Indianapolis Jazz Festival kicks off in Military Park this weekend

Jazz fans, blues fans, aspiring musicians and all-around music lovers will flock from every corner of Indiana this weekend in anticipation of the annual Indianapolis Jazz Festival. \nThe festival, which will run from June 15 to June 17, is comparable to many national jazz festivals. Headlining the concerts and playing last will be Chick Corea and Bela Fleck, two jazz musicians whose names are recognized by jazz fans and other musicians alike.\nDespite its name, the festival will celebrate not only jazz, but blues, R&B, soul and fusion. With such a wide spectrum of music, everyone is sure to find something of interest. \nSeveral events will make this year’s festival special. The official commencement, and perhaps the most exciting portion of the entire festival, will be the official unveiling of the world’s first life-sized bronze statue of Indiana’s beloved jazz legend Hoagy Carmichael.\nFive years in the making, the statue shows Carmichael sitting at a piano, and children will be encouraged to sit down on the piano bench next to him. After opening the festival, the statue will then tour the whole state of Indiana, educating Hoosiers about their own musical treasure, and will then come to rest at People’s Park here in his hometown of Bloomington.\nAlso different will be the “Women in Jazz” day, which will take up the entire first day of the festival. It will pay tribute to all women in jazz, past and present, and feature a set of all-female performers playing jazz written by women. \nKicking off the entire festival, as well as the “Women in Jazz” day, will be IU’s own Monika Herzig, a professor in the Jacobs School of Music who received her doctorate in music education from IU. She and her quintet will tip their hats to jazz’s brave women and play both original modern jazz tunes written by Herzig herself and mainstream jazz standards written by women.\n The weekend will culminate Sunday, with performances from musicians Corea, Fleck, McCoy Tyner, Al Green and James Hunter. \nSaturday, two bands native to Indiana will perform. At 3:30 p.m., guitarists Mike Milligan and Steam Shovel will open the day’s festivities with a down-and-dirty performance Milligan described as “blues/rock/soul.” Though some might question a straight blues show in a jazz festival, Milligan said, “My show doesn’t change for anything. I’m gonna come in and do the same set that I do every night. ... When you call something a jazz festival, it encompasses a lot of every different kinds of music. It’s not a snobby treatise.”\nSaturday evening at 9 p.m., bassist Frank Smith will lead a contemporary big band, consisting of 10 musicians and a singer. They won’t be playing traditional acoustic, big-band style jazz, but will instead use the performance to play more contemporary jazz music. \n“With all the people involved in this band, it’s really my pleasure to be in the front of them,” he said. “because they are a veritable who’s who of Central Indiana jazz musicians.”\nSmith said he believes people enjoy live jazz performance because they create an atmosphere that can’t be replicated.\n“When you’re looking at live music in the club or the festival setting, you’re actually seeing the performance happening in real time,” Frank Smith said. “There are a lot of intangibles you can’t get by just listening that you can get when you’re actually there at the performance.”