Review: At 20, Hyde Park Jazz Festival is as essential as ever
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.
