The Chicago Jazz Festival turns 25 this year, and to celebrate it’s spending an evening at Symphony Center. For the first time, you’ll have to buy a ticket to get into the opening-night event–a concert starring Branford Marsalis’s quartet followed by an homage to Art Blakey featuring Marsalis and other Blakey alums. Though it’s nice to see the programmers experiment a bit, and plenty of people over the years have advocated moving some fest performances indoors, this is hardly what anyone had in mind: Symphony Center’s acoustics have always made jazz sound muddy, and the gain in intimacy is minimal. Meanwhile, there’s one fewer night of free music in Grant Park, though the addition of afternoon sets on Friday makes up some of the difference.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 28
SYMPHONY CENTER
FRIDAY, AUGUST 29
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s a shame Rebel Souls don’t have a more prominent slot than this; they certainly deserve it. Sirota is one of the most highly regarded youngish drummers in Chicago, a crisp and lively player with a keen sense of dynamics; he’s just back from a 15-date tour of Europe with his trio. Like his sometime comrade Jeff Parker, he’s an active link between the straight-ahead camp (he’s at the Green Mill every week as a member of the Sabertooth Organ Quartet) and the vanguard. With this group–guitarist Parker, tenor saxophonist Geof Bradfield, trombonist Jeb Bishop, and bassist Josh Abrams–Sirota embraces the postbop virtues of swing feel, architectural complexity, and free interplay while covering a spectrum of interests, at times recalling the adventurous 60s Blue Note records of Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, and Grachan Moncur III. JC
1:05 PM
Tenor saxophonist Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre played with most of the city’s greatest avant-gardists back in the 60s and 70s, including Muhal Richard Abrams and Anthony Braxton, in addition to making a handful of superb records as a leader. But he moved to New York in the mid-70s, where for many years he recorded only sporadically and did most of his gigging in the subway. He’s become more active over the last decade, but local performances are still rare. For this one he’ll appear with his newest group, the Light, a trio with drummer Ravish Momin and tuba player Jesse Dulman. As heard on South Eastern (CIMP), the format gives McIntyre’s appealingly sour, full-bodied tenor plenty of space to work in: he’ll pile up jagged notes in excited flurries or stretch out in long, limber, melodic but harmonically free postbop lines. The rhythm section rarely just settles in behind him: Momin ebbs and flows and then erupts in frenetic cymbal splashes, and Dulman alternates between bass lines and wonderfully unhinged low-end blubbering. PM
