Geof Bradfield, Dana Hall, and Ben Goldberg perform in the Smart Museum’s courtyard as part of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, a weekend of free performances at cultural venues throughout the neighborhood.

FREE, open to all. 

Visit hydeparkjazzfestival.org for the complete schedule, safety guidelines, and other information.

The Musicians

Geof Bradfield – Saxophone
Dana Hall – Drums
Ben Goldberg – Clarinet 

Saxophonist and composer Geof Bradfield has toured throughout North America, Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and shared the stage with jazz luminaries such as Randy Weston, Carl Allen, Brian Blade, Rodney Whitaker, Etienne Charles, Joe Locke, and Orrin Evans. He performs and records regularly with fellow Chicago artists Dana Hall, Clark Sommers, Jeff Parker, Matt Ulery, Marquis Hill, and Ryan Cohan, to name a few. He has released seven albums as a leader, garnering critical accolades from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Downbeat, Chicago Tribune, and NPR. His work is featured on more than fifty CDs, and he has been recognized in Downbeat Critics Polls as a Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist and Arranger. A committed educator, Bradfield is Professor of Jazz Studies at Northern Illinois University, and has given master classes and lectures at the Brubeck Institute, the Manhattan School of Music, the Jazz Education Network conference, and other national and international venues.

Dana Hall has been an important musician on the international music scene since 1992, when he left aerospace engineering for a life in music. He has professional performance credits on six continents, and extensive concert, club, and festival experience throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia, both as a bandleader and with the ensembles of others. Hall was a 2019 Camargo Foundation Fellow in Composition. His most recent commission, a multidisciplinary work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son, had its premiere in the renowned Orchestra Hall at Chicago’s Symphony Center. Hall is also a Professor of Music and the Director of Jazz Studies at DePaul University. His scholarship is principally concerned with issues of ethnicity, identity, and temporality; popular musics of the world; music as protest and resistance; and musics of both the African continent and the African Diaspora. His dissertation is a historical ethnography of Philly Soul during the Black Power Movement. 

Since 1992, when his group New Klezmer Trio “kicked open the door for radical experiments with Ashkenazi roots music” (San Francisco Chronicle), clarinetist Ben Goldberg has established himself as “one of the most vibrant, flexible, and inventive clarinetists in jazz and improvised music” (Downbeat), and as “an artist who seems to find beautiful melodies at the end of every path” (NPR). In Goldberg’s music, The New York Times has noted “a feeling of joyous research into the basics of polyphony and collective improvising.” He was named #1 Rising Star Clarinetist in Downbeat Critics Polls in 2011 and 2013. In 2015, Goldberg released “Orphic Machine,” a song-cycle built of lyrics from the speculative poetics of Allen Grossman and performed by a nine-piece ensemble including Nels Cline, Ron Miles, Myra Melford, and Ches Smith, and sung by violinist Carla Kihlstedt. The Los Angeles Times called it a “knotted and occasionally spooky composition marked by dazzling interplay.” Goldberg also leads or co-leads The Out Louds, Invisible Guy, Unfold Ordinary Mind, Go Home, Ben Goldberg School, and Ben Goldberg Trio (with Greg Cohen and Kenny Wollesen). He is a member of the avant-chamber jazz ensemble Tin Hat, and performs in a duo called Dialogue with pianist Myra Melford.