Dee Alexander, Chicago’s soulful singer of all styles, from AACM improv to her own originals and American songbook standards, had her Sunday March 15 performance at Promontory cancelled “out of abundance of caution” by the Hyde Park Jazz Society, prior to Illinois governor Jay Pritzker closing all venues for the time being to reduce chances of exposure to the coronavirus.
Fortunately for fans of the JJA’s JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here series, the entirety of the Metropolitan Jazz Octet’s 2019 concert featuring Dee singing new arrangements of mostly lesser known Billie Holiday repertoire at “Live at Studio5” was video’d and posted, thanks, Studio5 producer Steve Rashid, who has postponed three shows scheduled for that venue in suburban Evanston through April 12. Rashid’s radio show on WDCB and WDCB.org, Tuesdays 7 to 8 pm CDT continues). The MJO, by the way, is led by saxophonist and arranger Jim Gailloreto, and has a previous album, The Road to Your Place.
This Alexander/MJO material is all available on the album It’s Too Hot For Words (Delmark Records), as I wrote about in DownBeat.
For a JazzOnLockdown encore, Dee (who is herself a composer) takes on Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” backed by pianist Miguel de la Cerna, bassist Mimi Jones and drummer Ernie Adams, at the Skopje Jazz Festival in 2017.
