Chicago Reader49%
Chicago experimental jazz gets a downtown shrine you can touch 13%
By Hannah Edgar11%
7/27/2026, 1:27:53 PM
Keywords: Vol 55 No 19
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Availability Heuristic, and Halo Effect, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 5.7% saturation with 70 hits. Analysis detected 799 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,238 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.9% and a BS Rank of 13% (27,082 of 30,930 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 87.60% of the article peer group.
When tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson died in 2010, the Velvet Lounge died with him.
Since the 1980s, his Near South Side club—just “the Velvet” to regulars—had been Chicago’s most reliable showcase for underground and experimental jazz artists, especially those in the storied Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
The venue’s closure left a gaping hole in Chicago’s avant-garde scene, and even after drummer Mike Reed filled it by opening Constellation in 2013, the Velvet’s absence remained acutely felt.
To this day, a framed portrait of Anderson watches over the bar at Constellation like a patron saint.
This year, the club Anderson founded and owned has risen again—albeit in a setting quite unlike its grungy, unassuming old facade.
The Chicago Cultural Center, which welcomes hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, hosts a partial re-creation of the Velvet Lounge as part of “Tangible Sound: Arrival to a Higher Ground,” a three-gallery tribute to Chicago’s creative music scene.
The Velvet’s groovy flowered wallpaper?
A re-creation plasters the gallery walls.
The painted wine bottles that used to adorn the Velvet’s bar, by artist and bartender Donna Joy Wolfe?
They’re on display too.
So is a table from the club and one of Anderson’s saxophones, both loaned by bassist and longtime Anderson collaborator Tatsu Aoki.
All three galleries host live jazz and artist talks for the duration of the exhibit.
The tribute is the brainchild of Lauren Deutsch, a familiar force in Chicago’s jazz scene.
From 1996 till 2018, she served as executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, and she’s been a photographer for even longer.
These days, her signature style involves digital composites of two elements: She overlays a crisp, focused portrait of performing musicians with streaks and blurs that she creates by moving along to the music during long-exposure shots.
Those streaks, which Deutsch calls “sound palettes,” are her attempt to capture some of the spontaneity of free improvisation.
In a 2023 portrait of flutist Nicole Mitchell—“probably my longest and biggest muse,” Deutsch says—blurs flare from the keys of Mitchell’s instrument like spread wings.
“Over the course of the last nearly 50 years, I have been searching for ways to photograph the music itself,” she says.
“To me, they really look like what the music sounds like.”
Deutsch’s photography and cultural advocacy meet in the Cultural Center show, which will be up till September 27 in the three Michigan Avenue Galleries on the eastern flank of the building’s first floor.
The south gallery contains the project’s calling card: Deutsch’s photography, projected and animated by filmmaker and AACM member Jonathan Woods in an immersive setting.
The center gallery houses the so-called Ancestral Forest, a tribute to departed Chicago musicians that was designed and built by Josue Esau with assistance from Jesse Cryderman.
Eight artists are singled out as “trees” on hanging cylindrical displays: Anderson; interplanetary pianist, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra; AACM icons Muhal Richard Abrams, Malachi Favors, and Ann E.
Ward; tenor giant Von Freeman; singer-songwriter and activist Oscar Brown Jr.; and pianist Willie Pickens.
On the wall behind them are 50 more names, painted by Chicago graffiti artist Tyrue “Slang” Jones.
The name of trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong stands out, primus inter pares.
The north gallery, which contains the Velvet Lounge re-creation, is adjoined by an interactive wall called Touching Sound, developed by artists Kristen Youngman and Mitch Stomner.
On it are projected performances by Velvet alums such as Aoki and saxophonist Edward Wilkerson Jr.
Indefatigable alto saxophonist Mai Sugimoto, though too young to have played at the club, is included in the video as an honorary Velveteer.
“She learned from all these people,” Deutsch says.
If you stand in the right spot in the gallery and flail, your movements will create their own Deutschian streaks of light on the wall, which fizzle away like the wake of a ship.
During a recent walk-through, Deutsch watched a man with a child on his shoulders cavort in front of Touching Sound as glowing tendrils danced around the musicians.
“In terms of the balance of the whole exhibition,” Deutsch says, “there's joy here, there's wonder [in the south gallery], and there's reverence in the Ancestral Forest.”
Prior to the Cultural Center show, Deutsch and Woods have twice presented their collaboration—essentially the contents of the south gallery—under the “Tangible Sound” banner.
Assisted by projection artist George Berlin, Woods devised a way to animate Deutsch’s photography using Resolume, a piece of video-DJ software most associated with EDM stadium shows.
Then, in the spirit of Deutsch’s own “sound palette” approach, he manipulated those photos into moving sequences while listening to the subjects’ music.
In other words, the collaborators explain, if Deutsch is the “composer” of the visuals, Woods is the “conductor.”
“Why should the EDM people have all the fun?”
Woods says.
“Our music and art is very surreal too.”
The “Tangible Sound” project was unveiled on May 9 and 10, 2024, at the Asian Improv Arts Midwest dojo in North Mayfair.
Deutsch and Woods staged it again on September 27 and 28 at the 2025 Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
At both shows, live duos added yet another layer of interactivity by freely improvising in dialogue with the moving projections.
The iteration in the Cultural Center’s south gallery, which uses a screen 60 feet wide and eight feet tall, is accompanied by an audio collage from those earlier events.
Deutsch says she was able to expand “Tangible Sound” to all three galleries thanks to a $12,000 grant from the Illinois Arts Council, which supplemented her initial commissioning fee from the Cultural Center.
She’d applied for the grant to support the iteration at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, but she didn’t get the money until after that show.
It came with a note that the funds could be used to further advance the project.
“Tangible Sound: Arrival to a Higher Ground”
Through 9/27: Daily 10 AM–4:45 PM, Michigan Avenue Galleries, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E.
Washington, free, all ages
The grant has also allowed “Tangible Sound” to host a free live jazz series over its duration—one with a lineup even deeper than that of its only plausible downtown rival, the MCA’s Tuesdays on the Terrace.
The exhibition opened in late April, and since then the “Tangible Sound” galleries have welcomed more than a dozen musicians from the same scenes it celebrates.
Artists at recent shows have included branches of the trees in the Ancestral Forest: Oscar Brown Jr.’s daughters, singers Maggie and Africa Brown; Ward’s sister, singer and percussionist Susan E.
Ward; and Pickens’s daughter, pianist Bethany Pickens.
Forthcoming performances feature stalwart veterans, including percussionist Michael Zerang (Fri 7/31) and Arkestra hornist Vincent Chancey (Sat 9/5), as well as prolific torchbearers such as cornetist Ben LaMar Gay (Fri 9/11).
The final act is a high-profile artist whose identity is still under lock and key (Fri 9/25).
Every once in a while, Deutsch will make her way to the Ancestral Forest gallery, where a collection box prompts visitors to either share their favorite jazz memories or jot down names of other departed ancestors.
She’ll fish out the responses and read a few.
Most people, she says, leave heartfelt recollections.
But her favorite so far is a response written in a grade-school scrawl.
“It said, ‘I love school because I love going on feel trips.’
F-E-E-L,” Deutsch recalls, grinning.
“I’ve adopted that.”
Speakers
2speakers13%attributed speech1,076writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageWoods
17 attributed words10% of attributed speech47% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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