Horrible as it was, Kate Dumbleton saw it coming.
Like so many arts administrators, the executive director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival kept a watchful eye on the news after President Trump announced his intent to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. A glimmer of hope arrived in January, when the agency reaffirmed that the $30,000 promised to the festival would, indeed, be coming through.
It turned out to be false hope. A second letter, in May, announced that the festival’s offer letter had been withdrawn. By now already booked, the festival was left to figure out the shortfall on its own.
“It was a gut punch,” says Dumbleton.
Luckily, she and the festival team had long been planning for the worst-case outcome. Dumbleton had already stepped in to write grants herself, rather than hire out a grant writer, and the festival was more scrupulous than usual about big expenses, like booking large non-Chicago ensembles. And even as panic set in immediately following the NEA cuts, Dumbleton says she and her team quickly agreed on some north stars: No matter what it took, they would hire the same number of musicians, pay the same rates, and keep the festival free for attendees.
To make it work, Hyde Park institutions jumped in to help — like the Smart Museum of Art, which underwrote one of the two sets in its courtyard. (I caught Renée Baker’s Modern Black Music Ensemble, in a set evincing the alert musicianship and soulful intuition that defines the project.) A festival board member’s match campaign helped plug the remaining gap. Dumbleton says donation sizes ranged from $5 to $1,000.
“It demonstrated how much the festival means to the community,” she says.
Had none of that chaos been sown, last weekend’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival would have still sounded like a rallying cry for the arts. Trio Imagination was an especially inspired invitee. After the breakup of their free-jazz unit Trio 3, veterans Andrew Cyrille (drums) and Reggie Workman (bass), whose bona fides stretch back to Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, rebooted their trio configuration with pianist David Virelles.
Trio Imagination leans into its new, all-rhythm instrumentation. Shared washes of sound gradually splinter into their own solo statements, the melodies ephemeral and terse. Nearly half a century younger, Virelles matched his older colleagues in intensity and control.
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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival shared its gleam with two other eminences, city institutions unto themselves: Asian Improv Arts Midwest, whose Asian American Jazz Festival turns 30 in November, and drummer Hamid Drake, who turned 70 last month, were honored with panels and performances. Flying in from Japan, pianist Yosuke Yamashita led a probing, exquisitely layered collaboration with Asian Improv Arts Midwest founder and bassist Tatsu Aoki and movement artist Takahiro Tomatsu. Later, Drake led a juggernaut quartet of Ari Brown on tenor saxophone and piano, Jason Adasiewicz on vibes, and Joshua Abrams on bass and gimbri.
Those acts drew packed crowds. So did singer Maggie Brown in a joyous, multigenerational affair at Augustana Lutheran Church, peppered with stories about her father, multihyphenate singer and songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr., and shoutouts to her family in the audience. Other venues which rarely hit capacity did, again and again, on Saturday: The Logan Center Penthouse was stuffed enough to turn patrons away for drummer Dana Hall and pianist Paul Giallorenzo’s trios. Even a more reflective attraction — an immersive multimedia display by Lauren Deutsch and Jonathan Woods in the Logan Center, its live soundtrack played by duos veiled from view — drew throngs of listeners.
While attendance is impossible to tally—there is no set entry point for the festival, which is free with a suggested donation — Dumbleton feels comfortable saying this year marked the Hyde Park Jazz Festival’s “biggest attendance ever.” As of midday Sunday, donations were also “significantly higher” than the previous year.
This year also provided a proof of concept for its new scheduling plan. Noting new audience behaviors since COVID, the festival decided to foreshorten the Midway shows on Saturday evening in order to move up the redeye set in Rockefeller Chapel by an hour — always a solo or duo, and usually featuring the year’s biggest name.
That slot, with pianist Jason Moran, topped out especially quickly on Saturday, and for good reason. In the spirit of his 2014 Fats Waller tribute, Moran has spent much of this year investigating Duke Ellington, whom, Moran said, we “owe more than he ever receives.” (Amen.)
“Investigation” isn’t a cute turn of phrase. Like a scientist, Moran splits Ellington’s tunes open and noses around, as though to see what they’re made of. What does “Melancholia” sound like, shrunk down to its essentials — one nudge of a melodic line, one seesawing harmony change? And what is “It Don’t Mean A Thing” if it doesn’t, in fact, have that swing? (Moran’s account fractures into mere slivers of rhythm, coalescing fitfully before falling away.) And what if the “Black & Tan Fantasy” became an epic, 10-plus-minute test of the piano itself — churning around in the lower register, pedal down, until the piano begins to roar back, deafeningly?
At this point, someone in my row leaned over to a friend and whispered, “I had no idea a piano could sound like that.” Me neither.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.