Sundays at Evanston’s downtown Fountain Square are about to get a lot more lively, as the city is set to revive its weekly summer jazz series beginning May 17.
The third-annual “Sunday Jazz at the Square” will showcase a variety of local jazz talent to perform in trios and quartets each week from noon until 2 p.m. through the end of July.
The concert series is free to the public and open to anyone who wants to listen, said Andy Vick, executive director of Downtown Evanston, which promotes community events for the business district.
“It’s really a very casual thing, and intended to be that you can just walk by and listen for five minutes, or you can pull up a chair and stay for the whole two hours,” Vick told the Pioneer Press.
“It feels very alive and vibrant, and that’s really what we’re striving for,” he added.
Vick said the series began three years ago when he stumbled upon a group of young jazz musicians busking in Evanston’s Fountain Square.
“They were absolutely amazing, I thought, and so, I approached them in that first year and said, ‘Hey, would you like to formalize this a little more?,’ and they were really interested in doing that,” Vick said.
All musicians are local North Shore residents of Evanston and its surrounding communities, a number of whom currently attend local schools in the area, Vick added.
Drummer Zach Sorkin, a past performer of the series, will be leading the charge this summer in pulling together a different collection of young jazz artists to perform each week.
“I’m definitely looking forward to playing for such a great community again. Last year, we got a lot more positive reception than we ever expected to get, and it made it so much more enriching and rewarding for us to play,” Sorkin told the Pioneer Press.
“Instead of the same quartet every week, we’re doing a rotating ‘special guests’ type of arrangement, so I’m really excited to play with a wide variety of different musicians from different parts of the Chicago scene.”
The first four weeks of the music series are already confirmed, Vick said, and are live on the organization’s website.
No tickets will be required for the weekly event, but tips are encouraged to help support the local jazz musicians.
For listeners in search of additional jazz performances this summer, Local Note, a new jazz club located at 1716 Sherman Avenue, is expected to open in June.
Club owner Kurt Schauer previously told the Pioneer Press the club will be a hybrid of 20s, 30s, 50s and 60s-era jazz influences in an 800-square-foot intimate space.
Downtown Evanston will also be sponsoring the third-annual Summer Sounds music showcase beginning July 9.
The free outdoor concert series is expected to run every Thursday until Sept. 3 and feature a variety of local and regional bands to perform from 6 to 8 p.m.
“We’re trying to activate the downtown as much as possible,” Vick said.
“So, we’re really excited about the sort of energy that’s coming out of this [area] right now and we want to keep it going.”
