As it may with many of you, Hyde Park holds a special place in my heart, but alas not in my ear. One thing that was missing while I lived there in the early 1980s was live jazz (there was some around there, OK, full disclosure, I wasn’t really listening to much jazz then, more along the lines of the Sex Pistols and the New Wave stuff at that time, but it was starting to make some preliminary inroads into my listening habits.
So, NOW they start getting more jazz in town. This year the community is hosting the first annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival. The festival will be held at multiple venues in Hyde Park on Saturday, September 29, 2007, 11am to 2 am (on September 30th, that is). It is being produced by the Hyde Park Cultural Alliance, The University of Chicago, and the Hyde Park Jazz Society, and will provide musical trolleys (OK, I want to know what a “musical trolley” is, too) for moving attendees around Hyde Park to a variety of creative and unexpected music and food venues.
The lineup is a who’s who of national and local Chicago jazz talent, artists I fondly remember hearing in the years before leaving Chicago for Western New York, including: Dee Alexander, Orbert Davis, Clark Terry and Willie Pickens Trio, Bill McFarland and the Chicago Horns, Judy Roberts (a former neighbor of mine), Corey Wilkes, Jimmy Ellis and others. Heard Kurt Elling (who lives in Hyde Park) was going to be there, but apparently scheduling conflicts kept him from the hometown stage. So, on the off chance that you’re going to be in Chicago next weekend, I thought you might want to check it out.
1 Comment
September 25, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Although I live in Painted Post, NY, I am visiting the UC campus for the first time since I graduated in 1961. I am staying at a bed and breakfast called University Quarters on Kimbark. I will miss the Hyde Park concert but I can report that the campus and Hyde Park are in beautiful condition. The students look so much more wholesome than in my day. I wish I could say the same for my old fraternity, Psi U.
Hope to get up to a meeting sometime.