September 28, 2026
By Hannah Edgar for the Chicago Tribune
Photo by Vincent D. Johnson for the Chicago Tribune
“You know you’re getting old,” saxophonist Joshua Redman told a Rockefeller Chapel crowd on Saturday, “when you’re twice as old as the festivals you play.”
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival he headlined has become such a cornerstone of the city’s jazz scene that it’s sometimes easy to forget that it is, in fact, only turning 20. But getting it going in the first place took a village. As co-founder Judith Stein recalls, the first iteration, in 2007, required the organizational muscle of the Hyde Park Jazz Society, fronted by the late James Wagner, the buy-in of the University of Chicago, and the mutual interest of Hyde Park cultural institutions, all of whom were anxious to build audiences.
