It doesn’t take a musicology detective to track the theme of this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, which drew an estimated 140,000 to Millennium Park and the Chicago Cultural Center for a program that was heavily Chicago-centric if decidedly rangy. The thread running through the fest’s 37th annual edition, held over an unusually warm and muggy Labor Day weekend: the continuing influence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective of players and composers officially organized in 1965 by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and others. The AACM’s emphasis on originality, innovation and experimentation continues to resonate among musicians in Chicagoland, New York, the West Coast and beyond.
The organization’s 50th anniversary called for a major performance at its hometown’s fest, and got a rare one, in the form of a closing-night set by Abrams’ Experimental Band on the Frank Gehry-designed stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, home to the fest’s headliners.
