Tammy McCann spent the year nurturing jazz on the South Side

Most anyone who follows Chicago jazz realizes that Tammy McCann commands a magnificent instrument and knows how to use it.

But in 2020 she made additional impact as impresario, curating a live jazz series at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Place.

In any other year, this would have been a worthy achievement for McCann, the museum’s American music curator-at-large. In the midst of a pandemic, it made McCann and her DuSable Museum colleagues heroes to jazz lovers citywide.

By bringing the aptly named Cabin Fever Jazz Series to the outdoor stage at the museum’s Roundhouse Plaza. This gave Chicago music lovers something they yearned for but that has been in perilously short supply this year: an opportunity to savor live jazz together.

“The turnout was wonderful, once people knew we were there,” says McCann of a setting that accommodated up to 100 people at socially distanced tables.

Tickets were sold online and health protocols were observed.

“People brought their own picnic baskets and enjoyed the evening breeze and the great music,” says McCann.

Indeed, every Wednesday from Sept. 2 through Oct. 21, some of Chicago’s best musicians took the Cabin Fever stage. The lineup included no less than saxophonist-clarinetist Victor Goines, a longtime member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and a professor at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music; Pharez Whitted, a virtuoso trumpeter and widely admired educator; and Fareed Haque, a guitarist whose experiments link jazz to eclectic musical traditions.

Chicagoan of the Year Tammy McCann stands next to the sculpture “Deeply Rooted (Dr. Martin Luther King),” a piece by artist Frank Hayden, at the DuSable Museum of African American History Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2020, in Chicago. McCann is an internationally recognized jazz vocalist who curated the outdoor Cabin Fever Jazz Series at the DuSable Museum of African American History earlier this year, featuring a weekly jazz band performance in the museum’s Roundhouse Plaza. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

The series, says McCann, grew out of a DuSable tradition that had been derailed by the pandemic.

“Over multiple summers, there was a ‘Sounds of History’ series held in the front and on the mall of the DuSable, and all of these wonderful Chicago musicians were always featured,” says McCann, who’s also artist-in-residence at the Music Institute of Chicago. “It’s something that our members and our constituency really looked forward to every year.

“So when the pandemic struck, and we had to close, there were phone calls coming in to the museum asking us how and where and if this was going to happen.

“At the time, all of us had been closed in. And what better way (to reach out) than to use music as a way to renew our spirit? The mere thought of being able to see and wave at your friends and folks in the community is something that I thought would be an elixir.

“We got guidelines from the city on how to present it.”

McCann made another significant contribution in 2020: She sang at “A Celebration of an Extraordinary Life: Stanley Crouch,” a New York tribute to the irreplaceable author-critic who died on Sept. 16 at age 74. Featuring remarks from Wynton Marsalis and Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, among others, the event – at Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem – paid tribute to a public intellectual who fearlessly expressed his opinions, regardless of political correctness and intellectual fashion.

In effect, McCann represented Chicago at the Crouch homage.

“Stanley Crouch had been an enormous mentor in my life since 2011, when we first met,” recalls McCann. “The opportunity to celebrate his life in song is something that I’ll never forget.

Tammy McCann listens to a solo by tenor saxophonist Ari Brown during a performance at the Jazz Showcase. (Reid Compton, Chicago Tribune)

“When his wife asked me to participate, when she asked me if there was any way that I would be able to, I could only think of all that he had given me over the years: all the advice and counsel and support. And I truly couldn’t imagine being anyplace else.”

So McCann confronted her fears of traveling amid a pandemic and flew to New York.

“I was absolutely nervous,” she says. “I actually was almost hermetically sealed on the way there!

“It was very powerful for me to see this remarkable collection of individuals celebrating this unrelenting Black genius of Stanley Crouch, and sharing his kindness, his generosity, his willingness to mentor. Coming from all of these different individuals was really a beautiful sight to see.

“And Wynton Marsalis’ touching tribute to his dear friend is something I won’t soon forget.”

As for McCann, she clearly has come a long way since tenuously trying to break into the daunting world of jazz in the early 1990s.

“I feel that I’ve come full circle from that girl who walked into a little jazz club at 71st and Rhodes, where Von and George Freeman were holding court,” says McCann.

“They took me under their wing and shared with me the gift of this music. I never thought I could do this. I never thought I could sing this music.

“I just want to help people the way that Von and George helped me.”

Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.