Artists explain and interpret our world, and we’ve needed their insights more than ever this year. The artists and arts administrators that our critics profile below are the cream of Chicago’s crop, and for them, 2001 was a significant year. We look forward to benefiting from their creativity for years to come.
Tatsu Aoki
Jazz musician
What inspires him: “The number of great artists who live in Chicago. I have everything in this city — swing and bebop masters like John Watson and Sonny Seals, masters of free jazz like Fred Anderson, younger people like Jeff Parker and Hamid Drake. There’s nothing like this in other cities.”
He may be the hardest-working man in Chicago jazz. In a typical month, bassist Tatsu Aoki leads performances by his groundbreaking Miyumi Project septet; plays in bands headed by saxophonist Fred Anderson, guitarist George Freeman and singer Yoko Noge; co-leads units such as Tri-Color and Healing Force; and runs the Asian Improv record label, based in San Francisco and Chicago.
Despite this perpetual swirl of activity — or perhaps because of it — Aoki in 2001 managed to write, perform and record the most important work of his career: “Rooted: Origins of Now.” Though the orchestral suite sounded sketchy in its premiere over the summer, at Ping Tom Memorial Park, by the time Aoki reprised it during the Asian American Jazz Festival (which Aoki heads), “Rooted: Origins of Now” had come into its own as an eloquent, often dramatic merger of ancient Japanese music and experimental American jazz.
To see and hear a contingent of traditional taiko drummers sharing a stage with such unrepentant Chicago avant-gardists as reedist Mwata Bowden and trumpeter Ameen Muhammad was to understand anew Aoki’s contributions to music in this city and beyond. For Aoki has been tireless in bringing together Japanese and American musicians, as well the audiences that follow them. In “Rooted: Origins of Now,” Aoki penned musical ideas that accommodated musicians from both cultures, the thunderous taiko drumming that opened the piece, vividly setting the stage for the Asian-tinged jazz-band playing yet to come.
“That piece meant a lot to me, and not just because we were fortunate enough to perform it several times,” says Aoki of a work commissioned by the Jazz Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Park District.
“For me, `Rooted’ was a concrete realization of what I and many others have been doing over the past many years in Chicago. In a way, it officially recognized the power of Asian-American musicians. With this piece, we really were being heard.
“And I also think a piece like that would not have been possible in any other city, because `Rooted’ drew on the talents and the styles of music that are available in Chicago every night of the week.”
That range of expression has been extended significantly by the Asian American Jazz Festival, which Aoki founded and, in its sixth season, has become the largest such event in the country. Meanwhile, Aoki’s record label, Asian Improv, has given Aoki and the array of jazz musicians he records an international audience. Thanks to these projects, and others, a new generation of Asian-American artists has followed Aoki’s lead, the list ranging from drummer Mia Park to violinist Jonathen Chen.
Aoki, of course, has not been alone in championing the exotic interweaving of Asian music and American jazz. But thanks to a relentless work ethic and a visionary’s approach to the art of improvisation, he surely has been the most influential.
— Howard Reich
Paul Christiano
Choreographer
What inspires him: “For me, the core of it is a need to be articulate. . . . Originally, I wanted to be a writer. But I couldn’t confine my thoughts to paper. I needed a bigger canvas. The stage allows work for both your mind and your body, and with dance, I can reach so many more people on so many levels.”
Young talent abounds in the dance community these days, none more noteworthy than 25-year-old choreographer Paul Christiano. He also dances up a storm with his home troupe, Melissa Thodos and Dancers, but this fall he made an impressive professional debut as a choreographer with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. The Bartlett native and former gymnast led the onstage theatrics himself in “Miracle, Interrupted,” a work full of surprising structure and witty riffs on its Vivaldi score. Onstage, Christiano manages Thodos’ own imaginative stylistics with flair and confidence, but “Miracle” suggests his real gifts may be offstage in the ever-hungry field of dancemaking. Good choreography of any sort is important; coming from such a young novice, it augurs great riches ahead.
An admitted outsider who says he never fit in (even as a child gymnast, he struggled to introduce more dancelike moves into the sport and for a time in his teens was plagued by suicidal thoughts), Christiano now has his niche.
