For at least the past couple of years, Chicago Symphony Orchestra management has been speaking grandiloquently about bringing new audiences into the CSO’s $110 million home, Symphony Center, which opened last weekend.
The vastly expanded site of Orchestra Hall would help develop new audiences for the next century, said the CSO brass, undoubtedly aware that the audience for classical symphonic music has been shrinking and graying (as evidenced by studies from the American Symphony Orchestra League and the National Endowment for the Arts).
What a pity, then, that Chicago Symphony management very nearly condescends to the audience it says it wants to lure. Compared with such performing arts institutions as Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, the Smithsonian Institution and the Los Angeles Music Center (which recently appointed Herbie Hancock head of a new jazz department), Chicago’s Symphony Center does not appear to hold the audience for jazz in particular, and black musical tradition in general, in very high regard.
You wouldn’t know it from the pronouncements that have come from Symphony Center managers.
“Symphony Center will serve Chicago with a much greater and more diverse scope of activities,” CSO president Henry Fogel told the Tribune last month, invoking the cultural buzzword of the ’90s: “diverse.”
“With the opening of Symphony Center,” writes CSO music director Daniel Barenboim in the orchestra’s program book, “we now have the multi-faceted facility to make music — all kinds of music — accessible to everyone.”
Similarly, Ravinia Festival executive director Zarin Mehta, whose staff books jazz at Symphony Center, has said that “American orchestras need to bring in more African-American and Hispanic audiences, and what better way than with jazz?”
The CSO has been presenting a formal jazz series since 1994. Unfortunately, the series, which begins its fourth season on Oct. 24, still gives the music short shrift.
For starters, the Ameritech Jazz at Symphony Center lineup has no artistic director, no resident ensemble, no themed programs, no related lectures and films and, ultimately, no artistic identity of the kind that distinguishes programs in other cities. Instead, Symphony Center merely books a smattering of acts that happen to be touring nationally, much the way that a pop presenter such as Jam Productions books various venues around town.
This city deserves better.
“Chicago,” wrote jazz scholar Gunther Schuller in a letter to the Tribune last April, “with its long and unique history in the entire development of jazz . . . should now, after New York and Washington, also acquire such a permanent jazz center.
“Were the new Symphony Center not to incorporate a resident jazz component in its overall structure, it would be ignoring and rejecting the music that has as much as (or more than) any other musical tradition conquered the world and influenced popular musics all over the globe.”
Yet Symphony Center has all but turned its backside to jazz, and not only because its series is so slight. The catch-as-catch-can bookings also utterly lack forethought, repeatedly featuring artists who recently have played Chicago. Betty Carter, Von Freeman and Illinois Jacquet, for instance, headlined at the Chicago Jazz Festival just last month, but there they are again on the Symphony Center schedule.
Each, obviously, is an important artist and always worth hearing. But unless these musicians are presented in a context that is original and unique to Symphony Center, the bookings are routine at best.
Chicago Symphony management has defended the unambitious nature of its jazz series by emphasizing its newness, and indeed a fourth season is early for any artistic endeavor. Lincoln Center, they point out, began presenting jazz in 1987. It’s worth noting, however, that Orchestra Hall has been presenting jazz concerts since the 1910s.
And though Symphony Center insiders have bemoaned the difficulty of finding a jazz director on the order of Marsalis (who already runs the state-of-the-art Lincoln Center program), superb artists are not in short supply: The list of top-notch candidates includes singer-conductor Bobby McFerrin, pianist-composer Marcus Roberts, trumpeter-composer Terence Blanchard, pianist-educator Henry Butler and perhaps best of all, Chicago Jazz Ensemble conductor William Russo.
“It has come to my attention that Chicago is contemplating putting together a permanent position for a jazz orchestra, which would add yet another layer to the already formidable array of programs and institutions that have given Chicago such an important position in the art of this country,” wrote Stanley Crouch, artistic adviser for Jazz at Lincoln Center, in a recent letter to the Tribune’s editorial page.
“As one who has been involved in these kinds of projects for quite some time, I unequivocally support this idea, especially if William Russo and his wonderful band are given the job to do in a formal and professional situation, which is what they have been doing with such quality within the context of Columbia College.
“There are no more talented, experienced, respected or knowledgeable musicians, composers and conductors than Mr. Russo, whose contributions to the contemporary language of the big band are indisputable. He knows how it started, and he knows where it is.”
Indeed, all the elements are in place for Symphony Center to join a growing jazz-repertory movement. With the sales of the jazz series strong enough to have inspired a doubling of the number of concerts (from 5 in 1995-96 to 10 in 1996-97), the Chicago audience clearly is hungry for more.
The question is whether Symphony Center can overcome a tone-deaf policy toward jazz, as well as such related genres as blues, gospel and Latin music. The CSO’s primary gesture toward these genres has been its performances of Hannibal Lokumbe’s juvenile “African Portraits,” which Tribune music critic John von Rhein called “a crossover pastiche.”
And though Orchestra Hall wisely presented Wynton Marsalis’ black history epic “Blood on the Fields” last February, that was simply an import from a more ambitious arts institution: Lincoln Center.
As the 21st Century looms, it’s time for Chicago’s Symphony Center to seriously acknowledge music of the 20th.