The Battle of the Upper-Midwest Labor Day Weekend Jazz Festivals!

Foreshadowing the Bears vs. Lions season opener on September 12, Chicago and Detroit are staging a Labor Day Weekend battle of the jazz festivals, and we're all over it at AccuJazz. We've created channels devoted to the two fests, and you can listen right now!

Listen now: Chicago Jazz Festival 2010

Listen now: Detroit Jazz Festival 2010

While it's pretty clear who the favorite in the game will be, I'll leave it up to you to decide which jazz fest wins.

Detroit has a slightly larger lineup and possibly more big-name mainstream acts, but Chicago has a lot going for it, too. Chicago's lineup will appeal to the more adventurous listener. The contrast is made clear in the two fests' choices of Artists in Residence. Detroit selected straight-ahead jazz pianist Mulgrew Miller, a veteran of Tony Williams and Art Blakey's groups. Chicago has Nicole Mitchell, a lesser-known (though that's rapidly changing) local flutist and composer known for her rough, edgy sound and long-form conceptual compositions.

Joining Miller in Detroit will be heavy-hitters like Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Maria Schneider, Tia Fuller, Benny Green and Roy Haynes. Less jazz-intensive listeners hoping for something a little more mainstream can catch Tower of Power or the Fabulous Thunderbirds, too. As usual, a nice amount of local talent will also fill the stages throughout the festival's 4 days.

While Nicole Mitchell is playing five performances at the Chicago Jazz Fest, she still left room for a few other artists to perform. The Jazz Institute of Chicago, who programs the festival, leans slightly left-of-center and very much towards Chicago. The final lineup, however, includes a little something for everyone. Headliners include broad-appeal vocalists Kurt Elling and Rene Marie, as well as big-name legends like Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis. Modern jazz stars Brian Blade and Brad Mehldau are also showing up on Sunday, and avant-garde master (and former Chicagoan) Henry Threadgill is playing the main stage Sunday night.

Detroit has a rich history of incubating some of the greatest talents jazz has ever known, turning out the famous Jones Brothers, Paul Chambers, Milt Jackson and Tommy Flanagan. But from what I can tell, Chicago has the more vital scene circa 2010 (though I might be biased, considering myself a small part of that scene). If they show up early enough in the day, Chicago Jazz Festival attendees will get a taste of the world-class jazz being created by local players. Highlights of Chicago artists performing at the fest include first-call drummer Dana Hall with special guest Nicholas Payton, avant-garde pianist/composer Paul Giallorenzo, Gen-Y post-afrobeat group NOMO, trumpeter Corey Wilkes and vocalist Saalik Ziyad.

Elling and pianist Mike LeDonne have the distinction of being the only artists playing both the Detroit and Chicago fests in the same weekend (and Elling's also playing the Tanglewood jazz festival in Massachusetts on Saturday! Somebody's got an ambitious agent). I'd imagine some sidemen might also be trucking between the two fests, but that info's not on the publicly posted schedules.

Whether or not you're going to be attending one of the fests, head over to AccuJazz.com and give the channels a listen. They're full of great music and offer up a lot of variety. And if you are going to the Chicago Fest, hopefully I'll see you there!

Honoring Bill and Fred

The jazz world lost two of its most distinctive artists this June. Bill Dixon and Fred Anderson were both uncompromising horn players who played important roles in the development of the jazz avant-garde in the '60s and enjoyed major career resurgences late in life. To celebrate Dixon and Anderson, we are featuring an extra-large dose of their music on the Avant-Garde channel, which listeners will find right at the top of AccuJazz.com.

Bill Dixon was a trumpet player who busied himself more with exploring sound through his horn than playing melodies or hitting changes. While his music is undeniably intellectual, his trumpet playing always betrayed deep emotion behind every note.

An active member of the New York avant-garde jazz scene in the '60s alongside bigger-name artists like Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, Dixon spent decades in relative obscurity teaching at Bennington college in Vermont and recording only sporadically. In the first decade of the 20th Century, however, Dixon's name started popping up on the jazz world's radar much more frequently. He released 3 albums in the last 3 years, all of which saw Dixon collaborating with much younger musicians.

