“Yah mahn, like, this is totally next level stuff — you don’t even know.” This is the mentality I felt I was faced with at the Made in Chicago concert. Any person who pulled pleasure from tonight’s painfully pitiful performance is a paragon of a proudly pretentious, pontificating pot-smoker. As a jazz drummer, I can tell you it sucked. Any five people can go on stage and strike various strings or plastics and blow into some metals or woods, but I guess I’m supposed to believe that it takes true masters to do it fast. All the players were doing was soloing over each other. When one got more vociferous than the rest, the next had to assert his dissonant dominance. There was even a concerted effort to rid the pieces of any modicum of musicality. Whenever two musicians accidentally banged out something melodious, the other actors made sure to squeak a little louder and bury it in a cacophony of chaos to remind the damning duo why they were there. That being said, I don’t think these musicians aren’t practiced; they’ve just been practicing the wrong things recently. Jack DeJohnette has played with all the greats of jazz, and I like a lot of his earlier work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QTf8Yjn7Hk. His new stuff is not up to snuff and, frankly, is enervating. I was waiting for the performers to start playing the Rick Roll music after I actually saw the piano player and one of the saxophonists fall asleep during the madness. They must just be growing weary and senile in their old age as the youngest was 71. Their minds have probably congealed into putty if that’s the best they can come up with nowadays. Lastly, I don’t understand how avant-garde jazz constitutes jazz music. Just because the band uses an upright bass and saxophones and improvises doesn’t mean the sound it makes is anything like jazz. It was nothing like jazz. You might say I just don’t get it. You’d be right.