Midnight Coltrane
By Kyle Olesiuk
October 10, 2018
Ravi Coltrane is laughing at me. Or maybe with me? I can’t say for sure. However he’s laughing, I don’t feel too bad about it. I’ve asked a stupid question.
“How did you pick the band?” He looks around, at each of his bandmates: Brandee Younger, the electric harpist who wrote one of the pieces they performed (the rest were penned by Alice Coltrane); Johnathan Blake, the drummer famous for playing with Omer Avital; and Rashaan Carter, the bassist of Coltrane and Younger’s Alice Coltrane–centered group. You can imagine why he’s laughing. It’s been a long, cold day, and they’ve been working on this show for most of it.
I first heard the sounds of the Coltrane ensemble on my way to the Midway Plaisance, the main location of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. I was passing by Rockefeller Chapel, and decided to try the door and see if I could get in. No luck: it was locked. But through the cracks between the door and the frame, I could hear the muted sounds of a horn being played, and some kind of string instrument. Soundcheck. But, unable to hear much, I moved on to the Midway.
The last weekend of September was cold: there were no squirrels on the ground, birds in the sky, or people on the sidewalk. Everyone was indoors, hiding from the first truly frigid day of the year—save for those attending the Hyde Park Jazz Fest, which took place on the Midway Plaisance between South Ellis and University Avenues, in one bank, at a nonprofit design center, and in several University of Chicago buildings.
The Midway was where most of the action happened. Two stages, placed on opposite ends of the plaisance, gave the effect of literal back-to-back performances, with the crowd moving between sets like marbles on a seesaw. As it got darker and colder, the crowd somehow got larger. During Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s set, there was hardly any standing room—and it felt as if the trees that lined the Midway were crowding in to listen. Visibility was low, so aside from the vague buildings in the distance and shuttle buses passing quietly along University Avenue, the only things to see were the bandstand and the people who made up the crowd.
Meanwhile, the festival continued around Hyde Park, with groups of people making their way to performances that were like rest stops on a long highway: cold, cold, cold, jazz; cold, cold, cold, jazz. At the Logan Center for the Arts, Brandee Younger gave a talk on the life and art of Alice Coltrane.