The Chicago Jazz Festival held Labor Day weekend at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, September 3 through 6, free. Dee Dee Bridgewater opened with the pianist Bill Charlap. Robert Glasper, Paquito D’Rivera and M.E.B. — the Miles Electric Band — filled the rest of the top of the bill.

M.E.B. is the booking that raises the question, and it is not a hostile one. An ensemble built from Miles Davis alumni playing Miles Davis’s electric material is either preservation or reanimation, and jazz has never settled which of those it is doing when it looks backward.

Preservation, or the Other Thing

The case for it is straightforward. The musicians on that stage were in those bands. The knowledge of how that music was actually played — the feel, the internal signals, the things never written down — lives in their hands and nowhere else, and it expires with them. Putting it in front of a free audience of thousands is a reasonable use of a public stage.

The case against is that Davis’s entire method was refusal. He abandoned forms the moment they became legible, including his own, and an ensemble organised around recreating one of his periods is doing the precise thing he built a career on not doing. A tribute to a man who hated tributes.

Both are true and the festival did not have to choose, because it put Robert Glasper on the same bill. Glasper is the hinge between jazz and hip-hop, an active argument about where this music goes next rather than where it has been, and his presence is what keeps the M.E.B. slot from tipping the whole weekend into retrospect.

The AACM Question

The harder thing to raise about Chicago’s own jazz festival is what it does with Chicago’s own jazz. The AACM came out of this city in the mid-sixties and became the most consequential experimental music collective in America, and the city’s flagship jazz festival tends to honour that legacy in the abstract while booking its headline slots from elsewhere.

Dee Dee Bridgewater is magnificent and not from here. Glasper is essential and not from here. D’Rivera is a giant and not from here. A festival in the city that produced the AACM might reasonably be expected to make the local avant-garde its centre rather than its side programme, and this one, like most before it, did not.

The Hyde Park Jazz Festival three weeks later is the corrective, and it is free too — artist-first, volunteer-heavy, and by most serious listeners’ reckoning the more musically adventurous of the two. Full lineups ran via the lineup and the city's page.

Four days of first-rate free jazz in a Gehry bandshell, and the most interesting jazz question in Chicago still being answered a few miles south.

Cover image: Courtesy Choose Chicago