Steans Sojourn: Eddie Harris, Don Byas, Other Apocrypha
Nested brackets and jazz tune titles — vestiges of jazz camp I spent all of last week at Ravinia's Steans (pronounced 'STAINS') Music Institute for their annual summer jazz program . Ravinia is a wooded, Shire-like area about 40 minutes north of Chicago by car, and the festival there hosts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra each year (someone explained Ravinia to me as "Chicago's Tanglewood"). The Steans Institute hosts several residencies each year for jazz and classical musicians to come together and produce or refine work intensely. Dr. David Baker's long been at the helm of the program for jazz, which grants the lucky participants access to the hall of baby grand pianos and rehearsal spaces at the building, but this year the faculty included pianist Billy Childs, saxophonist Nathan Davis, and bassist Rufus Reid. The ages ranged from 17 (!) to 30s, although the median age I'd guess would be somewhere around early-mid 20s, and I was amused to fin...