Music

The Chicago Jazz Festival has been bringing outstanding musicians to the lakefront for over forty years, but before it, in 1965, DownBeat magazine hosted a festival at Soldier Field with the likes of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Muddy Waters.

Chicago native Steve "Silk" Hurley helped bring the Chicago-born genre of dance music known as house to the UK. House music's history is increasingly being recognized, with a landmark and the Chicago House Music Festival.

Mavis Staples began performing with her family band, The Staple Singers, when she was eleven. She's still singing at 83, as in a concert recorded earlier this year at Chicago's Symphony Center that WTTW is broadcasting. 

J'Nai Bridges, the subject of a new American Masters documentary, was a member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago's Ryan Opera Center for three years, and is currently singing Carmen at the Lyric. She has also worked with the Chicago area composer Shawn E. Okpebholo.

Hip-hop turns fifty this year. A history professor and advisor to the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World discusses the music's context and impact. "Hip-hop is still here because it has had this transformative impact on the way youth engage with the world around them," he says.

"The story of gospel music is actually a more universal story of American music and our country’s history," says the producer of a new Chicago Stories documentary about the genre's origins in Chicago.

In the third season of Now Hear This, Scott Yoo explores the idea of American classical music through several composers and their influences, which range from samba to spirituals to Hindustani music—with explanatory pit-stops for food along the way. 

Marian Anderson, who was the first Black soloist at the Metropolitan Opera and gave an unforgettable concert at the Lincoln Memorial after being denied the use of a concert hall, is the subject of a new American Masters profile. We spoke to the director.

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, who scored two recent WTTW documentaries, uses Chickasaw and other North American Indian music and stories as source material for his classical compositions. "I have a mission in my music," he says.

Norman Malone can play piano only with his left hand due to a traumatic childhood injury, but in a new documentary he prepares to make his orchestral debut at the age of 79. “The beating heart of this film is who Norman is," says Howard Reich, the writer and co-producer.

The Chosen Few Picnic and Festival has been bringing house music and a family reunion atmosphere to a South Side park for three decades, thanks to a set of DJs who helped popularize house music in the first place. The event, virtual this year, takes place July 3.

Havana, Paris, Spain: the soundtrack of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's new Hemingway documentary helps set the places and moods of the writer's life, via the creative music produced by Johnny Gandelsman of Brooklyn Rider and the Silk Road Ensemble.

Commuters at the 95th Red Line Station pay their fares to an unusual soundtrack: music from a DJ booth. Called AESOP, the booth is a public art installation by Theaster Gates meant to enliven commutes. Two of the booth's DJs share some of their favorite tracks to spin. 

A new Great Performances series explores the broader culture classical music fits into, from the architecture it was played in to the dance, fashion, landscape, and food that help explain it. Learn more about the globetrotting Now Hear This. 

Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed "inventor of jazz," didn't praise many people besides himself, but he made an exception for Tony Jackson: "Tony was considered among all who knew him the greatest single-handed entertainer in the world.” And Jackson was openly gay at a time when that was incredibly rare.