Spreading the Jams
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Both Walsh, 29, and Smartt, 33, are sometime Deadheads who began exploring jazz because it was a key inspiration for their favorite band, and gravitated naturally toward groups like San Diego’s Greyboy Allstars, who began sticking Dead-style space jams into jazz-oriented material in the mid-90s. As Deadheads are wont to be, Walsh is an obsessive music collector, and in the spring of ’99, when he was approached to DJ a going-away party for an employee at Alive One–a now-defunct Lincoln Park watering hole that featured only live recordings on its CD jukebox–he leaped at the opportunity. He nagged the bar’s owners to let him do it again, and then again, more or less once a month for the next year.
“I’d get a group of friends to come check it out, maybe 100 people,” says Walsh. “I saw this audience that appreciated the improv and the free-form stuff of the jam band scene, so I just gave them some really cool funk from, like, 1965 to 1975. It became like a dance party. People just ate it up. I was on my hands and knees under the bar with a five-disc changer and a flashlight in my mouth trying to make sure I caught the ends of songs.” In early 2000 Walsh and a friend, Sam Burick, were mulling over ways to make the parties bigger and more regular, when an acquaintance in Madison approached them about setting up a show for guitarist Melvin Sparks.
That’s why they planned their festival the same weekend as the Chicago Jazz Festival and the African Festival of the Arts. “When you go to Jazz Fest in New Orleans, it takes place during the day,” explains Walsh. “But you’ve got a town full of music lovers, so there’s a lot of nighttime events too. That’s what we’re going for.” Thursday’s torrential downpour kept the crowd small for a Logan Square Auditorium gig with the Fareed Haque Group, but a jam session at the same venue on Saturday, featuring George Porter of the Meters and young New York jazz pianist James Hurt and paying homage to Les McCann and Eddie Harris, pulled in about 250 people, and Sunday’s double bill at the Park West, which paired the Dirty Dozen Brass Band with the Rebirth Brass Band, did 500.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