“Miracle,” for 10 dancers, moves smoothly from creepy melodrama to innocent acrobatics, incorporating both playground romp and sign language in its imagery. As a performer, he is light-footed and funny in Thodos’ amusing workaday sendup, “SYSTEMatic ERROR,” performed at this year’s Dance Chicago festival. He’s intimidated by the thought of a “Miracle” follow-up, but in one regard he needn’t worry: A lot of us are anxious to see it.
He says he gets his inspiration from a need to communicate.
“For me, the core of it is a need to be articulate,” he says. “I’ve never been able to do that in words, and dance picks up where words leave off.”
— Sid Smith
Cliff Colnot
Conductor, educator, arranger
What inspires him: “Beethoven’s inevitability and James Brown’s groove.”
A consummate musician who has no trouble whatsoever thinking outside classical music’s tradition-bound box, Cliff Colnot this year found plenty of outlets for his apparently boundless talent and energy. Like his friend and colleague Daniel Barenboim, Colnot enjoys keeping many musical plates spinning simultaneously and focuses intensively on each project as it comes along. Few music educators have his performing skills, just as few performers are such born teachers.
Colnot came into his own early in 2001 when the Civic Orchestra of Chicago named him resident conductor — a richly deserved reward for his years of tireless service to the training orchestra for college-age musicians administered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But preparing symphonic programs with the Civic and coaching Civic chamber groups was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg for Colnot, one of the area’s most respected musician-educators, who also directs the DePaul University Symphony Orchestra along with teaching advanced orchestration at the University of Chicago.
His second major appointment at Symphony Center occurred this month when he was named principal conductor of the CSO’s MusicNOW series. These concerts, combining recent works and 20th Century classics, excited not just new-music buffs but also more general listeners eager to discover what’s happening at the cutting edge of contemporary music. This year Colnot rehearsed the CSO chamber groups that appeared on the series and also conducted several programs. Anyone looking for a reason why MusicNOW caught on in such a big way this year had to take into account Colnot’s yeoman efforts.
Through it all, Chicago’s musical Renaissance man proved himself a classic unsung hero. The intensive rehearsals and coaching sessions Colnot led during Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Workshop for young Israeli and Arab musicians last summer at Northwestern University were crucial to the success of this extraordinary, politically risky venture. Although Barenboim deserved credit for masterminding the project, the workshop organizers owed Colnot a huge debt of gratitude for the staggering amount of work he put in behind the scenes.
As if all this weren’t enough for one musician, Colnot this year reminded us all over again why he is as esteemed in jazz and pop circles as in the classical sphere. Late this year he undertook his own arrangements of four Gershwin songs at the behest of the Chicago String Quartet and CSO principal clarinetist Larry Combs. These forces will give the world premiere of Colnot’s Gershwin songbook Jan. 16 at the DePaul University Concert Hall. If the arrangements are half as swinging as Colnot’s settings of Duke Ellington songs — which you can hear on Teldec’s recently released album, “A Tribute to Ellington,” featuring Combs and Barenboim as jazz pianist — the DePaul audience will get a “s’wonderful” respite from winter’s icy grip.
No doubt about it: Chicago’s classical music scene would be a great deal less interesting if Colnot were not around.
— John von Rhein
Douglas W. Druick
Searle Curator of European Painting and Prince Trust Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago
Peter Kort Zegers
Rothman Family Research Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago
What inspires him (Druick): “How in studying works of great power and beauty, one examines life — and is motivated to communicate the experience to others.”
What inspires him (Zegers): “The search for new evidence revealing the texture of the past, and the thrill of the chase.”
In 1988, while preparing for “The Art of Paul Gauguin,” the retrospective organized by museums in the United States and France, curators Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers often noticed the influence Vincent van Gogh had on the works of Gauguin. Exactly 100 years had passed since the artists worked together in the South of France; the nine weeks had entered into popular mythology because of how they culminated in Van Gogh cutting off his ear. But, surprisingly, no scholar had ever examined the sojourn in detail to determine the precise artistic consequences: Who influenced whom, how and when? A year passed before Druick and Zegers conceived the exhibition that attempted to answer the questions — the current “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South.”
When the show was announced nearly a decade later, it was easy to be cynical. All large museums rely on blockbuster exhibitions. The Art Institute of Chicago’s biggest hits were in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist periods. Some of these exhibitions actually revised one’s thinking about the artists. More often, the shows delivered little significant scholarship, disappointing almost in direct proportion to how much they served as crowd-pleasers.
