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In this week’s paper I previewed an exciting concert happening Thursday night in Millennium Park: the fantastic drummer Dana Hall will be reconvening his Black Fire project, which plays the music of pianist and composer Andrew Hill, with a lineup twice as large as the one he used to debut the endeavor last year at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. One of the new participants is the excellent Philadelphia pianist Orrin Evans, one of the most critically overlooked musicians in all of jazz. He’s made 20 albums as a leader since the late 90s and worked with some of greatest current jazz artists (including Ralph Peterson, Nicholas Payton, Ravi Coltrane, Eddie Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, Branford Marsalis and more), yet he remains largely unknown outside the music’s cognoscenti. Luckily, Chicagoans are getting a couple of chances to hear his playing over the next few months: in addition to playing with Hall on Thursday, he’ll be back in November to play the Umbrella Music Festival with his collective trio Tarbaby, featuring bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits.
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