CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- A second volume of Situation Chicago is now in the works, after the success of the first double vinyl album featuring Chicago-based musicians with the proceeds going to independent venues in the city and an artist relief fund.
Situation Chicago Vol. 2 will again feature music from local musicians in an effort to now raise money for venues and their staff, as well as musicians. This second double vinyl album, set for release sometime this summer, will be pressed by Smashed Plastic out of Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood as was done with Situation Chicago Vol. 1.
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Handheld copies of the first album released in September 2020 sold out quickly and the proceeds were split evenly between 25 local independent music venues that were closed due to the pandemic. Vol. 1 however is still downloadable with a donation on the Situation Chicago website.
Trey Elder has organized the fundraising projects through his non-profit Quiet Pterodactyl.
“After the first album we got a lot of questions if we were going to do a follow up. My quick answer was always ‘I sure hope not. I hope we’re out of the weeds at that point’ obviously we are not," Elder said.
Groups like the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL) have led campaigns for the Save Our Stages Act and some congressional funding has been acquired for independent venues nationwide.
Elder added that that many musicians don’t feel comfortable drawing crowds and even if they did, the work still isn’t there.
“I don’t think that the live music industry is ready to support all working musicians again. It would be an exaggeration to think that’s the case," Elder said.
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Elder said while live music lovers wait for the new release, there are other legitimate ways to support the music industry in Chicago through CIVL or the Chicago Federation of Musicians. He said the national organization Sweet Relief has a Chicago regional fund as well.
“Even more importantly, buy music and merchandise directly from the musicians,” Elder said. “If their album is five bucks and you can afford it, pay 30 dollars to download it. Buy their t-shirts, buy things that you know are going to directly affect them and get them income.”
Chicago-based and critically acclaimed jazz vocalist Erin McDougald will have her song “The Parting Glass” on the multi-genre Situation Chicago Vol. 2. The song is a traditional Celtic song that she has re-designed and arranged with a jazz treatment.
It’s the final track from her 2018 album “Outside the Soiree” and features iconic soprano saxophonist David Liebman and the legendary trumpeter Tom Harrel among other luminaries.
McDougald, who had charted on the national Jazz billboards with her new album said she had all of her shows in the U.S. cancelled in 2020 and that even a world tour which included shows in Paris, France was put on hold.
“The term starving artist was never more apropos than in the last year, there are definitely people who are losing their apartments and losing their ability to eat and I’m not a stranger to rationing food,” McDougald said.
McDougald said that while there have been some recent gigging opportunities many musicians like herself have been staying home to stay safe and relying solely on GoFundMe pages and online sales or live streamed backyard shows that she said can never replace the in-person feel with an audience or provide the intimacy between musicians necessary for her artform of true improvisational Jazz. She added the live streams and podcasts have also now saturated the internet to the point where it is just “tapped out."
Many musicians have also had a difficult time obtaining the same financial relief during the pandemic as other unemployed or otherwise financially impacted business owners might find, but McDougald added it’s not just the money that has been suddenly swept from her scene. She said an absurd amount of Jazz musicians have lost their lives over the past year due to COVID-19.
“It’s devastating, to lose musicians who have been doing this for multiple generations, not just decades. They’ve been through every major nuance of Jazz from the Bebop to the Cool era to Modern Jazz, Post-Modern, Fusion…you name it. They were the living leaders of the genre and they’re gone. That happens with or without a pandemic. It just seems like we lost so many of them in one year, for one horrible reason,” McDougald said.
Situation Chicago organizer Trey Elder said the effort last year was so successful here that it has become yet another Chicago idea to spread elsewhere.
“Quiet Pterodactyl is working on a similar project in Seattle now and another project in Colombia ‘Situation Bogota’ that will be mostly Columbian musicians, but some American and Canadian musicians with Columbian roots,” Elder said.
Elder said he hopes the Seattle and Bogota albums will be released sometime in 2021 with Situation Chicago expected this summer.