The Englewood Jazz Festival held 6401 South Halsted from September 17 to 19, its twenty-seventh year. Englewood also ran a separate Englewood Music Festival on September 12. Two music festivals in one neighbourhood inside a single month.
Hold that next to how Englewood appears in the rest of Chicago’s media. The neighbourhood is a reliable dateline for violence coverage and almost nothing else, and a reader of the city’s dailies could be forgiven for not knowing it has sustained a jazz festival since the late nineties.
Twenty-Seven Years Is the Story
Longevity in a neighbourhood festival is not a sentimental detail, it is evidence. Twenty-seven consecutive years means a quarter-century of somebody securing permits, booking players, raising money, and doing it again the following September through recessions, a pandemic and every round of disinvestment Englewood has absorbed.
Compare the failure rate elsewhere in this package. Pitchfork Music Festival lasted nineteen years in Union Park with a magazine publisher behind it and was killed by a corporate reorganisation. The Silver Room Block Party went on a three-year hiatus because production costs reached $300,000 and then a million. Little Village’s Cinco de Mayo parade has now missed two years after four decades.
A small nonprofit jazz festival in Englewood has outlasted all of that. It is the most durable cultural institution in this entire summer calendar and the least written about.
The Counter-Narrative Nobody Commissions
Two festivals in a month is the part worth reporting properly, because it breaks the frame the city uses for this neighbourhood. Englewood is not a problem that occasionally hosts something nice. It is a place with a cultural calendar, and the calendar has a jazz festival with 27 years of programming history on it.
The city’s own Chicago Jazz Festival ran a fortnight earlier in Millennium Park with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Robert Glasper and the Miles Electric Band, free, downtown, and got the notices. The Hyde Park Jazz Festival hit its twentieth year the following weekend and got some. Englewood’s twenty-seventh got a line in a listings guide.
All three are free. All three are on the South Side or serve it. The coverage sorted itself by proximity to the Loop, which is the whole problem in one sentence.
Details sit with the festival itself, which is a small operation and by the reckoning of anyone who has dealt with it, very likely to say yes to a photographer who asks.
Twenty-seven years on Halsted. Somebody has been doing the paperwork since 1999, and the reward has been a listings-guide mention and a neighbourhood that gets to hear live jazz in September.
Cover image: Via englewoodjazzfestival.org