Music

Jazz Brunch – Storyville – Sundays

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The Storyville jazz infused, red-light district in New Orleans closed in 1917, or so I’m told, though you can revisit it in the 1992 movie of the same name.

One result of the closing was that famous jazz cornet player King Oliver left town and came to Chicago, followed a few years later by his mentee Louis Armstrong.

Neither of them was in attendance at brunch at Chicago’s Storyville establishment, not even for old times’ stake, but a nice trio led by guitarist Kevin Lipa entertained the patrons. As far as I can tell Lipa is not related to singer/songwriter Dua Lipa, who is someone I would know something about if I were a lot younger, or less clueless.

Kevin Lipa is a member of the band Bowmanville, named after the Chicago neighborhood where the only red lights are at intersections, but I’m not sure if the other two musicians were from that band as their names were not displayed. Hopefully they still get their share of the tips.

Consistent with the ambience, I went with the Blackened Shrimp n’ Grits. Tasty, but the grits were a little loose. Perhaps the chef was the witness from My Cousin Vinnie.

Next time I’ll take a double dose of cholesterol meds ahead of time and try the beignets.

Luiz Ewerling & Amada – Night Out in the Parks – Washington Square Park – August 14, 2026

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Luiz Ewerling was born in 1958 in Southern Brazil and started playing the drums at age six, making his first television appearance two years later. What took him so long?

 He moved to the U.S. In 1984, bringing his roots with him, and possibly his drums, though he may have upgraded since then, judging by how good they sounded in the park.

The group was a joy to hear. As I know nothing about Brazilian music, I recorded a little on my phone and sent the recording to a knowledgeable friend, who gave me the following soundbite:

“The music is of a style called MPB, for Música Popular Brasileira, which first emerged at the end of the 1960s and mixes bossa nova with pop and so-called Tropicalista tendencies. I could also hear certain influences from Milton Nascimento and his crowd. Nice vocals too.”

As to those vocals, the singer was not Amada (which means beloved or loved one in Portuguese), but rather Ana Everling. As far as I know the similarities of her last name and Luiz’s is coincidental, as she is from Moldova, which is about 6500 miles from Brazil.

I found a good video of her with the band at the Old Town School of Folk Music that is very representational of their performance in the park. I have no idea what the translation of the lyrics might be, but they can’t possible sound as good in English.

Elaine Dame – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – July 24, 2026

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Elaine Dame let the crowd know right away not to request that she sing Old Man River, as it is not in her wheelhouse. Smart move.

She did, however, sing Moon River, and also played the flute for parts of it, though not simultaneously, which would have been something.

Her jazzy version of West Side Story’s Somewhere, while okay, did not have the emotional strength of the version sung by the four vocalists at the Grant Park Music Festival the night before.

I love jazz, but, in my opinion, layering that style of music just doesn’t make sense for every song. This profound revelation, along with Dame’s excellent scatting on some other songs, led me to wonder how composers feel about scat being added to their songs.

Out of laziness, and lack of concern for accuracy, I’m going all AI on you here. First, composers often write songs with scatting in mind and notated accordingly. Second, “songs that lend themselves best to scatting share specific traits, primarily up-tempo rhythms, jazz harmony, and repetitive or pentatonic melodic structures.” Third, singers like to ad lib different scats, even to the same song, but may defer to repetition of a scat that has become well known from a recording.

Dame included a Portuguese Samba song, the name of which I missed, as I don’t speak Portuguese. Dame admitted that she doesn’t either as she apologized in advance to anyone in the audience who did for any mispronunciations on her part. Turned out someone did, but I didn’t stick around afterward for any language lessons.

Local jazz guitarist favorite Andy Brown accompanied Dame and will be back as a headliner next week. I imagine he’ll also accompany his wife, Petra van Nuis, when she appears in three weeks.

Broadway Sings America – Grant Park Music Festival – July 23, 2026

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Giving Mel Brooks’s History of the World a run for its money, Broadway Sings America covered an historical period of approximately 225 years, in 19 songs, before finishing with a 100+ year-old topic from a current show that is still relevant in today’s political atmosphere.

Host and singer Scott Coulter provided interesting commentary before each selection and only made one glaring mistake when, despite that fact that he lives in New York, he said that the Statue of Liberty is on Ellis Island. Someone back stage must have said something to him, as next time out he corrected it to Liberty Island (duh).

