Photo by Matt Frankel/Courtesy Hyde Park Jazz Festival

Find more fall event recommendations in our Music Top 5 for September.

Hyde Park Jazz Festival
Various
September 28–29
The eighteenth-annual festival will activate thirteen venues in and around the neighborhood: everywhere from the Logan Center to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures will play host to performances by jazz stalwarts like Brandee Younger, Courtney Bryan and Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood. Highlights include a late-night solo performance by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in the staggering Rockefeller Chapel and a celebration of James Baldwin’s one hundredth birthday featuring Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young and de deacon board ensemble at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Muti, Uchida, Emperor & Eroica
CSO
October 31–November 3
Riccardo Muti returns to the CSO for his fall concerts, now as Music Director Emeritus for Life, his successor as music director named last spring. Muti will conduct Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, inspired by the French Revolution, along with a performance of his Emperor concerto featuring virtuosic pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Dennis Polkow wrote at the end of Muti’s tenure as music director that the conductor hates goodbyes—we’re grateful that he continues to make his presence felt in the city.

Tomeka Reid Stringtet
Logan Center
November 8
Tomeka Reid, the jazz cellist and composer, leads a seventeen-member improvising chamber orchestra at the Logan Center to perform the Chicago premiere of a new piece. The MacArthur Fellow, described as a “new jazz power source” by the New York Times, promises to lead a thrilling night of improvisational, dynamic new work that will be a highlight of your fall cultural season.