Chicago jazz, blues and in-person views
Sustaining live performances - in words and photos
Having been immersed for the past three months in the voluminous correspondence, web-editing and promotional writing required to celebrate Jazz Heroes (33 in 29 North American locales) and run the 29th annual Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards (online, presentations at winners’ performances throughout the summer), I’ve been missing a lot of local live performances. But I caught a few, too.
Hearing music in the room where it’s played is important to me — at it’s best, it’s transporting, and I feel I’m witnessing delivery of something significant, new. Since there is now almost no reviewing of jazz concerts, club dates or adjacent events in either national or metropolitan publications — though such activities are musicians’ lifebloods and intended for in-person audiences, after all — I note recent highlights:
First: Unique music for eye and ear. Tangible Sound, an immersive installation too briefly in the event space of Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW) was an entrancing
experience of induced synthesesia, letting us see sounds and hear images in a new definition of “motion pictures.” Photographer Lauren Deutsch, my longtime friend and occasional collaborator, worked with Motion Designer Jonathan Woods to process her already imaginatively captured action photos of musical emanations for projection on enormous panels. Her selected imagery, de- and re-constructed, segued like floating clouds before and around viewers, while behind the panels Edward Wilkerson (on tenor sax, didjeridoo and oud) and Tatsu Aoki (on upright bass and shamisen; both used electronics) improvised.
Without intentional reference to the images, their music was variously ethereal, spiky, ambient and yet intricately synchronous. But attendees focused mostly on Deutsch’s vivid distillations of moments from concerts by the Sun Ra Arkestra, the AACM’s Great Black Music Ensemble, Taiko-Miyumi Project excerpts and more — squiggles, dashes, blurs, sharp details, artists’ expressions and gestures representing energies of the sounds themselves, captured in-camera.
Deutsch often but does not always or only move with what she hears as she shoots it to arrive at her personal visions of music otherwise unseen. Her conventional photography also captures something resonant about sound and its purveyors. The rest of the photos in this post are hers.
Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet at the spacious concert hall of the Logan Center, in Hyde Park (photos in this post by Lauren Deutsch).
Pianist-composer and UCBerkeley professor Melford is another close friend of mine (I produced her first commercially available recording, One for Now, on Nisus Cassettes), who as a child and teen studied with pianist-composer Erwin Helfer, Chicago’s elder statesman of Jimmy Yancy/Otis Spann traditions. (I’m close with Erwin, too — he’s retired at 88 since releasing last March Two Pianos Too Cool with his Barcelona-based protégé Lluis Coloma, from The Sirens label. In fact, Melford, Helfer, Deutsch and I had lunch together while she was here, just to catch up).
Myra’s highly original music is thoughtful, probing, sweeping, deep and sincere, sweet and beautiful to my ears — she plays from the heart all the way out (as in this clip of her rendition, introduced as a blues, of her piece “The Strawberry” with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra). Fire and Water’s Hear the Light Singing was my number one album of 2023. An extraordinary bandleader in many, diverse collaborations as well as breakout soloist, Myra was on tour with all-stars who are, incidentally all women: Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, cellist Tomeka Reid (more of whom below), guitarist Mary Halvorson (ditto), drummer Lesley Mok. Each applies sounds of their own inspiration to the pianist’s themes, arranged to expand, develop and flow into elastic and complex but always expressive statements. Lines of composition and improvisation blurred into disregard, as proper. Attentive listening draws one into the musicians’ experience, enriching one’s own.
A triple feature at Lincoln Hall (comfy enough venue, new to me). Opening: performance artist Damon Locks — using turntables and samples, distorting his vocals, dancing cooly. Next: Earthy bassist Joshua Abrams with tenor saxophonist Ari Brown (our wise elder) and ever-active drummer Mike Reed (more below). Headlining: tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis with the Messthetics.
I recently reviewed tenor saxophonist Lewis’s lyrical acoustic quartet album Transfiguration in DownBeat, along with his album with the hard-core/post-/alt-everything Messes: rhythm team of Fugazi plus explosive guitarist Anthony Pirog (who in brief discussion said he listened to “Danny Gatton, Sonny Sharrock, Derek Bailey, Nels Cline, Fred Frith — many!”). The evening ran from Locks' wacky act through the trio’s dramatically unfolding reflectivity that climaxed in Brown‘s insistent, aching, prophetic cry to the Mess’ gritty, rocky, Celtic and/or reggae-inflective tunes with memorable hooks, fierce blowing and shredding.
Mike Reed, who somehow creates a river of rhythm from a cascade of discrete, detailed movements around and across his drum kit, scheduled five shows for himself during the week of his 50th birthday. Was that set with Abrams and Brown the first of them?
— the second I heard was by Artifacts Trio at Reed’s club the Hungry Brain (which he’s spoken of as his “living room”). He sat onstage between Nicole Mitchell (winner of the JJA jazz Award for flutist of the year) and Tomeka Reid (winner for "Strings player — Violin, Viola, Cello — of the Year) and balanced them brilliantly. Nicole has a seemingly endless stream of melodies — she used an effects pedal, and also broke sometimes from her flute into sung pitches, without pause. Tomeka, on the cover of the July issue of The Wire, is a daring improviser, digging into the momentum the trio cooks up, pitch firm and fingers quick, with a full pallet of timbres or colors, adept both pizz and arco.
