Extraordinary Popular Delusions at Hamilton Park & Cultural Center

The 26th Annual Englewood Jazz Festival, presented by Live the Spirit Residency, returns to Chicago’s historic Hamilton Park, expanding to five nights this year on September 16–20, 2025, marking a powerful milestone in American music: the 60th Anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). All events are FREE. 

Extraordinary Popular Delusions (EPD) is closing in on twenty (20) consecutive years of performances on an almost-every-week basis, mostly Monday nights at Beat Kitchen.  It is not entirely clear how the music they play would be categorized; though "jazz" or "free improvisation" would probably be reasonable suppositions:  pretty much, they just start playing and then at some point, stop.  The members of EPD (Edward Wilkerson, Jr; Brian Sandstrom; Steve Hunt; Jim Baker) have, over the past four decades or so, been playing awhile, both in/as EPD, and also with various other musicians, including Fred Anderson, Tatsu Aoki, Joshua Abrams, David Boykin, Bill Brimfield, Ari Brown, Frank Catalano, Shawn Colvin, Vincent Davis, Ernest Dawkins, Hamid Drake, Eight Bold Souls, Douglas Ewart, Von Freeman, Mats Gustafsson, Lin Halliday, Light Henry Huff, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Nicole Mitchell, Junius Paul, Edward Peterson, Willie Pickens, Avreeayl Ra, Dave Rempis, Charles Rumback, Hal Russell, Shadow Vignettes, Robert Shy, Luke Stewart, Tortoise, Ken Vandermark, Mars Williams, Jack Wright, Kahil El-Zabar, and Michael Zerang.  Although currently comprising four musicians, the members of EPD play a variety of instruments, including Alto Clarinet, Analog Synthesizer, Bass, Clarinet, Cymbals, Digeridoo, Drums, Electric Guitar, Miscellania, Percussion, Piano, Tenor Saxophone, Trumpet, Viola, and Waterphone.  Like most musicians, EPD is noting, with some apprehension, the impending onslaught of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, which--in at least some hypothetical futures--threaten to displace human musicians with AI-created music; however, unlike most musicians, EPD instead views the notion of AI displacement as more of a threat to audiences than to musicians, since AIs already outperform humans by all quantitative measures by which "listening" is gauged.