night weren’t big enough, an estimated 93,000 listeners pour into the park to hear a glorious Ray Charles Reunion Band, featuring trumpeter Marcus Belgrave and reedists Hank Crawford and David “Fathead” Newman. With this performance, Charles re-establishes links to his jazz roots.
Aug. 29, 1984. The artistic breadth and daring of the Jazz Institute’s programming is summed up on opening night of the sixth annual event: The original Ramsey Lewis Trio represents the pop-mainstream wing of jazz music; E. Parker McDougal epitomizes the big and burly Chicago tenor sound; Wilkerson’s expanded, 24-piece Shadow Vignettes Big Band pushes large-ensemble improvisation firmly into the realm of the avant-garde. All that was just the curtain-raiser for Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time group, with the leader turning in ferocious solos on alto saxophone.
Aug. 30, 1984. The Chicago Jazz Festival again arranges for a performance that could be heard nowhere else: blues musician B.B. King backed by a jazz-swing unit. As if to redirect the great blues singer-guitarist away from Las Vegas nightclub fare and closer to a jazz-blues sensibility, the Jazz Institute teams him with an ensemble of rough-and-tumble, Southwest veterans: pianist Jay McShann, tenor saxophonists Buddy Tate and Budd Johnson, trumpeter Joe Newman, bassist Gene Ramey and drummer Gus Johnson. Energized by the setting, King tears into scorching versions of “Every Day,” “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” “Sweet Sixteen,” “The Thrill is Gone” and even “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Aug. 31, 1984. Gil Evans didn’t always receive due credit for the originality of his orchestral arrangements, but the Chicago Jazz Festival is characteristically ahead of the curve, featuring the Gil Evans Orchestra as the finale on this evening. Perhaps not surprisingly, the band’s innovative version of Thelonious Monk’s “Friday the 13th” draws thunder and lightning from on high.
Aug. 29, 1986. Billed as “A Tribute to Thelonious Monk,” an all-Monk marathon closes with the Thelonious Monk Reunion Orchestra, playing arrangements that Monk and friends performed in Carnegie Hall in 1963. Offering familiar fare and intriguing esoterica, the band excels with Howard Johnson’s baritone saxophone work on “Bye-Ya,” trumpeter Don Sickler’s solo on “I Mean You” and reedist Phil Woods, Steve Lacy and Charlie Rouse on “Light Blue.”
Sept. 6, 1987. Tenor saxophone giant Dexter Gordon, fresh from his success starring in the exceptional jazz film ” ‘Round Midnight,” plays his last Chicago performance. Once a technically brilliant tenorist, Gordon struggles against various physical infirmities to play “Blues Up and Down,” ” ‘Round Midnight” and “Rhythm-a-ning”–to heartfelt ovations.
Sept. 1, 1990. If the ’80s established the Chicago Jazz Festival as the best in America, the ’90s represent the diminution of its artistic credibility and financial wherewithal. In presenting the Chicago premiere of Charles Mingus’ “Epitaph,” for instance, the fest presents excerpts amounting to roughly half the work; esthetically, that’s akin to presenting half a Mahler symphony.
Sept. 4, 1992. Pop-shlock band Spyro Gyra headlining a once-great jazz festival? The low point in the festival’s history occurs after City Hall shrinks the festival’s budget to cover only two days, and the Jazz Institute of Chicago proves unable to drum up alternate funding. Two “smooth jazz” outfits — WNUA radio and GRP Records — eventually rush in with the extra money but demand a say in programming. The Jazz Institute, in a Faustian deal, agrees to the Spyro Gyra booking, thereby shattering its credibility and damaging the festival.
Aug. 31, 1995. Showing a degree of innovation absent for years, the Jazz Institute presents “Now’s the Time,” a dream tribute to Charlie Parker staged not in acoustically challenged Grant Park but inside the Merle Reskin Theatre. The ticketed event features James Moody, Charles McPherson, Jon Faddis and other virtuosos.
Aug. 29, 1996. For the second year straight, the Jazz Institute of Chicago breaks free of the financial and artistic constraints of the Grant Park festivities, offering a themed concert in the Merle Reskin Theatre. “Woodchoppers Ball: A Tribute to the Woody Herman First Herd” reunites several Herman alums under the direction of veteran Herdsmen Frank Tiberi and Ralph Burns. Alas, this is the last time the Jazz Institute dares to present a festival concert unbound by the apron strings of the Mayor’s Office of Special Events.
Aug. 31, 1996. The schizophrenic nature of the Jazz Festival in the ’90s is apparent on a night when trumpeter Orbert Davis and William Russo’s Chicago Jazz Ensemble offer a rare performance of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans “Sketches of Spain.” Though the performance is sublime, repeated commercial announcements by Columbia Records, sponsor of the performance, turns a great artistic event into a crass promotion for a reissue of the Davis-Evans “Sketches.”