Coulter sang beautifully, as did all the performers, including the Grant Park Chorus, though I found it amusing that his two big solos, Tomorrow and Maria, both contain lyrics where the title is repeated over and over again. If he does have memory problems, that probably helped.

Blaine Krauss’s big moment, on the other hand, was his rendition of My Shot from Hamilton, a five and a half minute song that, while it also repeats the title a lot, has about a million lyrics in rapid-fire succession. He was flawless.

Tiffany Mann singularly graced us with Everything’s Coming Up Roses and I Know Where I’ve Been.

Jessica Hendy won the award for most costume changes, which was a reflection of the range of styles she displayed with her crystal-clear voice, and precise stage movements, in singing everything ranging from Burn to All That Jazz to Summer Nights.

The festival will be hard-pressed to top this program in any future Broadway tributes.

Cirque: A Space Odyssey – Grant Park Music Festival – July 22, 2026

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Christopher Nolan’s epic movie wasn’t the only Odyssey playing in Chicago this week, as the Grant Park Music Festival presented Troupe Vertigo’s Cirque: A Space Odyssey. Though I haven’t seen the movie yet, I can’t imagine that Matt Damon, or his stunt double, Devyn Dalton, had to perform the kind of death-defying aerial acrobatics that the cirque performers did, high above the stage, without a net, unless they’re counting on the first row of the string section of the orchestra to help break any falls.

And, although Damon described Dalton as having “the greatest arms I’ve ever seen,” I doubt she can do the bent over backward, one-armed handstands that the troupe’s contortionist did while using her feet to take off and put back on her hat (my description doesn’t do her justice). And don’t even get me started on hair hanging (ouch!).

Moreover, while the infamous Hollywood accounting practices are a great example of juggling the books, let’s see those executives keep multiple balls in the air while swinging on a wire.

Not to be forgotten through all of this was the orchestra providing a cornucopia (like The Odyssey, arising out of Greek mythology) of musical excellence, ranging from DeBussy, movie scores and pop tunes, all the way to cartoon themes, in half the time it takes Damon to get home on the screen.

Three Friends, Three Third Coasts, Three Non-calendar Decades

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In the late 1990’s I enjoyed watching Chicago’s 3rd Coast String Quartet, of which a friend was a member, play at a local club, after which I became the proud owner of their eponymous album, from which, apropos of the current World Cup, one can listen online to their take on the jazz classic Spain, along with the rest of the album’s songs.

Fast forward to July 8, 2026, when the Grammy award-winning Third Coast Percussion performed, with their usual aplomb, with the orchestra at the Grant Park Music Festival and, thanks to a different friend, I was able to attend a post-concert reception with the group.

Regular-speed forward to July 16, when a third friend invited me to attend, at Depaul’s Holtschneider Performance Center, Third Coast Music’s Scoring for Chicago Summer Benefit, which included a raft of performances (my favorite, of course, being Marianne Parker’s deft piano work on Pictures at an Exhibition), coordinated nicely with a variety of videos, to drive home the drive to raise money to “build the Midwest’s first scoring stage; anchoring an audio post-production center, educational facility, and community event space,” which would be about an eight-mile drive from the Center, straight down Halsted Street.

If nothing else, I now know what a scoring stage is, as does the event’s engaging emcee Lisa Parker (no relation to Marianne), who joked about her initial misunderstanding (and fear) of what it might mean. And I heard a good story — about John Wiliams recording, with the CSO, the score to the movie Lincoln with the aid of sound-dampening acoustic trucks and baffles outside Orchestra Hall — used as evidence of Chicago’s need for a scoring stage and the possibilities it might bring.

Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – July 15, 2026

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Some people I know who have season tickets to the Grant Park Music Festival skipped this concert, I would guess out of concern for the heat. The weather was very warm, but not unbearable. The only thing that was too hot to handle was Michelle Cann’s virtuosity on the piano, which may have been why a couple of the bass players were wearing shorts on stage.

Cann, who I have seen and written about several times before, thrilled the crowd with her work on Ravel’s Piano Concerto, but what really set the place on fire was her encore, which wasn’t listed in the program, but, if I had to guess, was Hazel Scott’s arrangement of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C# Minor. I could practically see the smoke rising from the piano.

The orchestra opened with William Grant Still’s Festive Overture and closed with Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, both well-performed and well-received, but the night belonged to Cann, another in the list of must-see pianists the festival has presented this season.

