The Chicago Blues Festival refreshes itself
The fest’s move to Millennium Park will improve its sound— and headliner Rhiannon Giddens will make for defiantly unstodgy listening.
The big news about this year’s Chicago Blues Festival is that it’s followed in the footsteps of Jazz Fest and moved to Millennium Park. This should finally guarantee state- of- the- art sound, at least on the main stage at Pritzker Pavilion— the system there leaves Petrillo’s PA in the dust. The change of scenery seems to have had a salutary effect on the bookings as well— at the very least, they present more of a challenge to genre boundaries than those at some previous Blues Fests. The 2017 edition includes rapper Rhymefest, eclectic roots- music innovator Rhiannon Giddens, R& B- flavored southern- soul chanteuse JJ Thames, and forward- looking blues- based artists such as Ronnie Baker Brooks, the Cedric Burnside Project ( who update the venerable north Mississippi “trance- blues” style with anarchic punk spirit), and Gary Clark Jr.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a blues festival without plenty of rootsy music to satisfy the traditionalists, and this year the old- schoolers include former Muddy Waters and Magic Slim sideman John Primer, 1960s Stax Records soul legend William Bell, veteran harp man Billy Branch, beloved soulblues pioneer Denise LaSalle, and elder statesman Jimmy Johnson. The seven acts the Reader has featured in its coverage— Branch, Giddens, Baker Brooks, Bell, LaSalle, Johnson, and Rhymefest ( read them all at chicagoreader. com)— draw from both groups, representing the scope and breadth of this year’s festival. All seven definitely deserve spots on your must- see list, but they’re by no means the only artists worth checking out. Explore, investigate, and discover!
The festival’s new layout is cozier than the old Grant Park arrangement— it looks as though better sound quality will probably come at the expense of some elbow room. The Crossroads Stage ( which emphasizes Chicago artists) is on the south promenade, southeast of the Cloud Gate sculpture, aka the Bean. The Mississippi Juke Joint Stage ( which mostly books southern artists) is on the north promenade, northeast of Cloud Gate. The Front Porch Stage ( which features mostly acoustic artists and smaller bands) is on the Harris Theater rooftop terrace, south of Randolph and north of Pritzker Pavilion ( where the headliners perform each night). The Blues Village in Wrigley Square, near the intersection of Randolph and Michigan, hosts nonprofits that sponsor or support the blues— and two of them, the Windy City Blues Society and Fernando Jones’s Blues Kids Foundation, present live music throughout the weekend on the Blues Village Stage. All events are free.