The south side’s own world-class jazz fest played host to dozens of shows and more than a hundred musicians.
By Philip Montoro @pmontoro and Michael Jackson
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- Angel Bat Dawid performed the commissioned work Requiem for Jazz at the Logan Center for the Arts on Saturday.
- Michael Jackson for Chicago Reader
This past weekend the 13th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival brought 36 performances by local, national, and international artists to more than a dozen venues and stages in and around Hyde Park. Saturday’s programming included two new works commissioned from Chicago composers in partnership with the U. of C.’s Logan Center for the Arts: Angel Bat Dawid‘s Requiem for Jazz and Isaiah Collier’s The Story of 400 Years, both of which employed large mixed-discipline ensembles to address the history of jazz, the history of slavery, and the African American experience. Percussionists Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph, who founded the influential Mandingo Griot Society with Gambian kora player Foday Musa Soso in the late 1970s, performed as the duo Karuna. And pianist Sylvie Courvoisier played in a duo with guitarist and brand-new MacArthur fellow Mary Halvorson.
Photographer and musician Michael Jackson went to both days of the festival, and his images capture these acts and many more. Chicago is fortunate to have not just its downtown jazz fest but also this world-class event on the south side, supported by a complex web of partnerships between private institutions, nonprofits, city agencies, foundations, corporations, and volunteers. Its most important supporters, though, are the tens of thousands of people who come out to see the music, and they’re in Jackson’s photos too. The images are collected in a slideshow below. v