250th Anniversary – In Case You Missed It – July 4, 2026

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Hallmark’s Anniversary Gifts by Year only goes through year 60, which seems somewhat short-sighted given extended life-expectancies, though I expect those numbers to start decreasing as the earth’s temperature continues to rise.

Still, we would be remiss in not celebrating America’s sesqui-something anniversary, so I am proposing, a little late, that the 250-year gift be potassium nitrate, a key component of fireworks, which is available in five-pound bags through Amazon.

The other supply problem is, of course, that China produces at least 90% of our fireworks and, you may have heard, there has been some tinkering with the tariffs on goods imported from there.

Nevertheless, the good news for fireworks aficionados, of which I am not one, was that the Taste of Chicago found enough funding to set off a display on July 10. The not-so-good news was that the nearby Grant Park Music Festival, in its infinite wisdom, delayed the start of its concert that evening by an hour and 45 minutes, so that instead of the fireworks starting, very appropriately, just after the music ended, the sky lit up, and the noise started, during the first movement of the orchestra’s otherwise beautiful rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony.

This faux pas did, however, allow guest conductor Leonard Slatkin to turn to the audience between movements and suggest, to a roar of approval, that the organizers had mistaken this work for the Tchaikovsky piece more often associated with fireworks.

I didn’t go to the actual Independence Day Salute a week earlier, but did attend its prior afternoon rehearsal, which not only allowed me to see concertmaster Jeremy Black get his moment in the sun with a couple wonderful solos, but also to listen to him playing them multiple times while the conductor tinkered with the orchestral accompaniment.

Grant Park Music Festival – Rehearsals are fun too – June 2026

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I went to the Tuesday, June 16th, free, late-morning rehearsal of Hayden’s Military Symphony in anticipation of possible bad weather for the next evening’s concert, which did provide the advantage of sitting wherever I wanted and moving around at will, which I took the opportunity to do, checking out the acoustics everywhere and moving in and out of the sun, but restraining myself from standing in the center aisle, jumping up and down and waving my arms trying to distract the musicians. I have too much class for that (and can’t jump) – but it sounds like fun, right?

As rain always seems to be forecast for Wednesdays, I went to rehearsal again on Tuesday June 23. Unfortunately, though I listened to two of the selections, I couldn’t stay for the Barber violin concerto, thereby forcing me to risk the weather the next evening, which held off long enough, but just, for me to see William Hagen perform brilliantly before the heavens opened up and the concert closed down.

Attending the rehearsal on Thursday, June 26, not out of fear of the forecast, but rather because it was outside and the performance itself was to be inside the next two evenings (more of a winter activity for me), I was treated to Sara Davis Buechner exuberantly playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1. It was interesting to observe her interaction with the conductor when he wanted the orchestra to repeat a section of the music. Shockingly, though she knew the music by heart, she had not committed the corresponding 1,625 measure numbers to memory (unlike prisoners telling jokes). Also, it allowed me, that evening, to watch the White Sox win 22-1 (what?!).

Grant Park Music Festival – June 19, 2026 (same performance playing on June 20)

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Prior to the “real” concert, there was a Young Artists Showcase Suzuki event, which I didn’t listen to and mention only on the off chance that the Cubs right fielder, who, as far as I know, does not play the violin, reads my blog and is related to Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, who invented the teaching method.

As is customary, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero received a standing ovation upon entering the stage. I think he’s great and a really nice guy, but nobody ever stood for me when I came to the office (or applauded for that matter), so I remained seated.

The Festival brings in one great pianist after another, this time Canadian Stewart Goodyear playing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at a tempo I can only fantasize about, once I finish with all the other fantasies in line in front of it, like my lifelong quest to get on Jeopardy, even though my information retention abilities are fading faster than his hands were moving.

Goodyear gave us a fabulous encore from his own Callaloo Suite composition, the sound of which would have fit wonderfully with the West Side Story music from last week.

After intermission, the orchestra finished with Copland’s Symphony No. 3, which made me wonder about the coincidence of two number 3’s appearing on the same program (and another, by Rachmaninov coming up in July). I loved it except, not being familiar with it, I was faked out several times in the final movement, which kept seeming like it was about to end, only to rise from the dead. Fortunately, as noted earlier, my hands don’t move all that fast, so I didn’t prematurely start clapping before the actual coda.