The last such exhibition seen here, of portraits by Claude Renoir, was organized elsewhere and, frankly, proved unworthy of the Institute, which had finer works by the artist in its own collections. But the public loved it. Attendance has little to do with scholarship. Name recognition is the thing. How easy to rely on it again with Van Gogh and Gauguin.
But “The Studio of the South” relies on the most meticulous research, observation and analysis. There are no curatorial fireworks. Any speculation is confirmed by evidence given in the works themselves. Both the exhibition and its accompanying 418-page volume — less a catalog than two complete biographies intertwined — could serve as models, especially for curators who build exhibitions on fancy theories and sleight of hand.
For once, here are efforts that add to our knowledge of artists who already were so popular that one assumed nothing more could be said. What’s said in the exhibition comes almost exclusively from juxtapositions of artworks and excerpts from the artists’ letters. Rare is any exhibition that lets the creators and their creations speak so clearly for themselves.
— Alan G. Artner
Kevin Drumm
Musician and artist
What inspires him: “What inspires me? It’s important for me to travel; I can’t stay in one place for too long. New perspectives are usually inspiring, [as are] people who aren’t preoccupied with passively contemplating life as it zips by them. I’m fond of irreverence and I find it inspiring sometimes; like-minded friends too. What else? . . . Anxiety maybe! Leaving the snide and haughty environs of my day job was very inspiring. And there are some books too, some records, some films, but the list would be too long.”
Every so often, a composer will be accepted in the world of the visual arts more completely than anywhere else. In the late 19th Century, it happened with Richard Wagner; in the late 20th, with Philip Glass. This year it also may have happened with Chicago native Kevin Drumm.
A composer-performer in the field of electronic and experimental music, Drumm has worked live with many ensembles and issued a number of solo and duet recordings. But as highly as he is regarded in music circles, Drumm reached another level entirely in a collaboration this year at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago.
He could have been invited to give a concert. Instead, the artist collective SIMPARCH created an acoustic environment, and Drumm was commissioned to create a recorded composition for the space. He received, then, an ideal environment for his music, which occupied the entire gallery of the Society for more than a month. One doesn’t want to aggrandize with precedents, but it was a little like Edgard Varese’s collaboration with Le Corbusier in a pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
Drumm’s composition was an hour long, in three distinct sections. It played continuously. Visitors could enter or exit at any point. Drumm created all of the sounds on a guitar, though they often sounded more like John Cage’s rustling and stroking of microphones for Merce Cunningham dance pieces. Much of the work was at the threshold of audibility, making the sound environment necessary; anywhere else would have had too many distractions. Besides, only there would the music’s spatial qualities — the final section allows one to plunge into the work, with silence used like glass or air to separate the sound layers — really come clear.
In the last 30 years, it has not been unusual to encounter musicians who are also visual artists. That is not the case here. So why cite Drumm in a visual arts category when, say, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle also has had a great year? Because it says something significant about not only Drumm but also the contemporary art scene. As performance was embraced in the 1980s, so now is experimental music. It is no coincidence that this has happened when painting and sculpture no longer dominate and greater prominence has been achieved by video and film, arts that unfold over time. Music is, of course, one of those arts. This was a year when the Chicago art world made possible something new in Drumm’s work, by bringing it out of clubs, into the bright gallery light.
— Alan G. Artner
Buddy Guy
Musician
What inspires him: “I don’t care how mad a person is when he comes to see me. When I walk on stage, I don’t have a set list. I look at the audience, tell my band to get ready, and do my best to please everybody, even though I damn well know I can’t. In the back of my head I think to myself, `I don’t know if you’ve had a tough day at your job, or with your family, but I’m gonna try to make you smile while you’re here to see me play.’ My goal is to make everyone as happy as I am inside.”
At the bar of Buddy Guy’s Legends, the namesake of the South Loop blues institution is — as always — beaming.
“I’ve got my old sound back,” Guy says.
And how. The occasion for the interview was the release last spring of his latest album, “Sweet Tea” (Silvertone), and it’s a monster — certain to stand among Guy’s finest recordings in a career that stretches back to the late ’50s.
