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The Pitchfork Music Festival isn’t the only game in town this weekend: a radically revamped JVC Jazz Festival runs Friday through Sunday at various venues around Chicago. In the past this local satellite of the onetime Newport Jazz Festival presented a handful of forgettable smooth-jazz shows, but this year the music is vastly improved–though it looks suspiciously like the presenters merely attached their name to an assortment of gigs that were already booked. In this week’s paper Bill Meyer previews bassist William Parker‘s shows at the Velvet Lounge, sure to be a highlight, and while I fail to understand the logic of including Pat Benatar’s Friday-night gig at the House of Blues, there are some other shows worth recommending.
And on Friday and Saturday the Green Mill hosts a multigenerational tenor-sax blowout, with patriarch Von Freeman, AACM MVP Ari Brown, and young squirt Frank Catalano, who just released his debut for Savoy Jazz, Bang!–a tepid and predictable dose of easygoing jazz-funk. Catalano has plenty of energy and chops, but his elders apparently have all the taste, knowledge, and ideas. Lucky for him, Freeman and Brown are avuncular, not cutthroat, so there won’t be a need for a body bag. The superb rhythm section consists of pianist Willie Pickens, bassist Brian Sandstrom, and drummer Robert Shy.
