Sep 22, 2026 12:26 PM
Hyde Park Jazz Fest on Chicago’s South Side to Present 20th Edition
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival will take place for the 20th time on the final weekend of September 2026. Beginning half…
Edward “Kidd” Jordan
(Photo: Michael Jackson)
Karl Berger
(Photo: R.I. Suitherland-Cohen)
Harrison Bankhead
(Photo: Michael Jackson)The jazz world lost three of its most impassioned and dedicated practitioners in early April of this year. Here, we honor the lives and legacies of the late tenor saxophonist Edward “Kidd” Jordan, composer-educator Karl Berger and bassist Harrison Bankhead.
Edward “Kidd” Jordan passed away on April 7 in his hometown of New Orleans. He was 87.
The cutting-edge tenor saxophonist and music educator explored the outer edges of jazz improvisation from the 1940s until his passing.
He performed with an array of musicians from well beyond the jazz world, including Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Art and Aaron Neville and Fats Domino.
Inside the jazz world, Jordan performed with Cannonball Adderley, Dewey Redman, Archie Sheep, Fred Anderson, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Ellis Marsalis and many others.
Jordan picked up the saxophone in high school, digging into jazz after hearing Charlie Parker and Lester Young recordings. He continued to study at Southern University in Baton Rouge and later taught there for 34 years. It was at Southern as a student that Jordan met and befriended his future brother-in-law, clarinetist Alvin Batiste.
Jordan maintained a strong connection to Chicago, getting a master’s degree from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and doing postgraduate studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He founded the influential Improvisation Arts Ensemble, a free-blowing, avant-garde force. But even more impressive than his own work might be the students he taught, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Donald Harrison Jr., Trombone Shorty and Walter Smith III.
Musician, composer and educator Karl Berger died on April 9 in Albany, New York. He was 88.
The founder of the Creative Music Studio, Berger collaborated with everyone from John McLaughlin, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and Jack DeJohnette to Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton and more.
His Creative Music Studio, founded with his wife, singer Ingrid Sertso, was an outgrowth of the couple’s Creative Music Foundation and its mission of musical cross-pollination based on improvisation.
Berger’s distinctive education career led him into professorships and administration roles at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Berger was born in 1935 in Heidelberg, Germany. He studied classical piano as a child, but turned to jazz at 14. After working as the house pianist at Cave 54 in Heidelberg in the 1950s, Berger moved to Paris, where he later worked with Cherry on the album Symphony Of Improvisers. He went on to make dozens of albums as a leader and sideman and won Vibraphonist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll six times.
His last album was a 2022 trio date with cornetist Kirk Knuffke, bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Matt Wilson called Heart Is A Melody (Stunt Records).
Chicago-based bassist Harrison Napoleon Bankhead III passed away at home on April 5. He was 68. Born in Waukegan, Illinois, he began his musical journey in grade school, gravitating to guitar and picking up the bass as a teenager.
Beyond touring and recording with the Harrison Bankhead Quartet, the bassist was an active member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians playing with the likes of Fred Anderson, Von Freeman, Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, Ed Wilkerson Avreeal Ra, Ari Brown and many more.
Bankhead’s final album, Blue Velvet (Engine Studios), featured the title track dedication to Anderson’s Velvet Lounge in Chicago. Ra, Wilkerson and saxophonist Mars Williams performed on the album. The bassist also played marimba and piano on the album. DB
A solo concert by saxophonist Joshua Redman will close the first night of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival on Sept. 26.
Sep 22, 2026 12:26 PM
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival will take place for the 20th time on the final weekend of September 2026. Beginning half…
“It was just that suddenly … I could hear it,” Ravi Coltrane said of an epiphany he experienced during his late teens regarding his father’s music. “And it was almost like a calling, like something saying, ‘Hey, man, come on. It’s time to get serious.’ And the first time you really tune in and dial in and focus like that, it can be very life-changing.”
Sep 22, 2026 1:39 PM
Editor’s Note: Tomorrow, Sept. 23, is the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane’s birth. In honor of the tenor and…
Camille Thurman took to the stage alongside bassist Kenny Davis and drummer Tommy Campbell for a rendition of Johnny Mercer’s “I’m An Old Cowhand” that recalled Rollins’ epochal 1957 trio outing Way Out West.
Oct 6, 2026 1:33 PM
As emcee Mark Ruffin noted at the commencement of an epic tribute to saxophonist Sonny Rollins at the Cathedral of…
Kurt Elling, Katherine Russell and Emmet Cohen (host on the 2027 Jazz Cruise) share a laugh at sea.
Sep 8, 2026 11:52 AM
It began in 2001. A travel agent named Anita E. Berry had been booking clients on “partial” jazz cruises that took…
Record producer Bob Thiele’s classic photo that became the cover of John Coltrane’s landmark album A Love Supreme.
Sep 22, 2026 1:36 PM
A tribute to John Coltrane is one thing, but there is much more to the iconic saxophonist’s 100th anniversary…
