{"id":1227868,"date":"2025-03-06T05:26:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T05:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/?p=1227868"},"modified":"2025-03-06T05:26:05","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T05:26:05","slug":"5-minutes-that-will-make-you-love-chicago-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/5-minutes-that-will-make-you-love-chicago-jazz\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Chicago Jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Jazz has experienced a meaningful resurgence<\/a> in popularity over the past 15 years or so, especially among younger listeners. What\u2019s driving that? You could make the case that there is a particular hunger, now that so much of life is lived in the digital cloud, for the messy and untamed energy of jazz, and for its way of putting a live process on display. And if that\u2019s the case, then it makes a lot of sense that Chicago jazz has been at the forefront<\/a> of this recent surge. Chicago has always represented a particularly rootsy, physical and \u2014 yes \u2014 windy <\/em>ideal in jazz. So perhaps it\u2019s an especially heady antidote to that sense of digital disappearance.<\/p>\n

The Chicago jazz sound amounts to a sum of the city\u2019s Black histories: In it you can usually hear something of the snowy, clamoring traffic in Richard Wright\u2019s \u201cNative Son,\u201d from 1940; the yowl of Howlin\u2019 Wolf\u2019s electric guitar in a 1950s blues bar; the drummers and dancers pounding out rhythms at one of Kelan Philip Cohran\u2019s gatherings<\/a> at the 63rd Street Beach in the late 1960s; even the antiracist street protests<\/a> of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The Windy City was an important musical outpost from the start of the recorded era<\/a>, when many blues and jazz musicians moved there from the South and became stars. It\u2019s also known as a cradle of the avant-garde, thanks to institutions like Sun Ra\u2019s Arkestra<\/a>, established there in the early 1950s, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians<\/a>, a seed-sowing collective that celebrates its 60th anniversary this spring. Today, the city remains at the forefront of contemporary jazz thanks to artists like Nicole Mitchell<\/a>, Kahil El\u2019Zabar<\/a>, Makaya McCraven<\/a>, Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker<\/a> and Isaiah Collier<\/a>, each a latter-day A.A.C.M. affiliate who has springboarded into a leading role on the international jazz circuit. And the label International Anthem, founded 12 years ago in Chicago, has become one of the biggest success stories in the indie-jazz business.<\/p>\n

We asked writers, musicians and other linchpins of the Chicago scene to tell us what tracks they would play to make a newcomer fall in love with the distinctive but multifaceted sound of Chicago jazz. Read on, listen to their picks in our playlists, and if you have favorites of your own, drop them in the comments.<\/p>\n