George “Buddy” Guy turned 65 on July 30, but his music and legend continue to bloom. On “Sweet Tea” he sounds like an artist renewed and a man possessed; his voice ranges from a racked whisper on “Done Got Old” to a lusty howl on “I Gotta Try You Girl.” The album is both a bold experiment and a return to Guy’s roots, as the son of a Louisiana sharecropper. “Sweet Tea” marks the first time Guy has taken on the droning hill-country blues of Northern Mississippi — a more groove-oriented and distinctly rural sound than his more familiar, urbanized version of the Delta blues — and he rises to the challenge.
Unlike most of his albums since his 1991 comeback, “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” the guitarist’s latest album isn’t weighed down by guest stars and overly familiar cover tunes. Instead, it presents Guy at his rawest, the closest he has come in decades to the flamethrower intensity of his classic Chess Records singles of the ’60s.
The cream of those early tracks are collected on the newly issued “The Best of Buddy Guy: The Millennium Collection” (MCA), a fresh reminder of why Guy has influenced three generations of guitarists, from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jonny Lang. Clapton returns the favor on the recent benefit double-CD, “The Concert for New York City” (Columbia), on which he trades guitar licks and vocals with Guy on Willie Dixon’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man.”
Otherwise, it was business as usual for Guy in 2001, which means he remains the hardest-working blues man of his time: He played 143 shows in eight countries, including a 45-date tour with one of his mentors, B.B. King. “We’re the two left from that [classic blues] era that are still touring,” Guy says. “The rest of them have just passed on and gone — we just lost John Lee Hooker. Some of the greatest players that ever sung the blues have lived, died and are buried in Chicago, and as long as I’m alive I’m going to work to make sure people know that.”
Though times are tough for many blues clubs — Koko Taylor’s Celebrity just shuttered its doors a few weeks ago — Legend’s continues to thrive. Guy says an expanded Legend’s will open across the street from the present club next year. He also hopes to record a new album with a high-profile producer.
“When I was touring in California, [Carlos] Santana walked on stage, gave me a hug and said, `I want to produce you — I want to make happen to you what happened to me,'” Guy says, referring to Santana’s multimillion-selling, star-laden 1998 release “Supernatural.” “I said, `You don’t have to ask twice, just start producing.'”
Whether the project happens or not, Guy has already proven that he can’t be counted out. At an age when most blues, rock and R&B deities are resting on their laurels, Guy has made one of his finest albums.
— Greg Kot
Helmut Jahn
Architect
What inspires him: “To be better than yesterday.”
Helmut Jahn was first named Chicago’s architect of the year in 1983 when he was fresh off such triumphs as the postmodern Chicago Board of Trade addition. His State of Illinois Center (now the James R. Thompson Center), which would be heavily criticized for its tawdry palette of salmon and robin’s egg blue, was still two years away.
No longer a wunderkind, the 61-year-old Jahn remains as audacious as ever, but he’s abandoned postmodernism and its decoration-slathered buildings for a sleek, self-assured modernism driven by engineering and technology.
The results are evident in such acclaimed projects as the year-old Sony Center in Berlin, a triangle-shaped wedge of offices, condos and movie theaters that has brought new life to the former no-man’s land near the former site of the Berlin Wall. Though not without faults, like a cone-shaped fabric roof that sits atop the complex’s buildings like a giant lampshade, the Sony project will win a national design award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) next month.
“I’ve learned a lot in these last 18 years, especially working in a team with engineers and specialists,” Jahn says at the offices of his firm, Murphy-Jahn, in the frilly, domed-topped 35 E. Wacker Drive building. He is less prone, he explains, to think of architecture simply as styling a building’s exterior. Instead, he focuses on “the real system of components and how a building is put together.”
That approach may sound dull, but it often yields a dazzling synthesis of technology and art, like Jahn’s corporate headquarters for Ha-Lo Industries in northwest suburban Niles. The sleek glass box is visually supercharged by metal screens that project from its roof and walls.
Unfortunately, Ha-Lo, a promotional product marketer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy only a few months after moving into the seven-story building. Some pointed fingers at the flashy structure as a cause of Ha-Lo’s demise. Jahn’s denies it, saying that bad investments — not overpriced architecture — sank the company.
