Funny how, after four days of back-to-back performances, the quietest parts echo the loudest.
Every corner of Millennium Park was awash in music last weekend for the Chicago Jazz Festival, boasting its usual blend of headlining stars in Pritzker Pavilion — bass titan Ron Carter and Makaya McCraven among them — and heaps of local talent taking over more intimate stages.
As a free festival in the city’s most-visited park, it’s fair to say the majority of those who make their way to the Jazz Festival aren’t jazz aficionados. But it was striking just how many attendees brought a superfan’s focus to the weekend. On Saturday, a standing crowd instinctually hushed to hear the bass solos and drum brush outros of saxophonist Roy McGrath’s quartet, at a stage hosted by radio station WDCB 90.9-FM. It happened again in the Pavilion, when harpist Brandee Younger tickled her upper notes in Alice Coltrane’s bluesy ballad “Turiya and Ramakrishna.” And again, during “You Don’t Know What Love Is” in trumpeter Pharez Whitted’s set on Sunday.
Chicago is a city that takes jazz seriously. It’s kind of our thing. That’s why this festival’s last-minute rollout — just a month and a half before kickoff — inspired much righteous grumbling among jazz fans. Why the city waited to release the complete lineup rather than at least announce Pavilion headliners as soon as they were finalized in May remains a head-scratcher.
But with an estimate by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events placing attendance at “well over 100,000? over the weekend, the late announcement clearly didn’t affect turnout at a high level. For most folks, we’re talking about a free festival, in Millennium Park, on a holiday weekend. What’s not to like?
Well, maybe one thing.
“All I want to know is: Who ordered this weather?” Whitted quipped during his set, summing up many artists’ feelings over the sun-baked weekend. After dabbing his brow, he dove back into an hourlong sprint of a set. What was that about the heat again?
The rising temperatures through the weekend never deterred Janet Walker of Aurora and James Jackson of Oak Park who attended all four days of the festival. The couple are easily spotted on the Millennium Park Lawn by their deluxe setup: a table adorned with a floral centerpiece and two enticingly squishy blowup chairs.
Walker says they’ve been attending the Chicago Jazz Festival for 12 years; next up are the Englewood and Hyde Park Jazz Festivals.
“I’ve lived in six different states. I come from New York — you’re not walking in nowhere for free,” Walker says. “The Chicago Jazz Festival is absolutely extraordinary. This is a free festival, and you’ve got excellent musicians. I tell everybody about it.”
The festival’s first evening honored jazz’s living history, starting with a band convened by tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman to commemorate what would have been his father Von’s 100th birthday year. (A fuller celebration on Von’s actual birthday weekend, in October, is planned at the Green Mill.) Guitarist George Freeman — Von’s brother, now 96 — joined the band onstage for a very fitting number, Von’s “Brother George.” When it sounded like his pensive opening solo was winding down, Freeman cheekily flared back, to the delight of the crowd and his bandmates alike.
Ron Carter and his quartet Foursight, playing just afterward, was every ounce the festival standout they’d promised to be. Tall and magisterial, and playing with a serene meditativeness that seemed to channel another world, Carter, it seems, couldn’t possibly be 86 — except that it would take at least 86 years to encompass the bassist’s thousands of recording credits (he’s a Guinness World Record holder) and career accolades. The high point of his unbroken set was a sweeping plucked solo that quoted “You Are My Sunshine” and Bach’s first cello suite before slyly guiding us into “You and the Night and the Music.”
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On the other side of Pritzker Pavilion’s stainless-steel crown, dozens of young artists tested their own material in front of a curious audience. Of the younger headliners I heard at the Harris Theater Rooftop, I left most impressed by Mxmrys (pronounced “memories”), a vibey, mischievously imaginative four-piece with a forthcoming EP. The day before, a young singer had brought a crowd of hundreds to her feet with a belting, powerhouse performance of “Feeling Good” with the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band.
“Did you catch her name?” a volunteer working the merch table asked me, winded.
It’s Courtney Phinn — remember it. The 16-year-old Kenwood junior sings in the school’s concert choir, as well as in the choir at St. Joseph Missionary Baptist Church in East Garfield Park. It was her first time performing at the Chicago Jazz Festival, which, she admits, was “a little nerve-wracking.”
But when Phinn saw a unanimous standing ovation? “I was like, ‘OK, I did something right,'” she says, cracking a grin.
Just an hour later, Chicago’s own Tammy McCann sang the same song in her Pritzker Pavilion set. Where Phinn’s rendition seized on youthful virtuosity, McCann’s version — sparse, eloquent and introspective, against a solo bass accompaniment by John Sutton — seemed to peer at the same material with the wisdom of age.
Most of McCann’s set was taken from her new album “Do I Move You?”, making her among the many artists promoting new albums at the festival. My favorite acts of the festival both built their sets on records released this spring: saxophonist Walter Smith III, with “Return to Casual,” and songwriter Billy Valentine, reintroducing himself as a jazz singer with “Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth.” Smith wins my award for best group, in a revelatory quartet featuring bassist Harish Raghavan, drummer Kendrick Scott and piano polymath Sullivan Fortner; their Friday set was equal parts provocative and profound, often both.
And if we’re conferring imaginary awards, Valentine, easily, was “most moving.” After working behind the scenes for years as a songwriter in Los Angeles, Valentine, 73 — one-half of the Valentine Brothers, behind the Reagan-era hit “Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)” — has only recently returned to his roots as a mainstage vocalist. He’d better be there to stay: His deeply felt set dusted off Nat King Cole’s sorely underrated “Funny (Not Much)” and ended with one of the most powerful renditions of “A Change Is Gonna Come” that I’ve yet heard.
The tear-jerking was mutual: Valentine dabbed at his eyes as an adoring Pritzker Pavilion audience rose to its feet at the end of his set.
Another recently released album, bassist Christian Dillingham’s debut “Cascades,” came out two days before his quartet’s performance at the Von Freeman Pavilion. As Dillingham told the audience, however, his week had been anything but celebratory: After the set, he was going to leave to be with his father, who was dying.
“He’s the person who got me to check out the bass from the very beginning,” Dillingham said. The ensuing set, dedicated to his father, blazed like an eternal flame. Even in more album-faithful numbers, the quartet approached everything with an engulfing intensity, stoked as if with gasoline by inexhaustible drummer Greg Artry. It was a powerful monument, as raw and real as they come.
The weekend’s greatest disappointment was a cancellation by singer Dianne Reeves, herself citing personal reasons for pulling out of Friday night’s show. But props to Kurt Elling, whose SuperBlue band skidded in to replace her — from Australia, no less. Their high-energy set included some of the same highlights sampled at the band’s Green Mill appearance last year, this time for a bouncing audience of thousands. You have to hand it to Elling, corny as he can be: He knows how to make a crowd move.
“Get up and wiggle-waggle your dingle-dangle!” he yelled, to cheers and laughter.
Later in the weekend, José “Pepito” Gomez of the Afro-Cuban All Stars — closing this year’s festival with an irresistibly bombastic set — issued a more straightforward exhortation.
“Up, up, up!” the singer cried into the microphone. Then, the big band launched into “El cuarto de Tula,” a tune made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club’s debut album. Most in the park needed no such directive, already having turned the Pavilion’s narrow rows into dance floors. So did the band — in “Amor Verdadero,” bandleader Juan de Marcos González called his wife, Gliceria Abreu, up front for a dance, and at set’s end, Orlando Cardoso broke from his rapt seriousness behind the piano for a somersault downstage.
I’m grinning as I write this. Guess that means the Chicago Jazz Fest’s loud parts are echoing plenty in my memory, too.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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