performances are happening on Friday, October 7th and saturday, october 8th at 7:30PM.
buy ticketS to the performances (available beginning august 9th)
In collaboration with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, The Reva & David Logan Center, and University of Chicago Presents, this extraordinary program reconvenes and commissions composer Dana Hall and writer Cheryl Lynn Bruce to further develop and re-stage “Hypocrisy of Justice: Sights and Sounds from the Black Metropolis,” a project which uses visuals, text, sound, and performance to explore inequities within systems and institutions, along with lived experience of confinement, redemption, hope, and home. For this world premiere, Hall brings together his sextet, including Tomeka Reid (cello); Clark Sommers (bass); John Wojciechowski (saxophone); and Dana Hall (drums, cymbals), along with special guest, actor Malcom Banks, to the Logan Center Performance Hall Stage. Composition by Dana Hall. New text and direction by Cheryl Lynn Bruce.
CheryL Lynn Bruce
Cheryl Lynn Bruce’s appearances include Marcus Gardley’s Gospel of Lovingkindness (Victory Gardens Theater), Tarell McCraney’s Head of Passes (Steppenwolf Theatre), and Danai Gurira’s The Convert (McCarter Theatre). She has received multiple Joseph Jefferson Award nominations, a Los Angeles Ovation Award nomination, and an NAACP Best Supporting FemaleTheatre Award.
Bruce made her professional debut in Death and the King’s Horseman (Goodman Theatre), directed by its author, 1985 Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka. Other Goodman productions include The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove; Each One As She May; Cry, The Beloved Country; All’s Well That Ends Well; Black Star Line; and Seneca’s Trojan Women. Additional Chicago credits include The Great Fire and Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (Lookingglass Theatre Company); Everyman (A Moral Play), Intimate Apparel, Nomathemba, and The Grapes of Wrath (Steppenwolf Theatre); The Snow Queen, The Voice of Good Hope, Eurydice (Victory Gardens Theater); Henry V and The Winter’s Tale (Chicago Shakespeare Theater); and Flyin’ West (Court Theatre).
For her work in From the Mississippi Delta, Bruce won a Jefferson Award for Best Ensemble (Northlight Theatre), a Helen Hayes Award for Best Actress (Arena Stage), and a Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Best Ensemble (Hartford Stage). She reprised her role as Ain’t Baby for the Off-Broadway run at Circle in the Square Theatre Downtown. In regional theater, she has appeared in Harriet Jacobs and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Kansas City Repertory Theatre), Gem of the Ocean (the Ensemble Theatre), and TheStory (Milwaukee Repertory Theater). Film and television credits include Prison Break; There Are No Children Here; Separate But Equal; To Sir, with Love II; Stranger than Fiction; Daughters of the Dust; and The Fugitive.
Bruce was awarded a 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation artist residency through a 3Arts Fellowship, and she continues work on her Yale University Art Gallery research residency. Named an inaugural fellow of the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago in 2006, she also received a 3ArtsAward and unrestricted grant in 2011 and a Jane Addams Hull House Association Woman of Valor Award in 2010. A Teatro Vista Theatre company member, Cheryl Lynn Bruce has also served on the board of Links Hall and the African American Arts Alliance.
Dana Hall
Dana Hall has been an important figure on the international music scene since 1992, when he left aerospace engineering for a life in music. He holds professional performance and tour credits on six continents, and has extensive experience playing concerts, clubs, and festivals with various ensembles throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. He has performed, toured, and/or recorded with such luminaries as Branford Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Curtis Fuller, Joe Lovano, Horace Silver, Benny Golson, Marcus Belgrave, Bobby Hutcherson, Michael Brecker, Betty Carter, Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, Jackie McLean, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Maria Schneider, and Joe Henderson, among others. Former artistic director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and permanent member of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Hall has been a member of the Terell Stafford Quintet for thirteen years. He has toured extensively with the group and been featured on its last four recordings. He also leads a number of ensembles and projects, including the Dana Hall Quintet; the Dana Hall/Nick Mazzarella Duo; Polyglot, a quartet devoted to creative improvised music; Black Fire, a project dedicated to the music of Chicago-born composer and pianist Andrew Hill; Spring, a musical endeavor featuring woodwind specialists Geof Bradfield and John Wojciechowski, acoustic bassist Clark Sommers, and his own drums, cymbals, and mbira; and a project called Black Ark Movement, which premiered at the 2014 Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Hall’s debut CD as a leader, Into the Light, which features his quintet, was released to great critical acclaim.
As an educator, Hall is professor of music and director of jazz studies at DePaul University, where he teaches courses in jazz studies and ethnomusicology, in addition to serving as coordinator of the Jazz Combo program. Formerly, Hall taught courses in world music at the Undergraduate College at the University of Chicago, private drum set instruction at Columbia College Chicago; and courses in jazz studies and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was an associate professor of music.
