Mike Reed's People, Places and Things/Green Mill/June 11, 2011

Mike Reed’s People, Places and Things
Green Mill, Chicago
Saturday, June 11, 2011

Last night's show at the Green Mill with Mike Reed's People, Places and Things -- a group dedicated to interpreting hard bop compositions by Chicagoans active in the late 50s and early 60s -- went places seldom heard. The saxophone symbiosis between Tim Haldeman's tenor and Greg Ward's alto was a dialogue of declaration, listening, comment, and embellishment. What's the Laurie Anderson line? "Excellent birds" -- an apt description of the conversation between the two saxophonists. That revisiting the Chicago hard bop compositions of the late 1950's could result in such bold blossoming in 2011 reminds us of how much is to be gained be relooking at the past.

Reed's delving into this 1954-1960 Hyde Park songbook reminds one the gestures of the characters in the fiction of Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño. In his story "Last Evenings on Earth," a boy accompanies his father on a supposed bonding trip to Acapulco, but only finds refuge amidst their strange tourist meanderings in a book he carries which describes the lives of little known French Surrealist poets of the World War II era. In the novel The Savage Detectives, a pair of poets in the 1980s travels the labyrinth that is the Northern Mexico desert to find the elusive poet Cesárea Tinajero who was active in the 1920s Mexican avant-garde. For the characters of Bolaño, dialogue between artists across the decades lends sustenance to life. And what transpired at the Green Mill with Mike Reed's People Places and Things was a dialog between the Chicago of today and the Chicago of the late 1950s -- both eras hovering, vibrating within the city's unending grid of tracks and streets. Both eras speaking across time to each other.

Dan Hanrahan