Going Out: August 2025, Part Deux
As threatened in my previous entry, I did end up going to the Chicago Jazz Festival at the end of August — for two nights, in fact. This will be a rather shorter reflection on those experiences, not because I have less to say about jazz than house but explicitly because I have more; I’m comfortable wandering through the hallways of the full-spectrum history of jazz in a way I am not, really, with electronic music, and instinctively greet it as an old friend rather than as a revelation.
On Thursday evening, I left work and met up with Josh at a taco truck parked between the Art Institute of Chicago and Millennium Park, catching up over styrofoam containers of beans, rice and well-seasoned meats. We strolled up to the Pritzker Pavilion and found seats on the western edge of the stadium before the opening ceremony, which included a singing of two national anthems: “The Star-Spangled Banner” (uncomfortable in this historical moment) and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (rousing and defiant). The opening act, guitarist Henry Johnson with a small combo, was mellifluous and tasty, playing Chicago blues, soul-jazz, and Johnson crooning songs by legendary singers he’d worked with like Nancy Wilson and Joe Williams — Josh was excited because he’d taken improvisation tutoring from the pianist.
But the headliner was who everyone was there for — and I do mean everyone; the crowd stretched far back across the lawn, and I don’t remember ever being in such a crush during the exit. (A mile to the south, leaden Britrockers Oasis were occupying Soldier Field that same night. I’m confident I got the better deal.) Bassist and fusion auteurist Esperanza Spalding opened her set with a purgative rendition of “I Want It All” from the 1971 Willie Wonka musical film as sung by the character Veruca Salt, dedicating it to a certain head of state who had been making noise about sending the National Guard to Chicago, but without actually naming him — the atonal keyboard banging and shrieking with which she ended the performance felt good, cathartic in a way that nearly any other context could not have inspired. Dressed in a white lacy Edwardian summer frock with tight cornrows, Spalding looked demure, but she led her quartet through a thoroughly grown-up set of freaky, sweet-voiced fusion, from the stretched-out samba of Milton Nascimento’s “Ponta de Areia” to the Funkadelickal “Stride Grease” to a hyperlexical cover of Wayne Shorter’s “Endangered Species” to her 2012 single “Black Gold.” Charmingly voluble, she told stories, gave context, encouraged us to sing and dance along, and towards the end, semi-apologized for the occasional outness of the music — but knew that the home of the AACM could take it.
It wasn’t until I spent my lunchtime walk the following day listening to her 2016 album that I formulated exactly what my impression of Esperanza Spalding was: take away the virtuosic jazz chops and deep Afrocentric consciousness (which is to say, take away almost everything), and you’re left with They Might Be Giants-style quirk. Which depending on your predilections may sound meaner than I intend — cool, in the twenty-first century, is a dead end, and only the kind of sincerity that risks anything is capable of building anything new.
On Saturday, Josh and I met up again, this time on the eastern side of the Pavilion seating, catching the end of singer Ava Logan’s supper-club set (a rousing rendition of Ellington’s “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ but the Blues” followed by a bathetic “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas about sums it up) before settling in for an adventurous, dynamic and wide-ranging set from Ernest Dawkins and his New Horizons Redux ensemble. I didn’t always pay close attention to it, unfortunately, as I kept getting notifications from Bluesky music chatter (having made the error of participating in one of the perennial rolling discussions of poptimism), but getting to look up from my phone and hear some thrilling playing that had nothing at all to do with either rockist or poptimist values was still an aesthetic experience I’m not sorry to have had.
Ernest Dawkins was followed by Gary Bartz, who played more traditional post-bop fusion, utterly beautiful and apparently largely instinctive — he said at the top that they wouldn’t be announcing songs, just playing what they felt the crowd’s energy demanded, and did so — with a kind of regal spiritualism. At the end of the set, Josh took his leave (Sunday being his big work day), but I decided to stay for the closer, New Orleans trumpeter Kermit Ruffins.
I’m glad I did. Ruffins’ easy-swinging trad jazz, with vocal and horn deliveries indebted to Louis Armstrong, is exactly the kind of feel-good music that makes jazz into a species of pop; and while he performed a number of jazz standards — “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Drop Me Off in New Orleans,” a rumba version of “If I Only Had a Brain,” the deathless “Skokiaan,” and the sentimental Armstrong perennial “What a Wonderful World” (which I theoretically despise, but I also find myself tearing up any time it’s played live) — he also performed crowd-pleasing pop numbers like Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” the Dixie Cups’ “Iko Iko,” Chuck Mangione’s “Feel So Good,” and the closer, Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day.” People got up and danced, sang along, and partied. Partied sedately, because the Jazz Festival attracts a crowd whose median age is some twenty to thirty years older than the House Festival’s crowd the previous weekend, but partied nevertheless.
It’s tempting sometimes to think of jazz as a dead tradition, the Classical Latin of popular music, especially from within the constantly-refreshing (in the webpage sense, not the sparkling-water sense) pop perspective in which trap and dubstep are now long in the tooth. But if there’s one thing that streaming has made clear, it’s that the actual listening done by the vast invisible bulk of the music-listening public is much more wide-ranging than whatever is making record companies enough money in a given week to be considered to have charted. I listen to a lot of 78-r.p.m. records on YouTube, and while it’s rare for them to have a viewcount that exceeds 100,000, it’s equally a rarity to see viewcounts below 100. To continue the linguistic analogy, a relatively small community of speakers doesn’t mean a language is dead, and in the recording era it’s nearly impossible for anything to ever truly die; even if live performance and music instruction somehow faded away, they could be resurrected from records.
Leaving the park on Saturday evening wasn’t as euphoric as after the House Festival, more of a mellow pleasantness. But then both of these days were a bonus, a surfeit over and above my intention to see a show a month. In September, at least there will be a change of venue.
See you then.