Kate Dumbleton
Kate Dumbleton is an educator, curator, and arts administrator. She is the co-Executive and Artistic Director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival and an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Kate’s work in jazz, improvised music, and performance spans more than two decades and includes music direction for jazz clubs and festivals; curatorial direction of artist residences; direction of interdisciplinary projects in music, dance, theater, visual art, film; venue and record label management; executive leadership; and artist management. Since Kate joined the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in 2012, the organization has grown significantly, including the launch of a commissioning program, the development of neighborhood initiatives, and the cultivation of international artist exchange projects. Kate has been teaching at SAIC since 2008, where she designed and developed the arts leadership curriculum for the graduate program in arts administration and cultural policy. A component of her current research involves methodologies of cross-sectoral collaborations that work to address systemic injustice and the ways in which the arts do and might contribute to this work.
Members of the Dana Hall Sextet, with special guest actor Malcom Banks
Tomeka Reid (cello)
Headlined by The New York Times as a “New Jazz Power Source,” cellist and composer Tomeka Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community in the last ten years. Her distinctive melodic sensibility, always rooted in a strong sense of groove, has been featured in many distinguished ensembles, including those led by Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, Dee Alexander, and Mike Reed.
Reid grew up outside of Washington, D.C., but her career as a musician began after she moved to Chicago in 2000. Her work with Nicole Mitchell and various Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians-related groups proved influential. By focusing on developing her craft in countless improvisational contexts, Reid has achieved a stunning musical fluency.
Her 2015 debut release as a bandleader, with the Tomeka Reid Quartet, provided a vibrant showcase for the cellist’s improvisational acumen, as well as for her dynamic arrangements and compositional ability. The quartet’s second album, “Old New” (2019) has been described as “fresh and transformative...striking out in bold, lyrical directions, with plenty of Reid’s singularly elegant yet energetic and sharp-edged bow work.”
Reid received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. She is a 3Arts (2016) and Foundation of the Arts (2019) Awardee and is currently the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition at Mills College.
Marquis Hill (Trumpet)
From his beginnings as one of Chicago’s most thrilling young trumpeters, to his current status as an internationally renowned musician, composer and bandleader, Marquis Hill has worked tirelessly to break down the barriers that divide musical genres. Contemporary and classic jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house, neo-soul—to Hill, they’re all essential elements of the profound African-American creative heritage he’s a part of. “It all comes from the same tree,” he says. “They simply blossomed from different branches.”
That mission to bring styles together, complemented by Hill’s absolute mastery of his instrument, is a through line connecting his many achievements. It can be heard on his latest album, Modern Flows Vol. II, with its seamless blend of jazz interplay, hip-hop-infused rhythms and socially conscious spoken-word. It’s integral to The Way We Play, his Concord Jazz debut from 2016, where Hill and his musicians reinvent jazz standards using their generation’s wide- ranging influences. It marks the four records Hill self-released before November of 2014, when he won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz competition and became a presence on the global scene virtually overnight. And it defines the revelatory live dates by Hill’s longtime working group, the Blacktet, which the Chicago Tribune called “a remarkably polished, immensely attractive ensemble.”
For Hill, playing and listening without limits has long been an instinct. “It comes naturally; that’s the way I hear the music,” he says. “I came up in a household where my mom played Motown, R&B, Isley Brothers, Barry White, Marvin Gaye. Then I received my first jazz record, by Lee Morgan, and that was added to the collection. ... I truly believe that the music is all the same.”
Born in Chicago in 1987 and raised on the city’s culturally rich South Side, Hill began playing drums at age 4, before switching to trumpet in the 6th grade. He attended high school at Kenwood Academy, excelling in its revered jazz-performance program, and was mentored by Bobby Broom, Willie Pickens, Tito Carrillo and other Chicago greats through the Ravinia Jazz Scholars program. Hill earned his bachelor’s in music education from Northern Illinois University and his master’s in jazz pedagogy from DePaul University. During college he made gigs and sessions around Chicago, jamming with and absorbing wisdom from the likes of Fred Anderson, Ernest Dawkins and Von Freeman. Even then, Hill was known in town as a stunningly gifted trumpeter with a soulful, highly textured tone. His sound is now somehow both deeply distinctive and a tour through jazz-trumpet history, evoking the high-drama stillness and space of Miles; the undeniable virtuosity of Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard; the groove- savvy phrasing of Lee Morgan and Donald Byrd; and much more.
Well before Hill won the Monk prize—arguably the most important jazz competition in the world—his reputation for brilliance was firmly established in the Midwest, as a member of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, an in-demand sideman and a bandleader. He also developed into a precocious, determined young label owner, and has released five acclaimed discs—New Gospel,Sounds of the City, The Poet and Modern Flows Vols. I and II—through his Black Unlimited Music Group imprint. “Just having my personality, there’s nothing like being in control of what you produce and put out into the world,” he says. “It’s a great feeling.”
