jazz festival
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival reached new heights in 2023
The festival’s bustling constellation of world-class music included a greater diversity of styles than ever before.
Latest on the Chicago jazz Festival
The mightiest double bill at the Chicago Jazz Festival
Two staggeringly prolific titans of the genre—saxophonist Chico Freeman and bassist Ron Carter—play back-to-back at Pritzker Pavilion.
Alexis Lombre brings her many-hued sound world to the Chicago Jazz Festival
The pianist, singer, composer, and producer will share vivid, genre-blurring songs from her forthcoming debut album.
The Chicago Jazz Festival plays it safe
This year’s solid lineup largely lacks the usual avant-garde artists, but plenty of daring satellite shows are still happening around town.
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Hyde Park Jazz Festival & Back Alley Jazz
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival returns to full flower
The crowd at the fest—activists, dancers, students, radio hosts, dog walkers, retired teachers, an ironworker in a tiara—is just as much fun as the top-shelf musicians on its stages.
The ‘new normal’ hangs over another summer of live music
As the pandemic grinds on, so do Chicago’s many music festivals. The Reader collects 16 of the biggest and best—though as usual, there’s little correlation between “biggest” and “best.”
Chicago’s Black musical visionaries charted paths for their communities in the 1950s and ’60s
Sun Ra, Phil Cohran, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians have influenced art and culture for more than half a century.
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Chicago jazz festival Guides: Archives
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Latest music coverage
New Morality Zine boosts Chicago hardcore with a Rumble preshow
Plus: Rapper Rich Jones celebrates the collaborative album Sour Dub, and From the ’Go Fest crowns its biggest bill yet with a set from Vic Mensa.
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Chicago’s own Common gets the orchestral treatment at an elegant one-night stand
Sat 7/20 at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park
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Chicago slam phenomenon Torture play their second-ever local show
Fri 7/19 at Beat Kitchen
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Mages Guild bring live electronic music to the Music Box Theatre
Plus: Goths and punks gather at Metro for the 45th birthday of Neo, and the International Latino Cultural Center uplifts Pan-Latino music around the city.
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Harpist Brandee Younger celebrates Alice Coltrane at the MCA
Tue 7/23 at the Museum of Contemporary Arts
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New York shoegaze darlings Hotline TNT play a Pitchfork aftershow
Fri 7/19 at Subterranean
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The Rumble provides space to channel political angst and find community through hardcore and metal
Thu 7/18 – Sat 7/20 preshow and festival at Cobra Lounge, aftershows at Beat Kitchen
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Demetruest wants to help you slow down
Their newest in a trilogy of EPs, They All Kept Moving, While I Stood Still is about persevering through the good and bad of it all.
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