The Bronzeville Smooth Jazz Festival ran the length of King Drive between 37th and 38th on August 1, noon to 8:30, free. That is the whole listing, and the listing is not the story.
The story is the genre. Smooth jazz is the most consistently sneered-at category in American popular music, a byword among critics for music that has had its difficulty surgically removed. It is also music that a Black South Side audience has never stopped buying tickets to, turning out for, and requesting on the radio, across four decades of being told it does not count.
Who Decided It Was Bad
Worth asking directly, because the answer is instructive. The critical consensus against smooth jazz was assembled largely by writers who valued rupture, difficulty and the avant-garde — an entirely defensible set of values, and one that happens to describe a particular listener. Music organised around warmth, groove and melodic ease fails those tests by design, not by incompetence.
Chicago is a useful place to notice this, because the city has spent decades being celebrated for the other thing. The AACM came out of here and built an international reputation on exactly the difficulty that smooth jazz declines. The city’s own Jazz Festival in September books Robert Glasper and the Miles Electric Band. Nobody is programming Millennium Park around the records that actually play in Bronzeville living rooms.
So a free festival on King Drive is a small act of correction. It says the audience that kept this music alive is entitled to hear it performed well, in their own neighbourhood, without a critic’s permission slip.
The Lineage Is Right Here
The geography is not incidental. Bronzeville is the neighbourhood the Great Migration built, and a substantial share of what the world calls American music was made within a few blocks of that stretch of King Drive. Jazz, gospel and blues all have addresses here.
That history is usually invoked to lend gravity to the difficult stuff. It applies just as well to the smooth stuff, because the same community produced both and only one of them gets treated as an inheritance. A free August festival is how a neighbourhood asserts the other half of its own catalogue.
Bronzeville ran a second music festival within the month — Black and Bronze at Armstrong Park on August 29 — and hosted the finish of the Bud Billiken Parade in Washington Park on August 8. Three major events in one month in one neighbourhood, and the city’s cultural pages noticed roughly none of it.
Eight and a half hours of free music on King Drive, for an audience that never needed convincing. The rest of us can catch up whenever we like.
Cover image: Unknown authorUnknown author / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)