Ha-Lo is one of Jahn’s rare projects in the Chicago area these days. Another, still in the planning stages, is an elegantly curving row of student apartments, just across State Street from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, due to open in 2003.
But most of Jahn’s work is in his native Germany, where he finds the climate far more conducive to innovation than in the United States. An example is the lozenge-shaped, 40-story German postal service headquarters in Bonn, which will be the tallest building in the former West German capital. Scheduled to debut next year, the tower will have a special outer wall of glass that allows the building to be naturally ventilated. “High technology, low energy,” Jahn calls it.
While Jahn’s buildings have changed, he is still brazenly self-confident, much like Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said that, faced with a choice between hypocritical humility and honest arrogance, he’d opted for the latter. Yet Jahn can be refreshingly self-critical — at least of his old self.
Looking at his architect-of-the-year picture from 1983, when he had a mop-top haircut and dressed like a 1920s gangster, Jahn says, without blinking his cool blue eyes: “I think I look horrible.”
His architecture doesn’t.
— Blair Kamin
Eileen R. Mackevich
President and executive producer of the Chicago Humanities Festival
Margaret Keller
Associate producer of the Chicago Humanities Festival
What inspires her (Mackevich): “It’s the people. I can’t walk down the street anymore without people giving me ideas. It’s the people’s festival in a very special kind of way that I could never have imagined. It’s people. It’s the people who live in this wonderful city.”
What inspires her (Keller): “The work itself. Having that constant sense of stimulation is self-inspiring. The work you do gets you going every morning and the impact goes beyond you. It’s not just sitting at a desk, it’s not just me — it’s bringing something interesting and exciting to the public. It doesn’t remain in a purely private realm. It touches a larger group of people.”
If the 2001 Chicago Humanities Festival were a jump shot, it would’ve been a three-pointer: The event, now in its 12th year, managed to land a trio of authors that constituted a cultural trifecta.
There was V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize; Jonathan Franzen, winner of the National Book Award; and Michael Chabon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Because the festival schedule was planned long before those awards were announced, the evidence is clear that somebody had her finger firmly on the nation’s cultural pulse.
Actually, there were two somebodys: Eileen R. Mackevich and Margaret Keller, who collaborated to produce this year’s event, organized under the theme “Words and Pictures.” Mackevich and Keller were instrumental in selecting festival participants and in keeping the whole shebang on track.
For approximately two weeks each fall, Chicago turns into the coolest place on the planet, as a plethora of writers, painters, photographers, performers and thinkers arrive en masse to bewitch and enthrall audiences. The 2001 edition of the festival was especially memorable — not only for the presence of the award-winning writers, but also for including comic book writers and historians, thus broadening the festival’s cultural sweep.
“There were some extraordinary things that happened this year,” said the effervescent Mackevich, a Philadelphia native who has run the festival since its 1989 startup. “The comics panels attracted a whole new audience. We succeeded in getting a younger audience and a very diverse audience. We just had great crowds.”
The festival also included events on the city’s South Side. “We’d never done that before,” Mackevich said. “We jumped out of the [North Side] lakefront to go south.”
Keller, a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Chicago who is a bit more reserved than her boss, has worked for the festival three years. Her original intention was to pursue an academic career, Keller said, but a funny thing happened on the way to the faculty club: She discovered that her real passion was for bringing academia — its cutting-edge ideas, its deep thinking on complex topics — to the public. The festival, she found, was the perfect conduit.
“This is as important as academic work and, for me, it’s a better fit,” said Keller. “I’ve always been interested in how you communicate the humanities to the public.”
The festival’s triple-word score in bringing Naipal, Franzen and Chabon to Chicago just as their reputations were exploding nationally and internationally was more than just good luck and good publicity, she added.
“It may look like we’re chasing the awards. But that’s not the case. We pay attention to emerging people.”
— Julia Keller
Marna Seltzer
Director of the University of Chicago Presents concert series
What inspires her: “I am inspired by great music and the great musicians. There is something so pure, so real, when a musician of integrity and depth gets in front of an audience and communicates something personal and heartfelt.”
The music business is hurting — bad — in many places across the American landscape. And no wonder, what with concert promoters falling back on the same tired handful of name-brand classical artists repeating the same tired programs before dwindling numbers of graying listeners.
