Gene Ammons

We're about to begin a remarkably lively jazz weekend, even by Chicago standards. Among the highlights: The Engines: This enterprising ensemble has been offering a stylistically free-ranging music for nearly a decade, but this weekend's engagement...

Ask anyone who loves jazz to the name the top tenor saxophonist of all time, and he or she probably will answer in a flash. To many, it's Sonny Rollins, at 82 still a giant. Or Gene Ammons, the long-gone, soulful player from the South Side of Chicago....

Any doubts that the fall season has gotten fully underway should be swept aside by this weekend's nearly brisk lineup of jazz offerings: "Women of Chicago Jazz Piano": Jazz listeners tend to think of Chicago as a tenor saxophone town, and for good...

Revered around the world but never a major star, worshipped by critics and connoisseurs but perpetually strapped for cash, the towering Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman practically went out of his way to avoid commercial success. When trumpeter Miles...

At 11:30 p.m. on this date, the Illinois Central train from New Orleans eased into Chicago's 12th Street Station carrying an unknown, 21-year-old trumpeter who soon would turn the city-- and the rest of the world--on its ear. "When the conductor came...

The South Side of Chicago holds a sacred place in the evolution of American music, for jazz, blues and gospel blossomed in this part of the city through most of the 20th Century. Why the South Side? Because great waves of African-Americans migrated...