By and large, the Grant Park Music Festival’s annual Independence Day Salute is feel-good musical fare. You have your Sousa, your Broadway medleys. Your favorite film composers. A healthy dollop of Americana.
More Top Picks Garden
But partway though a fantasia on American tunes, a man sitting across my aisle in Jay Pritzker Pavilion curled inwards on himself. He removed his glasses, shoulders quaking, and buried his face in his hands.
He wasn’t alone. During the same measures, the men in the group in front of me — two couples, probably in their 70s — began to paw at their eyes. Their wives smiled at them reassuringly.
Onstage, the orchestra played “America the Beautiful.”
Coming to Saturday’s concert at all was an act of faith. As has been the norm this summer, seasonal storms kept attendees guessing about whether the July 4 tradition would go forward until downbeat. Even once the storms abated, a low-slung quilt of fog obscured the Navy Pier fireworks show later that evening.
To Meredith O’Sullivan, of Old Irving Park, the forecast reflected the dampened celebrations. She compared this year’s semiquincentennial to the bicentennial celebrations in 1976. At the time, that nationwide bash felt like “the biggest thing.”
“I don’t think that America is celebrating the 250th like we did the 200th. And it’s sad,” she said. “It feels very politicized in a way that it never has before. It seems like it’s somebody’s birthday instead of the country’s birthday.”
Still, by the end of the concert, a soggy yet determined crowd of 4,750 had flowed through the park grounds. O’Sullivan’s friends — the Koonmen family, of South Loop — circled downtown in their car until the rain let up enough for them to enter the Pavilion. The Dahlgrens, of North Park, came with a picnic box and faith that the rain would relent in time for the concert. (It did.) John Jendras and Judy Paice are festival members who count the Independence Day Salute among their favorite concerts; they walked from their Near North Side home in the rain to attend.
“We’re not made of sugar,” Paice told me.
Those who braved the elements were rewarded with exceptional music. Dressed in a star-spangled vest, Grant Park concertmaster Jeremy Black spun the tango “Por una cabeza” from a programming trifle into a poetic statement, his tone singing and ever-sweet. From there, he launched into the fun, fast-chugging fiddle tune “Orange Blossom Special,” imitating the low crow and high bells of a locomotive.
Principal clarinetist Dario Brignoli went in a different direction while playing an arrangement of George Gershwin’s Three Preludes. He wore an all-black, bedazzled cloak, halfway between “The Matrix” and steampunk, and his performance echoed that renegade quality — braying multiphonics, high shrieks like an electric guitar, and a devil-may-care sultriness in the bluesy second prelude. The Millennium Park Jumbotron picked up smiles sprouting all over the ensemble during Brignoli’s performance: This clarinet wizard has acolytes onstage and off, and rightly so.
As a running Independence Day gag, conductor Christopher Bell dresses in absurd, red-white-and-blue getups for the annual Salute, which he guards under lock and key from both musicians and management until concert day. One knew Bell had something outlandish up his sleeve for this milestone Fourth. Still, he outdid himself, taking the stage in a huge inflatable, five-pointed star.
Logistics forced him to shed the costume after the first number. “To be honest, I couldn’t hear a thing,” he confessed to the audience afterward.
But this concert always balances silliness with solemnity. Just as reliable as Bell’s costumes is the Armed Forces Salute, which invites members of the U.S. military to stand alongside each branch’s anthem.
More Top Picks Best Beverage Refrigerators
Eric Solis — from Austin, Texas, but visiting family for the holiday — was the only one in the Pavilion to stand when the orchestra segued into the “Marines’ Hymn.”
Solis joined the Marine Corps in 2012 and served for eight years. A first-time Grant Park Music Festival attendee, he hadn’t known the concert would include a tribute to military members.“I think my family surprised me with that,” he said, smiling. “It took me back to the times when I did serve, you know — that warm feeling.”
After the concert broke, I also caught up with the man I’d seen crying during “America the Beautiful.” He introduced himself as Scott Alexander, a longtime Hyde Park resident and professor of Islamic Studies at the Catholic Theological Union. After 26 years in Chicago, he attended the Independence Day Salute with his wife for the first time. They’d wanted to do something special for the big anniversary year.
Alexander hadn’t expected to tear up during the concert, he told me. But in the instrumental “Fantasy on American Themes,” by Jeff Tyzik, he thought of the lyrics to the second stanza of “America the Beautiful”: “God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law.”
“Sometimes, I feel like we’re celebrating a birthday of a patient who’s in the ICU,” Alexander said, overcome all over again. “Cakes and balloons aren’t necessarily what you do when someone’s in a very difficult situation like that.”
Despite that, Alexander said, he’s “trying to stay hopeful.”
“That,” he said, “is one of the reasons why I’m here.”
A faith that feels reckless? That sounds like America — the proud, the irreverent, the persevering.
And, yes, even beautiful.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.