Fortunately, there still are classical impresarios who actually care about music and the artists they engage. Few have demonstrated so unwavering a commitment to classical music as Marna Seltzer, director of the University of Chicago Presents chamber music and early music concert series. In 2001 she proved herself one of the shining beacons for Chicago music among local arts managers.
For nearly a century, the university’s intimate, 985-seat Mandel Hall was known among Hyde Park residents as a nice place to hear big-name chamber ensembles. But the artistic reach of Mandel’s concert lineup did not exceed its grasp until Seltzer took charge. Since she became the series’ director three years ago, people have begun flocking to Mandel from far beyond the city’s South Side to hear what she has to offer them.
This season, the U. of C. Presents schedule was a model of what a classical concert series should be. Seltzer introduced Chicago audiences to the extraordinary Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski and the gifted Borromeo String Quartet. She brought back to the city the extraordinary contralto, Ewa Podles, for her first local recital. Thanks to Seltzer’s enterprise, we have heard such remarkable musicians as violinist Hilary Hahn, tenor Ian Bostridge, countertenor David Daniels and the Baroque orchestra Il Giardino Armonico.
Seltzer likens the difficult task of coming up with a fresh and interesting series every year to “buying the absolutely perfect present for 1,000 people.” Within her $350,000 current annual budget — which has risen about $80,000 since she took over the series — she has had to be choosy about which artists Chicago needs to hear and who would make a good fit with her public. She has used her buying power discerningly, bringing to the city young and/or relatively unheralded instrumentalists, singers and ensembles one wouldn’t necessarily encounter at such large establishment venues as Orchestra Hall.
And she deserves credit for cultivating one of the most loyal, supportive, discerning and adventuresome audiences in Chicago music. “I am continually astounded by their courage,” she says. “We have taken many artistic risks and they have enthusiastically supported every one of them. They care deeply about the value of music in their lives.”
— John von Rhein
Chuck Smith
Theater director
What inspires him: “My friends. Friendship. I’m inspired by my close friends, many of whom I’ve been associated with since grade school and high school. Conversations with that group of individuals really keep me on a certain level.”
When Picasso looked at a painting, his gaze was so intense and devouring that, friends said, they were amazed anything was left on the canvas. Anyone who watches Chuck Smith work with a dramatic text would say the same thing: In his quiet, unostentatious way, he’s a marvel of focus and concentration.
Recently named resident director of the Goodman Theatre after a decade as an artistic associate there, the Chicago native had a marquee year in 2001. He directed the critically acclaimed production of “The Amen Corner” at the Goodman, and then took the James Baldwin play to Boston’s Huntington Theatre. He garnered national attention with a staging of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery and “The Last Season” in Los Angeles.
Back home in Chicago, he continued his work as facilitator of the Theodore Ward Prize for African American Playwrights, now in its 16th year. The prize is sponsored by Columbia College, where Smith is artist in residence.
“This has been my busiest year to date,” said Smith, whose calm demeanor belies a fierce and unremitting passion for theater, especially theater that explores the African-American experience.
Smith was a founding member of the Chicago Theatre Company and worked with other local African-American troupes such as the Kuumba theater group. He began directing professionally in 1978 at Victory Gardens Theater, racking up some 40 productions between then and now.
A self-described “South Side soldier,” Smith has remained close to his roots — he still lives on the South Side — and puts his time where his convictions lie. In 2000, while he was directing the Goodman’s production of the late Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” Smith spent much of his free time at Englewood High School, the late playwright’s alma mater, directing a student production of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” He led a drive to raise $5,000 to upgrade the school’s auditorium.
“This year, we brought in Chicagoans who knew Lorraine Hansberry to talk to the students,” Smith said. “And we used the new lighting system for the first time” in a student production that combined excerpts of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” and “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Smith relished his diverse assignments in 2001, but he’s glad to be home, he said. “It’s nice, but I intend to stay very, very close to home in this next year. I realize now that I don’t like to be away from home that much. I really, really like working in Chicago. Chicago is a very special place for theater.”
— Julia Keller
David Young
Jazz musician
What inspires him: “Writers, poets, artists, nature and all the different ways that people choose to live their lives, which is what we, as creative people, explore.”
It has been a long time since a Chicago musician of David Young’s musical gifts, intelligence, erudition and commitment has made a debut akin to his.
