By Steve Rhodes
Gospel Fest is apparently no longer fit for downtown. Instead, it was sliced, diced and segregated this year, opening at Millennium Park, moving to the Chicago Cultural Center for a day and then shipped off to Ellis Park for a lackluster weekend that didn’t exactly sell the musical form to the masses. Let’s take a look.
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“The reinvented, dramatically expanded Chicago Gospel Music Festival got off to a sometimes rousing, sometimes perplexing start Thursday night at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park,” Howard Reich wrote for the Tribune last week.
“Rousing because most of the music captured the exuberant spirit one expects of gospel song, Chicago style. Perplexing because only some of the work could be considered gospel.”
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Two days later, Reich wrote:
“Thousands of Chicagoans poured into Ellis Park, at 37th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, on Saturday, suggesting that a rather large cultural gamble had paid off handsomely.
“Though the Chicago Gospel Music Festival always has unfolded in the Loop – and indeed played there on Thursday and Friday – by Saturday the event had moved on to the ancestral home of gospel: the South Side of Chicago, where the music originated early in the 20th century.”
Thousands pouring into a park is not impressive, given the festival’s historic attendance levels, as we shall see. And the set-up at Ellis Park looked like a rinky dink affair if this typical YouTube video is any indication:
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Here’s the way it looked in 2011 at Taste of Chicago:
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Which was a come-down itself from the pavilion at Millennium Park:
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It’s not that Bronzeville shouldn’t have such an event; move all the festivals there, I say! But then we also could have built Millennium Park there – or at least a new pavilion capable of holding the city’s great music festivals. Talk about jump-starting economic development where it’s needed. Instead, it gets a crumb that falls off downtown’s table.
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“[A] city spokeswoman estimated weekend attendance of 25,000,” Dave Hoekstra wrote for the Sun-Times. “There was no outdoor concert lighting at the park, so the area was cleared by nightfall.”
Hardly impressive.
In June 1991, the Sun-Times estimated that Gospel Fest drew 200,000 annually.
The Tribune that year reported that “The throng that surrounded the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park over the weekend for the city’s seventh annual Gospel Music Festival packed plenty of power in its enthusiasm. And in its sheer numbers. Festival organizers estimated the weekend attendance at a record 150,000.”
In June 2002, “Attendance [at Gospel Fest] reached about 225,000 over the weekend, according to the Mayor’s Office of Special Events.”
So 25,000 in 2012 is nothing to brag about.
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Too bad because Chicago ought to rightfully claim the biggest and best gospel festival in the land. It’s in our heritage.
Here are some of the acts that appeared last weekend.
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J. Moss.
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Byron Cage.
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Fred Hammond.
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Mary Mary.
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Comments welcome.
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1. From Helen Adair:
This is horrible and poorly set up. Why is the Gospel Fest depreciated this way? I am a Christian female. Why go to Ellis Park on the site where there is shooting and a smaller area to accommodate thousands? Why, why, why. Very disappointed.
Posted on June 26, 2012