Chicago Magazine

By Mark Guarino

In just a few years, Angel Bat Dawid has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in Chicago’s free jazz scene. The clarinetist–composer has performed in ensembles led by Ben LaMar Gay, Damon Locks, and Roscoe Mitchell, and founded a collective called the Participatory Music Coalition. Earlier this year, the Chicago label International Anthem released her acclaimed debut The Oracle.

Chicago Reader

By Bill Meyer

The happy paradox of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival is that while it was instituted to celebrate the jazz legacy of Chicago’s south side, its programming puts it on par with great jazz festivals around the globe. It commissions new projects from rising local musicians.

JazzTimes

The Polish festival Jazztopad, which turns 16 in November, is extending its reach into the United States, marking its fifth year of events in New York and its first in Chicago, where the Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar will present a new chamber-music piece, Ahwaal (the title translates roughly as “states of consciousness”), on Sept. 28 as part of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

Block Club Chicago

By Pat Nabong

South Shore residents and people from around Chicago gathered for Back Alley Jazz Festival, which is reviving a tradition that started in the ‘60s.

Chicago Tribune

by Howard Reich

Why does groundbreaking jazz thrive in Chicago?

The great performers who live and tour here of course set the standard, but there’s another key factor at play: the audience.

Hyde Park Herald

Hyde Park Jazz Festival Executive Director Kate Dumbleton (right) receives the “2019 Jazz Hero Award” from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) at the Logan Café, 915 E. 60th St. Grammy-award winning journalist, music critic and radio host Neil Tesser made the presentation during a break between sets of the Café’s Third Tuesday Jazz series on April 16, 2019. Jazz journalist Michael Jackson wrote of Dumbleton on the JJA Jazz Awards’s website: “The choice of … Kate Dumbleton as the JJA’s 2019 Chicago Jazz Hero is a no-brainer. She is chiefly revered in the jazzosphere for helping transform the neighborhood Hyde Park Jazz Festival into an event of national and international repute.”

The New York City Jazz Record

By Mark Keresman

When it comes to jazz, Chicago is one of THE American cities, with a vibrant and varied local scene. It also has one of the nation’s great annual festivals, but there’s another, not as well known, deserving attention.

DownBeat Magazine

By Michael Jackson

In its 12th year, Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival presented an almost preposterous amount of quality music on Sept. 29, day one of the two-day event that hosted scores of programs in about a dozen disparate venues.

Hyde Park Herald

By Aaron Cohen

When drummer Mike Reed spoke at the Logan Center on Saturday about his new “The City Was Yellow: The Chicago Suite,” he encapsulated the Hyde Park Jazz Festival’s essential spirit. Reed’s recent work represents 30 years of the city’s jazz compositions and he said his goal was to share stories about people and places rather than delve into a singular musical style. The entire day showed how his words resonated throughout the event.

South Side Weekly

By Kyle Olesiuk

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.

Chicago Tribune

by Howard Reich

The 12th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival was the reason, musicians performing in far-flung venues, from churches to concert halls to the great outdoors.

Music always resonates in Hyde Park, but over the weekend it was practically ubiquitous.

Following is one listener’s diary of some of Saturday’s events, which kicked off two days of stylistically wide-ranging jazz.

Block Club Chicago

By Lee Edwards

HYDE PARK — Returning for its 12th year, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival this weekend gives a platform to the city’s emerging, current and former jazz stars. 

Chicago Tribune

By Howard Reich

For jazz lovers, it’s one of the most eagerly anticipated weekends of the year: the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

As always, the historic neighborhood will come alive with the music, which will play in several venues from 1 p.m. to midnight Saturday and 1 to 9 p.m. Sunday.

Chicago Reader

By Izzy Yellen

In its 12th year, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival continues to program a diverse lineup of jazz artists. Over the course of the two days, the event will showcase over 30 acts at various venues in Hyde Park while embracing countless styles, traditions, and innovations.

Chicago Tribune

By Howard Reich

Last year, the Orchestre National de Jazz in France invited drummer-impresario Mike Reed to compose a suite of pieces dedicated to Chicago, where he’s based.

South Side Weekly

By Bridget Vaughn and Kyle Oleksiuk

On 73rd Street and Paxton, toward Merrill, at least one hundred people marched: past cars, over puddles, into alleys and across the block. As they marched, they held bundles of herbs in the air, played percussion, danced, and waved flags. This scene was the beginning of the Back Alley Jazz Festival—and the man at the front of the crowd, who rode in a mint-green Pedicab and wore a sash that read “Grand Marshall,” was Jimmy Ellis, a saxophonist who has been playing in Chicago since 1948.

The Chicago Community Trust

By The Chicago Community Trust Staff

By seven o’clock in the evening on a muggy Saturday in July, the backyard of Zenja Vaughn’s house at 7343 S. Paxton was filled to capacity. Visitors brought lawn chairs and coolers, or balanced plates of jerk chicken and ribs from a food truck on their knees as they waited, eyes fixed on the concrete parking pad. Folks who didn’t fit crammed into the alley to watch through the open gate, or peered over the fence from the house next door. The attraction, the headliner of the day’s Back Alley Jazz festival, was vocalist Maggie Brown and her ensemble.

Chicago Tribune

By Howard Reich

At first glance, the lineup for the 12th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival suggests a bulging array of styles and musical idioms.

For any event that features singer Dee Alexander and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, vibraphonist Thaddeus Tukes and the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band, harpist Brandee Younger and pianist and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran clearly encompasses a wide swath of artistic territory.

But as always with this intelligently programmed festival – which will run Sept. 29-30 at multiple Hyde Park locations – underlying themes and messages will drive the proceedings.

South Side Weekly

By Bridget Vaughn

In its eleventh year, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival drew large crowds two weekends ago. The free two-day festival offered music lovers ten venues to hear some of the best local, national, and international music on the planet.

Arts Journal: Jazz Beyond Jazz

By Howard Mandel

Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival in the first days of fall (Sept. 23 & 24th) which were unusually hot, is an exceptional event, curated for creative artistry, local and otherwise, drawing a highly diverse crowd to a fair that mixes popular and specialized performances at a range of boutique venues.