One of the most successful Chicago Jazz Festivals on record (both for attendance and quality of programming) ended with a bang Sunday night, and that wasn't just the sound of fireworks over the lake co-mingling with Denardo Coleman's bass drum beats during the closing set.
The Petrillo Music Shell had hosted cut-above local tenorist Ron Dewar and his quintet with peppy alto sax sideman Willie Garcia, the wonderful ICP Orchestra from Amsterdam, in sparkling form, followed by Eight Bold Souls, which climaxed a colorful set with leader Ed Wilkerson's lively “Brown Town." However, considerable anticipation preceded the appearance of Ornette Coleman.
He arrived on stage with alto sax, violin and trumpet in hand looking like a dandy accountant in a pinstriped suit, with a too-hip tie and green shoes. Clearly he'd requested extra microphones -- there were four trained toward his various instruments, and two music stands butted together to accommodate skeins of manuscript paper. It seemed a little much, given that Coleman, with his eyes closed most of the time, barely looked at the dots. As he put it backstage when the Sun-Times solicited his impressions about the concert: “Sound is the only thing you don't have to know to hear it."
Coleman's set started abruptly with one of his hallmark whinnying downward riffs on the sketch-like “Following the Sound." It was clear that, though Coleman pioneered the term Free Jazz (on the 1961 album of the same name) -- ultimately spawning the totally improvised, close-listening exchanges popular in Chicago venues like the Hungry Brain, Elastic and the Velvet Lounge -- his own music remains free of conventional harmonic strictures but revels in the restatement of his squirrelly themes.
The Petrillo Music Shell had hosted cut-above local tenorist Ron Dewar and his quintet with peppy alto sax sideman Willie Garcia, the wonderful ICP Orchestra from Amsterdam, in sparkling form, followed by Eight Bold Souls, which climaxed a colorful set with leader Ed Wilkerson's lively “Brown Town." However, considerable anticipation preceded the appearance of Ornette Coleman.
He arrived on stage with alto sax, violin and trumpet in hand looking like a dandy accountant in a pinstriped suit, with a too-hip tie and green shoes. Clearly he'd requested extra microphones -- there were four trained toward his various instruments, and two music stands butted together to accommodate skeins of manuscript paper. It seemed a little much, given that Coleman, with his eyes closed most of the time, barely looked at the dots. As he put it backstage when the Sun-Times solicited his impressions about the concert: “Sound is the only thing you don't have to know to hear it."
Coleman's set started abruptly with one of his hallmark whinnying downward riffs on the sketch-like “Following the Sound." It was clear that, though Coleman pioneered the term Free Jazz (on the 1961 album of the same name) -- ultimately spawning the totally improvised, close-listening exchanges popular in Chicago venues like the Hungry Brain, Elastic and the Velvet Lounge -- his own music remains free of conventional harmonic strictures but revels in the restatement of his squirrelly themes.
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