Dec. 28--As 2015 draws to a close, it's time to consider New Year's resolutions for Chicago jazz.
As always, there's plenty of room for improvement on the local scene.
Here, then, are one listener's hopes for the next year in jazz:
Help the emcees. Though it's slowly making progress, the Chicago Jazz Festival still suffers from a remarkably persistent case of logorrhea. Specifically, the emcees -- and there are way too many of them -- talk too much. This malady dates back to the early days of the fest, in which volunteer announcers mistakenly believed the audience yearned to hear their profound analyses of the music.
In recent years, festival planners wisely have begun to turn over some of the emcee duties to the folks the event ostensibly was designed to spotlight: the musicians themselves. Alas, some nonmusicians still have been allowed to grab the microphone (and they don't easily let go), while even some of the artists have been reciting the program book aloud. Do these people think the audience can't read the material themselves? Or that the music doesn't speak eloquently for itself?
In the spirit of generosity, I therefore offer an easy-to-remember script that will save the emcees from further self-embarrassment: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome (insert name here)." Or, for variety's sake, the announcers could go with this: "Let's give a warm Chicago welcome to (insert name here)."
With this simple plan, the Chicago Jazz Festival could show a degree of professionalism that long has eluded it.
An annual Billy Strayhorn Festival? One of the more encouraging developments of 2015 was the citywide Billy Strayhorn Festival, which celebrated the centennial of a great American composer long overshadowed by his employer, the incomparable Duke Ellington. The fest, coordinated by the Auditorium Theatre, offered not only concerts but panel discussions and commemorative events, several illuminating Strayhorn's bold decision to live openly as a gay man in a hostile, homophobic era. Both the gay community and Chicago at large embraced the festival, but Strayhorn's story shouldn't slip back into the shadows now that the grand events have ended. Why not build on this year's successes to create an annual Billy Strayhorn Festival spotlighting gay musicians, still a marginalized community in jazz? The OutBeat Jazz Festival in Philadelphia bills itself as America's First Queer Jazz Festival and has attracted broad corporate and philanthropic support, showing the rest of the country how it's done. A Billy Strayhorn Festival could push forward the cause while reminding the world of what Strayhorn achieved in music and for society at large.
Champion the AACM. Another 2015 triumph saw Chicago arts institutions celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was founded here in 1965. Despite minimal support from foundations and other nonprofit funders during the past half century, the AACM has launched the careers of generations of groundbreaking musicians. Organizations such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Chicago Jazz Festival and others played major roles in staging AACM concerts and other events throughout the year, giving the collective a degree of exposure in Chicago that it has not enjoyed during its first 49 years. It would be a pity, then, if we returned to the status quo in 2016. Can Chicago's arts institutions leverage the precedents of the past year? Can pillars of Chicago philanthropy, such as the MacArthur Foundation, find ways to provide the AACM with the support it needs and richly deserves? Are Chicago's cultural powers listening?
Blanket the screen. Yes, the Godzilla-size LED screen at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park may be great for showing movies. But it dwarfs, demeans and distracts from the musicians playing onstage during the Chicago Jazz Festival and other events. No musician should be upstaged by a colossal, too brilliantly lit image of himself or herself. Granted, the videographers who managed the screen during the 2015 Jazz Fest did a somewhat better job than the year before, though there were gaffes aplenty. In the end, however, no camera or director could hope to keep up visually with the musical give-and-take that occurs among improvisers during a live jazz performance. It's true that the audience seated far away from the stage on the lawn -- rather than close up in the permanent seating -- benefits from seeing visual projections of the action. So the only reasonable compromise is to shut down the harsh visuals of the behemoth on the Pritzker stage and put up a temporary screen or two in the place where the permanent seating ends and the lawn area begins. But let's stop violating the sanctity of the stage with garish, outsize, mishandled images writ large.