A move to New York in 2014 helped him gain wider exposure and new opportunities—though he frequently returns to his hometown for gigs and projects—and in recent years Hill has
garnered an enviable spate of press. Previewing a Blacktet show, the New Yorker said, “His performances and recordings reveal a smart post-bop player who circumvents genre clichés by incorporating elements of hip-hop and contemporary R. & B.” Of The Way We Play, DownBeatwrote, “The groove-laden arrangements provide the perfect soundscape for Hill’s fluid improvisational style, which, with its glass-like lucidity, recalls the crisp elegance of hard-bop stalwart Donald Byrd.” In 2016, Hill earned first place in the “Rising Star–Trumpet” category in that magazine’s storied Critics Poll. Throughout his journey, he has supported and guested with a who’s who of jazz that includes Marcus Miller, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Boney James, Kurt Elling, Joe Lovano and Hill’s trailblazing Chicago peer Makaya McCraven.
Today, Hill maintains a nonstop touring schedule with the Blacktet, and the intensely interactive, utterly unique band has become a kind of graduate school for next-level talent—Hill included.“One of the most beautiful things about leading a group is the flow of knowledge and energy that we bounce off of one another,” he says. “Each member contributing their distinctive voice is what truly makes the music and magic happen.”
John Wojciechowski (saxophone)
Saxophonist John Wojciechowski grew up in Detroit, but has spent the last 19 years performing and teaching in Chicago. In addition to leading his own groups, he has performed or recorded with The Chicago Jazz Orchestra, The Chicago Jazz Ensemble, The Woody Herman Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Charlie Haden, and Kurt Elling, among others, and been a member of Dana Hall’s spring, The Jeff Campbell Trio (w/ John Hollenbeck), the Chicago Yestet, and Ryan Cohan’s quartet and sextet. He has appeared on dozens of recordings as a sideman, and has two recordings as a leader: the 2009 “Lexicon” and 2015’s “Focus.”
Clark Sommers (bass)
Grammy Award-winning bassist and composer Clark Sommers cut his teeth on the Chicago jazz scene in the mid 1990s playing with local heroes Lin Halliday, Jodie Christian, Von Freeman, Ron Perrillo, Bobby Broom, and Dana Hall, among others. He has had the privilege of touring the world with jazz vocalist Kurt Elling since 2008 and has performed for audiences in cities around the globe. He can be heard on seven Elling recordings including Dedicated to You and Secrets are the Best Stories, both of which won Grammys for Best Vocal Jazz Album.
When not on the road with Kurt Elling, Sommers is engaged in leading his own bands: Ba(SH) and the Lens Project. He has released four albums as a leader. The latest, Peninsula, which features longtime collaborators Dana Hall and Geof Bradfield, was released in the Spring of 2020. The group's first recording, Ba(SH), was acknowledged on the "notable and not to be missed" list by All About Jazz of 2013. In 2017, Sommers released his second recording as a leader, featuring all original compositions. Released on the Ears and Eyes record label, The Clark Sommers Lens Project’s “By A Thread” features Kendrick Scott on drums, Jeff Parker on guitar, and Gary Versace on organ. Sommers also composes and plays bass in Typical Sisters, a trio including Los Angeles-based guitarist Greg Uhlmann and Copenhagen-based drummer Matt Carroll, and has been featured in The New York Times and on the Best of Band Camp playlist. The group released its third album, “Love Beam” in Spring of 2021. In addition, Sommers has had the privilege of performing and recording with Portland pianist and composer Darrell Grant in his Territory and Step-by-Step ensembles, alongside Brian Blade, Joe Locke, and Steve Wilson.
Sommers completed his undergraduate degree in Jazz Studies and World Music at the California Institute of the Arts in 2002, where he studied with bass icon Charlie Haden. In June 2021, he completed his Master’s degree in Jazz Composition at DePaul University. He makes his home in the Chicago area and can be found performing with groups led by gifted artists Dana Hall, Geof Bradfield, Adam Larson, John Wojciechowski, Chris Madsen, Scott Hesse, Nick Mazzarella, and The Chicago Yestet.
Malcom Banks (actor)
Malcom Banks’ first appearance on national television was on an episode of NBC’s Chicago PD. He can be seen in a film on Netflix called Black and Privileged, as well as one called Side Effects, currently on Aspire TV and Amazon Prime. He has written and directed his own dark thriller, 7vens Law, available on Amazon.
Banks was nominated for Best Male Actor in the Midwest Film Festival for his portrayal of a high school football player forced to confront his own history and prejudice when he discovers the captain of his new team is gay.
In live theater, Banks was part of the cast of the Jeff-recommend show, Jitney as Youngblood, performed by Congo Square Theater and directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce.
"Hypocrisy of Justice: Sights and Sounds from the Black Metropolis" is co-commissioned by the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, and UChicago Presents. This program is supported by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), Dan J. Epstein, Judith Guitelman, and the Epstein Family Foundation, the Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice initiative, the Jazz Institute of Chicago's Dr. Timuel Black Inspiration and Education Program, the National Public Housing Museum, the Revada Foundation with additional support from the Julie and Parker Hall Endowment for Jazz and American Popular Music, and the Reva & David Logan Foundation. Presented in partnership with Chicago Jazz Magazine, DownBeat Magazine, Jazz Institute Chicago, and WDCB 90.9 FM.
The 2015 premiere of Hypocrisy of Justice was commissioned by Symphony Center Presents Jazz series and made possible by Dan Epstein and the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation.
