JAZZ REVIEW : Outta Sight Chicago Blues Fest Needs New Site

The Chicago Blues Festival, a three-day outdoor event held in Grant Park here last weekend, may already be too successful for its own good.

Given the Windy City’s long-enriched blues legacy, it’s a little surprising that this year’s festival was only the fifth annual celebration of the music that played such an enormously influential role in shaping the sound of American music in general and rock ‘n’ roll in particular.

Despite generally strong performances and a varied lineup that included such blues luminaries as Koko Taylor, B. B. King, Albert King, Bobby (Blue) Bland and Etta James, there is one major question hanging over the festival’s future.

That question is purely and simply one of space. The focal points of the festival were three evening concerts at the Petrillo Bandshell, tucked into a corner of Grant Park in the heart of downtown Chicago. Framed by a parabolic arc of downtown skyscrapers on one side and the traffic whizzing by on Lake Shore Drive skirting the edge of Lake Michigan, the bandshell opens up to a vast brassy expanse.

In theory, it is a comfortable and seemingly spacious locale for an outdoor music event, but the audience each evening overran every inch like a swarm of locusts. Taking a long-range view of the crowd flow while waiting in line in the concession stands suggested that director Godfrey Reggio (“Powaqqatsi,” “Koyaanisqatsi”) has a custom-made scene to include in his next civilization-run-amok epic, and one that won’t require speeded-up camera techniques.

Compounding the problem is the bandshell’s location at the foot of a substantial incline. Sight and sound lines were fine for those who paid for fixed seats in front of the stage, the backstage contingent and anyone who arrived early enough to stake out a piece of turf on the crest of the hill. But for the vast majority, the only visible sign of the performance was the banner strung across the top of the bandshell--about 25 feet above the performers’ heads. Even with speakers pumping the sound back into the Frisbee zone (or what was the Frisbee zone until it was overwhelmed by the crush of people), trying to focus on the music was a pointless exercise in futility, even by the hang-loose-and-hang-out standards of a big outdoor festival.

The festival proper was preceded by four days of preliminary events capped by a birthday tribute at the Riviera Nightclub to Howlin’ Wolf, the late bluesman who rivals Muddy Waters as an enduring influence. Former Wolf sideman Hubert Sunlin and Eddie Shaw combined on strong versions of “Sitting on Top of the World” and “Howlin’ for My Darling,” and guitarist John Watkins’ band contributed a vigorous set. But the tribute came to an anticlimactic end when the hoarseness of headliner Willie Dixon, who wrote many of Wolf’s classic blues tunes, limited his singing to a snippet of the set-closing “Wang Dang Doodle.”

That same song was also a 1966 hit for Koko Taylor and the veteran blueswoman used it to close her headlining festival set Friday, her first major Chicago appearance since a car accident in February put her and most of her band in a Tennessee hospital with an assortment of broken bones. Taylor vainly struggled to hit the high notes on “I’d Rather Go Blind,” but her Blues Machine Band jelled behind her gruff, raspy voice on the slinky “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” groove of “Let Me Love You” and the insinuating Memphis soul of “Come to Momma.”

Not all the festival activity centered around the nighttime concerts. There was the standard festival gantlet of record booths, food stands and T-shirt vendors spilling lines like “If you’re cruisin’ for a bluesin’, I’ve got what you want.”

And the two smaller stages operating only during the afternoon provided an assortment of music ranging from re-formed Chicago doo-woppers the El Dorados, a blues band from Osaka, Japan, named Ukadan and separate bills featuring four Texas pianists and three young Chicago guitarists and the folk-oriented pairing of Moses Rascoe and the duo of guitarist Bowling Green John Cephas and Harmonica Phil Wiggins. The latter may have performed on the Front Porch stage in Chicago Sunday afternoon but their music rang as true as if they were sitting on a back porch in their native Virginia playing for family and friends.

Not all the musical activity took place on the festival grounds. Local clubs also got into the act, although most of the name acts now play North Side bars rather than the fabled South Side joints where Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf cut their teeth. On Saturday night, B.L.U.E.S. Etcetera featured the clever but skin-deep San Francisco quartet Little Charlie and the Nitecats and Chicago’s own Kinsey Report, a tough young quartet that expertly melded rock, funk and reggae influences into its arrangements. The last portion of its set was given over to bagging Big Daddy Kinsey, father to three-quarters of the Kinsey Report, who brought the requisite stamp of patriarchal authority to crowd-pleasers like “Mannish Boy.”

The new breed of Chicago blues was also represented at the Festival Sunday afternoon by Dion Payton and the 43rd Street Band. The lanky, rail-thin Payton showed himself capable of sustaining fluid, extended solos that neither flagged in imagination nor resorted to crowd-pleasing blues cliches.

It’s the maturing young artists like Kinsey Report and Dion Payton that hold the future for Chicago blues. Now the Windy City just has to figure out where to hold the future festivals that will feature them as headliners.