My first exposure to Dixon was his appearance on Exploding Star Orchestra's 2008 CD. It was actually one of the first CDs I added to AccuJazz playlists after getting this job -- I started working here about a week after its release. I remember being floored by the otherworldly sounds Dixon coaxed from his horn. At that point in my musical education, I had literally never heard anything like it. I hope you're also floored by all of Dixon's music that we're playing on the Avant-Garde channel.

Fred Anderson, like Bill Dixon, came up during the avant-garde revolution of the '60s, and, also like Dixon, experienced that late-in-the-game spike in popularity. His story is quite different, though. While Dixon enjoyed the stability of an east-coast liberal arts university gig, Anderson led a blue-collar life in Chicago his whole life, supporting his family and his music by installing carpet and tending bar. From the '80s on, Anderson ran his own club, the still-standing Velvet Lounge. In his role as club proprietor, Anderson mentored scores of young musicians and provided a place to play for artists and groups that wouldn't fit in anywhere else.

As a saxophonist, Anderson played with a wholly individual tone that was somehow smooth and gruff at the same time. Citing Charlie Parker as his greatest influence, Anderson didn't play in the bebop style, instead choosing to express himself in a freely-improvised style that alluded to everything from bop to funk to African rhythms. Anderson was on the more melodic side of free jazz improvisers, exploring seemingly infinite avenues of melody rather than pushing at the sonic limits of his instrument, as many working in the world of free improvisation are wont to do. His music is truly visceral and undeniably beautiful.

I personally am extremely grateful for Anderson's dedication to running the Velvet: I have frequented the club's longstanding Sunday night jam sessions for years, and my band played our debut gig there in April. Fred presided all night, and even agreed to show up 2 hours early so we could sneak in a last-minute rehearsal before the gig. At the end of the night, after everyone had cleared out, it was just me and Fred left as I was packing up my drums. He told me a story about how Lester Young used to be a drummer, but decided to switch to sax when he got tired of missing opportunities to go home with girls because he was busy tearing down his drums. Clearly, he felt for me. He was always so kind and gracious, and never seemed outwardly phased by the daunting economic realities of running an avant-garde jazz club in a run-down neighborhood.

AccuJazz News: ChicagoJazz.com Radio

I'm pleased and proud to announce a new joint venture from AccuJazz and ChicagoJazz.com: ChicagoJazz.com Radio. It's an unprecedented radio application that anyone with any bit of interest in Chicago's jazz scene will find useful and interesting.

The "Radio Station" features 10 subchannels, including "Chicago Vocalists," "Chicago Veterans," "Chicago Avant-Garde Jazz," and, probably the coolest, "Chicago Jazz Fest 2009," playing music by the many great artists, local and national, scheduled to perform at this year's fest. Access it by going to ChicagoJazz.com, scrolling down just a bit, and clicking on the banner that says "Listen Now to ChicagoJazz.com Radio." You can get to the subchannels by clicking on the "Other Channels" tab in the player.

Why shine the spotlight on Chicago? Why not New York, New Orleans, or Rolla? The answer is pretty simple: we're from Chicago. Right now I'm sitting in the AccuRadio offices downtown, a few dozen feet away from one of America's most iconic buildings, I play in Chicago's music venues, I frequent the city's jazz clubs, and, truth be told, artists from Chicago have produced an enormous amount of great jazz over the years.

Another question: what's ChicagoJazz.com? It's a pretty coveted URL, for one. It's also the web arm of Chicago Jazz Magazine, a bi-monthly newsprint magazine distributed for free at restaurants, bars, and libraries around Chicago. The website features local jazz news and a huge amount of local musicians' personal websites, like a localized MySpace. It's a great starting place for anyone looking to get familiar with the Chicago scene, and now there's the perfect soundtrack to browsing the site.

You can read my appreciation of the past and present of Chicago Jazz here, in my post about AccuJazz's Regions: Chicago channel. From Louis Armstrong to Johnny Griffin, Joseph Jarman to Kurt Elling, Chicago has incubated its fair share of jazz creativity.

While the AccuJazz channel has already been out for a little while, ChicagoJazz.com Radio will hopefully expose AccuJazz programming to a new audience, and it lets listeners go deeper into the different strands of Chicago Jazz. For example: there are definitely plenty of Avant-Garde tracks that are on their dedicated channel that didn't quite make the cut for the main Chicago channel. Same goes for the other subchannels. Plus, for those of you in to that sort of thing, there's even a "Chicago Smooth Jazz" channel. It's alright, you can listen. I won't tell anyone.