Hyde Park Jazz Festival is back, packed with primo music — but facing its biggest challenges ever
September 23, 2024
By Hannah Edgar
Every great music festival has a few of those moments.
If you’re a music lover, you know them well. You desperately want to catch two — maybe even three or four — spectacular billings at the same time, on different stages. But since humans haven’t yet cracked on-the-spot mitosis, one has to make tough decisions about whom to catch, when, and for how long.
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival is replete with these small agonies, which says a lot about its primo programming. This year’s festival, running Sept. 28-29, welcomes trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire (11 p.m. Sept. 28 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel), saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins (7:15 p.m. Sept. 28 at Logan Center Performance Hall), pianist Craig Taborn (in a trio with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Ches Smith, 5:15 p.m. Sept. 28 at Logan Center Performance Hall), a Billy Higgins tribute by drummer Willie Jones III and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt (8 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Wagner Stage on the Midway) and nearly 30 other acts.