Photos: The Hyde Park Jazz Festival
The south side’s own world-class jazz fest played host to dozens of shows and more than a hundred musicians.
By Philip Montoro and Michael Jackson
September 30, 2019
This past weekend the 13th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival brought 36 performances by local, national, and international artists to more than a dozen venues and stages in and around Hyde Park. Saturday's programming included two new works commissioned from Chicago composers in partnership with the U. of C.'s Logan Center for the Arts: Angel Bat Dawid's Requiem for Jazz and Isaiah Collier's The Story of 400 Years, both of which employed large mixed-discipline ensembles to address the history of jazz, the history of slavery, and the African American experience. Percussionists Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph, who founded the influential Mandingo Griot Society with Gambian kora player Foday Musa Soso in the late 1970s, performed as the duo Karuna. And pianist Sylvie Courvoisier played in a duo with guitarist and brand-new MacArthur fellow Mary Halvorson.