For starters, Young released an unusually strong, critically applauded first CD, “Appassionata” (Big Chicago Records), which documented the signature beauty of his tone and the cohesiveness of the band he leads. A composer of already considerable accomplishment and even greater promise, Young proved on this recording that he can write indelible melodies and beguiling chord changes on a par with anyone his age (22) and better than many of his elders.
But the fuller measure of Young’s work as composer came last month, when he unveiled “Beneath the Bronze Belt” during the Chicago Humanities Festival, which commissioned it. An epic suite exploring the musical and cultural roots of black life in Chicago and across urban America, the piece contained passages of exceptionally controlled, beautifully conceived ensemble writing. Traces of Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis coursed through this work, which included a concertolike movement for Chicago tenor saxophone legend Von Freeman (loosely modeled on Ellington’s “Concerto for Cootie”).
“That suite definitely was a big turning point for me,” says Young. “It was the first time I really got to dig into making a piece about blackness, but also about community. `Beneath the Bronze Belt’ was about more than just this one city — it was about Bronzeville as a microcosm of the whole country.”
Only an artist of considerable experience could have pulled off such a work, but Young is no neophyte, having been recruited to play in some of the city’s best ensembles. In the past few months alone, he has finessed the classical score of Wendell Logan and Paul Carter Harrison’s “Doxology Opera,” riffed freely in the Bebop Brass band, swung the trumpet part in Ernest Khabeer Dawkins’ Englewood Community Jazz Band, and elegantly dispatched Daniel Tucker’s sleek new fanfare for the Chicago Humanities Festival. In so doing, Young has taken full advantage of the city’s stylistically rich musical scene while becoming an important part of it.
“Talk about growing pains — this has been one of the more turbulent years of my life, but also one of the most exciting,” says Young, who’s writing the music for his next CD and looking for a venue to perform once again “Beneath the Bronze Belt” (the Museum of Contemporary Art would be an ideal setting).
“All of sudden, the music I had been playing in private became very public, and that took some getting used to. It has been an incredible turning point.”
— Howard Reich
Dennis Zacek
Marcelle McVay
Sandy Shinner
Leaders of Victory Gardens Theater
What inspires him (Zacek, artistic director): “Living and working here, in this vibrant community, in what Mayor Daley calls the great City of Chicago, is what inspires me.”
What inspires her (McVay, managing director): “The artists and the audiences, and the joy of bringing them together.”
What inspires her (Shinner, associate artistic director): “The collaboration with our talented actors, writers and designers, and then bringing their work to the stage so that audiences can be excited, moved and challenged by a new play.”
When the phone call came in early May, Marcelle McVay remembers, “It was a total surprise. I mean it was total. Total! Unbelievable! We were standing around shrieking with excitement.”
The call had come from the administrators of the Tony Awards, who this year picked Victory Gardens Theater, where McVay is managing director, as recipient of its annual award for an outstanding regional theater in the United States. One month later, McVay, plus the theater’s artistic director (and her husband) Dennis Zacek and associate artistic director Sandy Shinner, were standing onstage in New York, triumphantly waving their Tony Award for all the world to see.
“The award gave us a tremendous amount of national recognition for the importance of the work we’ve been doing,” Zacek says. “A couple weeks after the Tonys, we went to a national theater conference, and everybody there knew who we were — which is very important. But the Tony also recognized the importance of nourishing playwrights, which is our mission and our inspiration.”
For McVay and Zacek, who have been together and in charge at Victory Gardens for a quarter-century, the award was especially sweet, since just last year they had gone through a brief but intense period in which their board had considered hiring a new administrator who would have had ultimate authority in all management decisions. That crisis passed, and the Victory Gardens mission, which is the nurturing of a group of resident playwrights, was preserved and strengthened.
Since receiving the Tony, the theater at 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. has counted more than 5,000 subscribers to its season of plays for the first time in its 27-year history; and late in the year, the staff and board members began what Zacek describes as “serious discussions” about buying the old Biograph movie house, a few blocks north at 2433 N. Lincoln Ave., and converting it into a new performing arts center for Victory Gardens. Those discussions should come to a head next year. But for now, Zacek, McVay and Shinner can look back on a miraculous year for them and for their theater. “Thinking about it now,” McVay says, “it still seems totally wonderful.”
— Richard Christiansen
