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Capital city jazz festival 20156/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Parker (Tortoise, Brian Blade), with drummer Chad Taylor and Chris Lopes on upright bass, specialized in long, lean, blues-inflected lines, building into inventive solos on a set including two tunes-“Days Fly By (With Ruby)” and “Ezra”-written for the leader’s children. ![]() Nor did other AACM-connected ensembles, notably the Jeff Parker Trio, led by a guitarist now based in L.A. The group, a veritable Mount Rushmore of AACM luminaries, clearly didn’t disappoint devotees of creative music. Cumulatively, it all added up to a performance of great intensity and surprising drama. The piece proceeded in similar fashion, with players, alone and/or together, stretching out for unfettered flights, often incorporating sound effects, and the entire ensemble sometimes uniting for ferocious hits and syncopated accents, with call-and-response passages and simultaneous improvisations along the way. Then all dropped out except for McMillan’s flute, mournful and searching over the course of a long, unaccompanied solo. The composition, which began with a ringing gong (and, inadvertently, sirens emanating from emergency vehicles racing down nearby Michigan Avenue), had bowed bass, horn stabs and fluttering piano lines feed into what felt like an awakening of kindred musical spirits. Abrams and company presented a sprawling, hourlong piece, cryptically titled “ASOADVA15.” The band, with three pairs of doubles-the two altoists, pianists Abrams and Amina Claudine Myers, and drummers Thurman Barker (also vibes) and Reggie Nicholson (also marimba)-plus trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, bassist Leonard Jones, trombonist George Lewis and baritone saxophonist and flutist LaRoy Wallace McMillan, offered a brand of music seldom played for locals and tourists in roomy outdoor venues. The 10-piece group, informally assembled in 1962, included alto saxophonists Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell, who two years ago reunited with Abrams for an acclaimed Jack DeJohnette-led performance at the same venue. The organization’s 50th anniversary called for a major performance at its hometown’s fest, and got a rare one, in the form of a closing-night set by Abrams’ Experimental Band on the Frank Gehry-designed stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, home to the fest’s headliners. The AACM’s emphasis on originality, innovation and experimentation continues to resonate among musicians in Chicagoland, New York, the West Coast and beyond. The thread running through the fest’s 37th annual edition, held over an unusually warm and muggy Labor Day weekend: the continuing influence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective of players and composers officially organized in 1965 by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and others. It doesn’t take a musicology detective to track the theme of this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, which drew an estimated 140,000 to Millennium Park and the Chicago Cultural Center for a program that was heavily Chicago-centric if decidedly rangy.
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