Tomeka Reid’s Quartet appeared a couple days later at the Green Mill celebrating the release of second album 3+3 with guitarist Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tomas Fujiwara.
The cellist’s compositions are tuneful and propulsive, intimate as chamber or living room or even campfire music; they lead to fresh musical spaces especially given Halvorson’s unassumingly outrageous countermoves and Roebke adding to their string trio dimension, Fujiwara supporting smartly with hustle and drive.
Mike Reed again — at Constellation, his larger performance space — in extra-sensory communication with pianist Craig Taborn and majestic Roscoe Mitchell, the co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, composer, multi-instrumentalist, NEA Jazz Master, former professor at Mills College, and now avid painter.
Reed and Taborn both have long histories of collaboration with Mitchell, who at age 83 may look frail but maintains rigorous practice daily on reeds and winds from lowest to highest, bells, gongs, chimes and woodblocks. Starting from silence he hoisted a horn big as he is and blew it full of air, tuba-like.
I imagined bubbles, balloons, blimps of air — Ms. Deutsch saw/heard this:
For an uninterrupted 40 minutes the players related to each other, to the instruments they’ve devoted lives to mastering, and to circumstances of the moment (for instance, Reed’s birthday, Taborn’s mother and brother having traveled far to attend, Mitchell perches beneath his latest large, color-wild, omni-sided canvas, the crowd of fervent fans eager to appreciate whatever was played. Hard as it is to persuasively depict music made without guideposts like song-form, chord progressions, prescribed meter or modes, I’ll just say it was absorbing. I’d listen again for how these three came up with ideas and connective responses, spinning narrative thread regardless of abstraction. By the way, Mike Reed is back at Constellation with aforementioned Joshua Abrams and Ari Brown on June 22.
I enjoyed a rousing set by saxophonist Ravi Coltrane at City Winery — paying sincere homage to his late, great parents but making his own way (rather merrily on sopranino), with trombonist Robin Eubanks using pedals for gritty and muscular effects; keyboardist Gadi Lehavi, playing bass on synth while soloing independently on Rohoders), and everything-at-once drummer Elé Salif Howell.
And an entertaining show at the Jazz Showcase by guitarist Mike Stern, recovered from or having adapted to a career-threatening injury. Happily, his touch ranged from butterfly wing shivers to a raspy edge, and he was clearly happy to be onstage with his wife guitarist Leni Stern, well-matched tenor saxophonist Danny Walsh, drummer Juan Chiavassa, bassist Noam Tanzer. Their bag is electric, evocative and hooky — they covered “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” — yet remained loose. Stern, who debuted with Miles Davis in 1981, is about to release a new album on Mack Avenue Records.
Topping this series off: Buddy Guy at Millenium Park closing the Chicago Blues Fest. Though billed as part of his farewell tour, 87-year-old Guy pledged in his opening moments to play for Chicago as long as he could, before launching a high energy show that felt utterly spontaneous and instrumentally wild.
In fine voice and flashing a handsome smile, Guy used an exemplary set list, including classics he recorded with Muddy Waters (“Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You”), Sonny Boy Williamson (“Bring it On Home”), Little Milton (“If Grits Ain’t Groceries).” He toyed with “Sunshine of Your Love,” Eric Clapton’s British Invasion theme that broke the hold of black blues and soul on the record sales charts and radio stations of the mid 1960s, and conducted “Skin Deep,”, his heartfelt response to racial bigotry, as a sing-along.
Guy’s guitar playing is the most exciting aspect of his talent — he sent up loud, long, barbed and pearly tones to the heavens (as he’s been doing since 1960!) so as to assure Jimi Hendrix, Prince, his old partner Junior Wells, Little Walter, B.B. King, Willie Dixon, the Chess Brothers, et al that the blues is still the game, and he’s the still its key player. At his climax Guy walked out into the crowd mid-solo, coaxing fans to strum his polka-dot ax as he fretted it. To end with a jam, he brought on and flirted with Shemekia Copeland, set harmonica-ist Billy Branch loose on a fast shuffle and introduced his guitar-wielding son. Buddy Guy’s not done — acts of God notwithstanding, he’ll be back — he’s booked solid across the U.S. to mid-September, scheduled for suburban Des Plaines’s River Casino Aug. 9.
Bonus media tip: An upbeat album flying under the radar/ That’s Harmonimonk, Randy Weinstein’s multi-tracked arrangements of the great Thelonious’ compositions for chromatic harp with drums/percussion, guitar and bass. Weinstein — who like me some time ago was educated at Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart [— draws on Monk’s bluesiness, mixing in Midwestern swing and fiddle romps, Brazilian choro and Jamaican dub to delightful effect. Believe me! Check it out!