The Hyde Park Jazz Festival is one of the best-programmed events of its kind anywhere, thanks to the resilient and resourceful people, many of them volunteers, who organize and coordinate it.
Read MoreBy James Porter, contributing writer
All-day Saturday, everything from free jazz improvisers to large ensembles took to stages on the Midway Plaisance and in various buildings across the surrounding University of Chicago.
Read MoreBy Hannah Edgar
Welcome to the Hyde Park Jazz Fest, where Bird, Billie and Blakey inspire more ardor than the Boss. The festival punches in the same weight class as the Chicago Jazz Fest when it comes to megastar billings but arguably covers a wider spread in half the time.
Read MoreBy Lloyd Sachs
It takes more than a gathering of great musicians to make a great jazz festival. For Kate Dumbleton, the much-admired executive and artistic director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, it takes a vision.
Read MoreThe Hyde Park Jazz Festival, a nonprofit working to support the development of jazz in Chicago, has programmed more than a dozen free performances through its Artist Corps Fellowship and Back Alley Jazz music series, as well as a fall festival to cap off the season.
Read MoreBy Hannah Edgar
Transplant Richard Wright’s “Native Son” to today and one will find much more to retain than to update.
Read MoreThe crowd at the fest—activists, dancers, students, radio hosts, dog walkers, retired teachers, an ironworker in a tiara—is just as much fun as the top-shelf musicians on its stages.
Read MoreBy Bill Meyer
This year, the HPJF resumes business as usual, staging concerts inside churches, museums, and performance spaces as well as on two big outdoor stages that face each other on the Midway Plaisance.
Read MoreBy Aaron Gettinger, staff writer
A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts grant will enable the Hyde Park Jazz Festival to put paid workers behind three initiatives beyond the borders of the neighborhood.
Read MoreBy Hannah Edgar
The Hyde Park Jazz Fest experienced its pandemic trial by fire last year, when the festival grooved on in the form of pop-up sidewalk performances and streamed indoor sets.
Read MoreBy Zach Long & Emma Krupp
While assembling the Time Out Best of the City Awards, our Chicago editors looked back on the past 12 months of food, festivals, exhibitions, shows and innovations in order to highlight our favorites. Some are places and happenings that are veritable Chicago institutions. Others are wonderful new additions to the city. But every Best of the City Awards winner is something that we feel is memorable and impactful in its own way.
Read MoreThe 15th Hyde Park Jazz Festival, which took place last Saturday and Sunday, may have been the best ever. That’s a tall statement, given how many great ones there have been—but it’s less about ranking favorites and more about how good it felt to see such a beloved event getting back to its old self.
Read MoreBy Hannah Edgar
Look, we all know what we’ve been through in the past year, and arts presenters — the good ones, anyway — are doing their damndest not to be part of the problem as COVID-19 mutates its way down the Greek alphabet.
So, if you’re refreshing the calendars of your favorite venues and think they look a little lean, it’s not just you. This Top 10 list’s “I”s were dotted and “T”s crossed on the first week of September, when virus cases in the city hit a half-year high; by the time it publishes, events may have been added, tweaked, postponed, or pulled altogether.
Read MoreBy The University of Chicago, Civic Engagement
Now in its 15th year, the free, community-led festival is drawing acclaimed national and local artists
Read MoreBy Aaron Gettinger, staff writer
As part of the "Open Chicago" reopening campaign, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the "Open Culture" initiative on May 5, with a return to summer cultural events, including festivals, theater and concerts — and attractions in Hyde Park are included.
Read MoreEdited by Scoop Jackson & Tara Betts
Editors’ Letter
We are looking at Chicago long after Jean Baptiste DuSable witnessed this land, long after the Great Migration fanned out from train stations to Chicago’s South and West Sides, and almost a century after Robert Johnson’s rendition of “Sweet Home Chicago” became a citywide anthem played on televised events to celebrate this city’s rich cultural and historic heritage, long after the 1919 Red Summer that set the uncomfortable stage for the city’s racial divide and dynamics that, to this day, still exist.
Read MoreBy Ryan Rosenberger, Staff Reporter
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival organization has launched a new virtual livestream series, “Jazz Kitchen,” which explores the intersection of jazz music and food and how that relationship played a role historically and still manifests itself in every day life.
Read MoreBy Bill Meyer
When the Hyde Park Jazz Festival's executive and artistic director, Kate Dumbleton, spoke to the Reader in August about the fest's efforts to adapt to COVID-19, she sounded hopeful that some version of the event would take place during its traditional time slot on the last weekend of September. Given that Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events had already replaced an entire season of live outdoor programming with prerecorded video broadcasts—and that no one knew if, when, and how hard a second wave of COVID infections would hit the city—that hope seemed wildly optimistic. But the virus held off, and the festival did hold events both its usual days.
Read MoreBy Mrinalini Pandey, contributing writer
Over the weekend, Hyde Park residents and visitors welcomed the 14th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival with great fervor.
Unlike its conventional format, this year’s event took place as a mix of live-streamed concerts on Saturday evening, and pop-up and mobile staged performances throughout Sunday at various outdoor locations in the neighborhood.
Read MoreBy Howard Reich
No, it wasn’t quite the same as spending a day running around Hyde Park catching jazz sets in concert halls, courtyards, churches and whatnot.
But the folks who stage the annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival weren’t going to let the pandemic derail the 14th annual event. So the two-day soirée opened Saturday with a series of stylistically wide-ranging shows livestreamed from the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.
Read More