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…
Joshua Henry, Brandon Victor Dixon, Billy Porter and Brian Stokes Mitchell, with Richard Riaz Yoder, in a scene from Shuffle Along.
(Photo: Julieta Cervantes)When the original Shuffle Along came to Broadway, jazz was “trending,” as we might say now. It’s hard to know precisely what the word “jazz” might have meant then. It was still without a formal history or lucid identity—barely even a brand yet. The show’s main selling point then was that it was written and played “entirely by negroes” (sic), according to the original New York Times review.
It was something the American theater mecca had not seen for more than a decade. But few critics failed to note its new and distinct musical extract. “A breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie,” said the Evening Journal. “Full of jazz … the real thing,” noted the Evening World. And the Times pronounced it a “swinging score, “ one of the earliest applications of the word “swing” to describe jazz.
Enough of the original score was recorded at the time by Blake, Sissle, Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller that in 1976 New World Records was able to assemble something close to an original cast album. You can hear what the world believed jazz was in 1921. By the time the show closed, people were beginning to think of the 1920s as the “Jazz Age.”
More importantly, its successful run of 504 performances cleared the path for a succession of black Broadway musicals that would not only expand our understanding of jazz but put such standards as “Runnin’ Wild,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “I Must Have That Man” into the Great American Songbook.
The Shuffle Along of 1921 was a smoking-hot revue draped loosely around the story of a local mayoral election in the imaginary Southern burg of Jimtown.
While the show itself may have been forgotten soon enough, Blake’s mock campaign song for the show’s fictional hero, Harry Walton, lived on. A generation later, “I’m Just Wild About Harry” helped elect Harry Truman president. And songwriter Fred Rose slipped a homage to Shuffle Along into his 1925 jazz hit “Jimtown Blues,” a cultural reference mostly lost by the time kids were dancing to Fletcher Henderson and Tommy Dorsey’s crisp swing versions of the tune 20 years later.
The present Shuffle Along is not a revival of the original but a biography of it. Lest there be any doubt, a long and cautionary subtitle has been appended: Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. The show’s original creators (Blake is portrayed by Brandon Victor Dixon; Joshua Henry plays Noble Sissle) become characters in the new version, struggling to get their idea produced.
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.”
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