John Corbett’s introduction to the Reader‘s overview of the 2019 Chicago Jazz Festival began: “An old pair of shoes, the United States Postal Service, a loving spouse—when things have been around awhile, it’s all too easy to take them for granted. The Chicago Jazz Festival has been with us for more than four decades.” With any luck your favorite footwear is holding up—and your relationship too, if you’ve got one—because 2020 has been hell on the other two. The USPS is under assault by the executive branch of the federal government, and on June 9 the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by finally canceling the city’s remaining summer festivals—including the 2020 Chicago Jazz Festival.
Elastic Arts is taking a hybrid approach: though it hasn’t opened its doors to audiences, it has made its facilities available for musicians to record performances that will be broadcast in coming weeks. Elastic Arts’ director, Adam Zanolini, writes in an e-mail, “Many people still do not feel safe holding events that are open to the public, and with numbers around the country and around the state steadily increasing, we’re wary of instituting the necessary measures, planning in-person events several weeks in advance, only to see Chicago revert to Phase Three and have to cancel. So it’s no-audience streaming-only for now.”
Millennium Park at Home: Jazz Music Every day’s programming consists of Citywide Jazz videos, prerecorded streams from Chicago musicians, and archival footage from previous iterations of the Chicago Jazz Festival. Thu 9/3-Sun 9/6, 4-8 PM each day, youtube.com/ChicagoDCASE, free.
Hyde Park Jazz Festival Sat 9/26, livestream from the Logan Center for the Arts, hydeparkjazzfestival.org, free. Sun 9/27, pop-up concerts around the Hyde Park neighborhood, free.
In addition to providing musicians a chance to play, the Jazz Postcards also signaled the HPJF’s intent to hold a live festival of some kind this year. But exactly what will happen on September 26 and 27 is still a matter of hope and conjecture, Dumbleton admits.
