Hyde Park Jazz Festival reimagines itself
Mobile stages will bring the music to listeners without the safety issue of drawing large crowds
A few months ago, Kate Dumbleton had the 14th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival pretty much mapped out.
As always, the event would feature September performances in venues across the historic neighborhood, concerts in the University of Chicago’s Logan Center, commissioned work and more.
The coronavirus pandemic shattered all that, of course, to the disappointment of executive and artistic director Dumbleton, her colleagues and anyone who has admired this most inventive of Chicago jazz festivals.
But rather than cancel the event, Dumbleton and friends have reimagined it. According to the current plan, the festival will open with a day’s worth of performances streamed live from the Logan Center on Sept. 26. “The University of Chicago protocols for building occupancy will guide decisions about whether there can be a physically distanced audience,” according to a festival statement.
On Sept. 27, the festival will present small ensembles in short sets across Hyde Park, using mobile stages to bring the music to listeners, rather than drawing large groups of listeners to particular venues.
Details have yet to be pinned down, and Dumbleton — like everyone else — is trying to pre
pare for whatever the pandemic brings us by the end of September. But Dumbleton, never known to think small, believes all the above is thoroughly achievable.
“Overall, we’ve been just trying to stay really thoughtful about what the needs of artists and the community are and think creatively about how to be supportive of both listeners and musicians,” she says. “And to think about what organizations can do and provide in these strange times that keeps everyone safe but provides people with joy and helps artists with earning a living.”
The most fascinating part of the current plans concerns the festival’s second day, Sept. 27. In past years, this has been when most events take place on outdoor stages on the Midway Plaisance, with an emphasis on music that listeners can dance to.
This time around, the festival’s finale will become something of a road show on wheels.
At first, “we thought about the possibility of having solo performances that would just kind of pop up places, very informally on a street corner or on a front yard or a parkway, where people could come out on their porches and just listen,” explains Dumbleton. “Some of that was inspired by things I had seen happening in Europe and elsewhere, where musicians or dancers were just showing up somewhere and performing.
“The other thing I thought through was: What if we could move bands around the neighborhood, and have short performances, so that crowds wouldn’t accumulate? It would be some kind of flatbed truck with equipment on it. And a band could perform for 30 or 40 minutes, and then we would move the truck to another location.”
Part of the beauty of this approach is that it reflects Hyde Park Jazz Festival’s fundamental character: Since its inception, it has embraced and celebrated its environs. In effect, the festival-on-wheels would do exactly that, while theoretically circumventing the challenges of drawing crowds too large for a pandemic.
“Maybe we’ll think of some route that includes being near some of the venues we usually use,” says Dumbleton. These have included Hyde Park Union Church, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and the Smart Museum of Art.
Gathering all performances Sept. 26 at the Logan Center similarly resonates with the festival’s history, since many of its most ambitious concerts and commissions always have taken place there during the event’s first day. One hopes that at least some kind of audience can be physically present, as well, for the give-and-take between musician and listener is nowhere more vital than in jazz, a communal art by its nature.
The other big shift concerns the lineup, which this year will be devoted entirely to Chicago artists. Though the festival always has paid close attention to jazz musicians who live here, that will be a defining feature this year, since performances by visiting artists had to be canceled due to the coronavirus.
An online benefit gala on June 18 proved so successful that it “revealed to us that we would be able to put as much money into the Chicago artists as we usually do,” says Dumbleton. “In that sense, we’ll still have the same footprint, if not bigger, in terms of what we can contribute to (Chicago) artists.”
The combination of donations, support from the University of Chicago and other sources brings this year’s budget to $175,000, a drop from last year’s $315,000 but still a significant figure. Dumbleton hasn’t booked artists yet, as she watches how pandemic restrictions evolve in coming weeks.
As a lead-up to all this, the festival has planned two summertime projects:
A Sunday Night Jazz series, curated by the Hyde Park Jazz Society, will stream 7:30 p.m. performances featuring saxophonist Sharel Cassity and pianist Richard Johnson, July 12; singer-pianist Jo Ann Daugherty and drummer Ryan Bennett, July 26; and singer Dee Alexander with guitarist John McLean, Aug. 9; all at hydeparkjazzfestival.org.
A Jazz Postcards Project will feature Chicago musicians performing at a location of their choosing during four dates in July and August, some events streamed and archived for future viewing.
For the fall, Dumbleton also is developing an online food-and-music program with ethnomusicologist and baker Monica Hairston O’Connell (former executive director at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research) and a series of programs inspired by Chicago drummer-educator Dana Hall’s 2015 “Hypocrisy of Justice” project.
In a way, Dumbleton and the festival are building all this in the dark, since no one really knows where the pandemic will take us in coming weeks and months.
“We are trying to get as much detail as we possibly can about what the scenarios could be, and to plan with as much flexibility built in as possible,” says Dumbleton. “If we can’t do this, let’s try this. We’ll have a Plan B and a Plan C.”
Considering how creative the Hyde Park Jazz Festival always has been, even the backups are likely to pique interest.
For details on the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, visit hydeparkjazzfestival.org.