The lawn at Ravinia is a specific kind of quiet before a show, because the people on it have brought folding tables and are eating dinner. Chance the Rapper chose that room to open the Coloring Book ten-year anniversary tour on Saturday August 8th, which means the first night of a national run happened in front of an audience sitting on blankets in Highland Park.

He is from 79th Street. Ravinia is thirty miles north of it, in a suburb with a median household income that does not resemble Chatham's. That distance is the entire interest of the booking, and the show did not pretend otherwise.

Lawn admission was thirty dollars, pavilion seats forty-five and sixty-five, and the night sold out. The lawn is where the actual Ravinia ritual lives — wine, a low table, somebody's mother-in-law — and for this show it filled with people who had plainly never been to Highland Park before, sitting next to the regulars.

The Nine-Year-Old

The opening slot went to Young Roddo, a nine-year-old Chicago artist billed on his own graphics as thirty million streams in three months and the Voice of the Playground. He asked Chance for the slot and got it. He is nine, so the set was short and the crowd response was the warm, slightly stunned kind, and the fact of it is the better story: the opening night of a ten-year anniversary tour, and the first voice on the stage belonged to someone who was not born when the record came out.

Taylor Bennett, Chance's brother, was on the bill too, and Mello — who manages Bennett and announced the Chicago date as the tour's first stop — was the one visibly running people between the stage and the back of house all night. Credit where it is due: the night was organised by Chicagoans for a Chicago audience that had travelled north to get to it.

The Record At Ten

Coloring Book was a gospel-rap mixtape that won a Grammy without being sold, and it does not survive on nostalgia the way a rock catalogue does — the songs were built on choir arrangements, and a choir either shows up or it does not. This one showed up. "Blessings" came through with the horn line intact and the crowd carrying the response vocal, which on a lawn means several thousand people singing a church part slightly behind the beat. "No Problem" was the loudest the night got. "Same Drugs" was the strangest — a song about growing apart from someone, played to an audience of families on picnic blankets, under red stage light and smoke.

A Lawn Is Not A Room

Ravinia has just come out of a renovation that cost somewhere between seventy and seventy-five million dollars, and the Hunter Pavilion reopened four weeks before this show. None of that money went into the lawn, because the lawn is not a room — it is a field with speakers around it, and what it does to rap is drain the low end before it reaches the back. The production compensated by pushing the vocal and the kick forward and letting everything else sit behind, which is the right call and still means the people furthest back heard a thinner record than the people in the pavilion.

Somebody near me said, to nobody in particular, that they had taken the Metra up and would be taking it back and that this was the first time they had ever done that for a concert. The Union Pacific North line runs to a halt directly beside the festival gate, which is the only reason a show like this can put a South Side audience on a North Shore lawn at all.

The Metra platform at eleven was standing room in both directions. He opened a national tour thirty miles from home.

Cover image: Ravinia Festival grand entrance / Wikimedia Commons